Pre-Negotiate

The first principle of not quitting comes from non-negotiables and Ed Mylet said “Most sales people focus on the price they’re paying, that’s low level stuff, forget about the price and what’s it worth.” This element of paying and suffering and going through some hardships has been a really hot topic for me lately. One of the things that’s helped me is when you’re in a good state, like let’s say I’m feeling good today. There’s not craziness that’s happening is when you negotiate you, pre-negotiate what your end result’s going to be. And so, if we pre-negotiate, and then we don’t allow renegotiation during the thick of it, that’s going to help us achieve a lot more.

Take One Step At A Time

I remember when I was training for my first marathon. I’d never run 10 miles. I remember the first time I was like, I’m going to run 10 miles. I was like five miles in and I went all downhill and then the other five miles was running back uphill. I was like, wow, stupid. I’m like dying. So what I ended up doing was just saying, I’m going to make it to that sign without stopping. Then I’d stop and walk at the sign and then be like, all right, I’m going to make it to that plant, without stopping. I vividly remember this element of I’m going to get to this point. So, I was like, look, I’m going to make it to this point and then I am going to run again.

Don’t Renegotiate

This is just like in life. When I’m in this running and it’s painful. I’m in my head emotionally; I want to renegotiate. If I allow myself to renegotiate during these times of hardship, those are the biggest limiting elements in life. You need to push through and finish what you started. I’ve done the same thing spiritually. I’ve done the same thing with writing. I’m writing a really challenging book right now and I’m pushing myself. The only way it grows is to push beyond those limits, which then is going to cause this emotional discomfort. When you think of Jesus Christ, when He was on the cross, Satan was like, Hey, I’m going to tempt Him with His own power is like, Hey, if you’re like God like, couldn’t you just come off the cross and like end all this? And Christ, knowing He had the power stop what was happening to Him, didn’t. He didn’t renegotiate what He was set out to accomplish. In the pain of being crucified, He pushed through. That’s the element of not renegotiating what was already pre-negotiated.

Pop Back Up

Another way to say this, comes from this podcast that I did with Tim’s story, where he says, don’t fold while you’re unfolding. Basically, it’s a whole element of palm trees in a hurricane. Think of Palm trees, I’m not the best artist, but I’ll give it a shot. So, you’ve got these Palm trees, right? If you think of a Palm tree and the elasticity of its trunk, when a hurricane hits, these things are gonna bend almost like completely to the ground. Go watch videos of hurricanes. Palm trees literally almost hit the ground. When the hurricane’s done, they pop right back up. And so, you ask yourself what is the strength and elasticity you have. When there’s hurricanes coming at us is going to be a huge factor in our ability to kind of hit the ground and then pop right back up and come back for more. Think of its environment. So, you’ve got this pine tree, or any other kind of tree, and they’re not used to hurricanes. They don’t grow up in the coastal region. A pine tree is going to, if a hurricane wind type happened, that thing would snap right in half and it would crumble. You have to think like, what’s the elasticity and what’s my flexibility in these hardships.

Learn To Withstand

So, I don’t crack right here and I can still withstand the hurricane and I can come back for more. That’s kind of an interesting example of that. And, and one of my biggest regrets sometimes is when you cut out short, when you break too early and there was a summer, and this is for everybody that’s selling door to door in, in the summer right now is I did one year, 298 accounts. And I remember, you know, it’s like, we finished the cup, we won the tournaments. You know, it was about a week early. Then the summer was going to finish. I still had plenty of time on the clock, but I had emotionally drained myself. It was as if I couldn’t knock another door. I remember calling my regional and I was like, look, I’m on my way home. We won the tournament. He’s like, you’re at 298 accounts. Why wouldn’t you just put two more accounts in? I said, well, I’ll do that when I get home. And he’s like, oh, you will, you’ll do it in Utah instead of Texas? And I was like, yeah, yeah. I could find two accounts. I never found those two accounts. Why? Because, I had kind of mentally shut this chapter and mentally moved on to a new chapter. Oftentimes we have life regrets like that, where it’s like, I can never say I did 300 that year. I’d gone on to do more accounts in years to come. What’s interesting is I always regret not just staying and sticking it out. I had a goal to do 300 and I limited myself. And so oftentimes we get all the way to the finish line. It’s so interesting watching the Olympics. You have a lot of these qualifying rounds where these sprinters would go all the way, and then they just kind of coast through the finish line. But, then when they are actually in the thick of it, in the real sprints, they’re running all the way through the finish line and not stopping early, not quitting, not renegotiating what you said. Okay. That is the finish line I sprint all the way through the finish line is a huge piece of like this emotional resilience.

Have The Emotional Resilience To Not Be Controlled

 There’s a word that the Stoic would use called apathea. So, apathea is to stop freedom from all passions. It meant eradicating the tendency to react emotionally and egotistically to external events. So, things that happen to us and the things that cannot be controlled. So, if you think about it, when I’m thinking about knocking, and I’m thinking about goals, and I’m thinking about achieving, I’m thinking about going out and being a top performer in life, in business. You have all these external events. You know, this person was rude. This person spit on you. This neighborhood, no one was home, whatever that is. And for the Stoic, it was the optimum rational response to the world. For things that cannot be controlled, if they’re caused by the willing, by the will of others, or by nature only one’s own will, can be controlled. That did not mean a loss of feeling or total disengagement of from the world, the Stoic, who performs correct virtuous judgements and actions as part of the world’s or world order experiences, contentment and good feelings. I think that there’s a, there’s a proper balance between feeling the pain of external events. It’s like, this did happen. Like, this is a real thing. I did get rejected. There was no one home. I did sell zero, but it’s that, that emotional balance of saying, okay, I can process that. I can live with that and still feel the gift and find the joy and be happy and content, and be present with what is. That’s a huge piece of this emotional resilience, that ability to kind of have this apathea towards things out of our control.