In today’s bonus episode of the Sales Success Stories Podcast, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. It’s super personal and super uncomfortable, but given how much it resonated with others on our last Sales Success Community call, it feels like a really important thing to share.
I’m trying to Defunkify myself!
I have been off my game for almost an entire year, and I’m sure experiencing some mild depression. I won’t get into all of the causes, because it’s really not that important, and many of us get into this place for a whole variety of reasons. What I want to focus on is getting out of it!
I know myself pretty well, and what I know about my previous bouts with depression and my level of openness is that I’m generally pretty comfortable talking about the experience AFTER I’m through it. I really don’t like to acknowledge it or talk about it when I’m in it.
That behavior probably causes me to experience it longer because I don’t want to acknowledge it and get help outside of myself.
The double edge sword of my current situation is that over this last year, it’s never been that bad. It’s a really mild case and I’ve certainly experienced worse, but I think it’s hampered my previous attempts to break free because it’s a low-level situation, the energy I’ve put into recovering has been pretty low level as well, so nothing has really stuck.
I’m also pretty good at faking it when I’m in this place. Only a couple of really close friends likely had any idea what was going on, and I’m still the top rep in my company and performing above expectations, so I haven’t really been getting any questions there, though I’m sure there are a few on my team who have noticed that my level of proactivity and responsiveness isn’t nearly what it usually is.
It also really upset me when I achieved a new all-time high, on my scale, and the first digit in my weight rolled over for the first time in my life.
I’ve decided that enough is enough and chose to call myself out publicly inside this community that I’m always trying to support. Recognizing that now I need a little bit of help.
Like I said at the beginning, their response, and the number of people who closely identified with feeling a similar level of funk and burnout is what prompted me to go even more public and share all of this here, because I know I’m not alone. This is just one of those things that we really don’t talk about enough, but we need to talk about more and we need to get more help when we’re in it. We need to let people know when we’re struggling.
Again, my intention here is to share my journey out. I’m not so interested in a bunch of unsolicited advice, as I’ve got a pretty strong support network. What I would love to hear is your own story of recovery. If you’ve recently defunkified yourself. I want to know what you did that helped you the most. This is a show about success stories after all, and I can’t get enough of them.
The first thing I did after deciding that enough is enough was to do some journaling. I took some time to write about where I was struggling the most. What some of the biggest issues and sticking points were and I started to write down some new goals and really focus on the activities that I thought would help me turn things around.
The biggest area where I’ve been off has been in my workouts. If you’ve listened to this show for a decent amount of time, then you know that I’m a huge Peloton fan. I’ve done over 750 rides, and you’d probably be surprised to know that I hadn’t been on the bike for basically a year. I was consistent through the end of last February, did 3 rides in March of 2022 and that’s been it. Since then I’ve walked with some regularity. The last few months I’ve gone to the gym and lifted a little bit a couple of times a week on average, but it dawned on me that I basically hadn’t gotten my heart rate up in a meaningful way in almost a year!
This is core to the way that I typically function. Taking that action. Getting sweaty and out of breath most days of the week is probably the most important building block to my routine.
I did get a ride in this last Saturday and by the time you hear this I will likely have gotten in at least one more ride. I felt AMAZING after that first ride back. I went relatively easy, but got a good sweat going and literally forgot how good it made me feel. I also forgot how good Peloton is at pushing my competitive buttons and getting me to think about improvement, progress, and consistency.
That’s the first, most important building block I’m working on putting back in place.
Next will be my routine. Again, those who’ve been around for a while know that my superpower is my productivity process. I haven’t been able to execute that process for basically a year. I’ve tried and tried and tried, but haven’t been able to complete it. So that’s next.
Fortunately, my work laptop just came off of lease. I’ve got a brand new one that I’m in the process of setting up and I’m using that as an excuse to change and update my environment. One of my monitors went out, so I’m getting a couple of new screens that are just a little bit larger, and nicer. If you’ve read Atomic Habits then you know how big a role your environment plays in helping you develop new habits.
You’re welcome to ask me about my progress with my productivity process, because that’s the second most key thing for me.
It really comes down to action. What I’ve read, and what I know about myself, is that action impacts emotion. It’s getting into action and doing things that has the biggest impact on how you feel. So getting back into my productivity process and really starting to crank again, I know is going to create a virtuous cycle. The more I do, the better I’ll feel. The better I feel, the more I’ll want to do.
I’ll also be working to address my diet in some simple ways so I can start taking some weight off, but maybe the biggest thing that has me excited is actually talking about this journey.
I started this process maybe a week and a half ago, and the morning of our last Sales Success Community call I decided that I was going to look for some input from everyone as I start to build the agenda for our one-day Basecamp event I’ll be hosting here in Austin on May 9th. But I had one of my shower ideas and decided that I was going to talk about this journey. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken the stage myself to talk about what I’m doing and it’s time. So at this year’s Basecamp event, I’ll be talking about Defunkifying and Overcoming Burnout.
Again, I’d love to hear your stories. Those success stories where you overcame the funk or overcame an intense feeling of burnout. I’ll focus primarily on my own story, but would love to share some other examples and lessons learned, because what we each need is very individual. Not everyone needs to work out the way I do for example.
Knowing myself, I know that I’m driven by public commitments like this. There’s no way I’m going to get up on that stage 75 days from the day this episode drops and won’t be in a better place.
So that’s me and what I’m working on, but if you’re also in this place. Send me a note. Email is best: [email protected]. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that yet as this was a very spur-of-the-moment idea and I honestly haven’t thought everything through, but maybe I’ll share some more regular updates with that group of fellow funkers. I might even put together a small support group and we can jump on a call every couple of weeks as we work through this together. But I think the first step is just acknowledging that you’re not at 100% and telling somebody. Even if it’s only me.
There’s also the broader Sales Success Community where I know you’ll find support and like I said, I’ll be talking about all of this in more detail at our Basecamp event in May. You can learn more about that event and about joining the Sales Success Community at top1.fm/2023 that’s T-O-P the number One dot F-M forward slash 2-0-2-3.
And this is just the beginning for me. I’m going to continue to work on this. There are a few more resources I’m planning to experiment with as I work through this process and I hope you’ll follow along.
Ok, that wasn’t quite as scary as I thought. Thanks for listening. Thanks for letting me share something intensely personal and I’d appreciate it if you’d share this with someone else who you think might need it.
We’ll get back to business next week with another brand-new interview episode. Thanks again!