Special Guest - Lena Scullard

0:03 Thank you for joining us on the Winning and Selling Podcast. I'm Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute and with me is Bill Hellkamp of Rich Development Systems. How do you react when the pressure is on? When customers or your manager demand more than you were able to give. The chaos of life can cause even the best of us to react rather than respond. And in today's world, life can easily get out of control.

0:28 What can you do? Take a chill pill and listen in as Scott and I welcome trainer and keynote speaker, Lena Scullard, as she discusses chaos to calm and other phenomenal philosophies on episode 639 of the Winning and Selling Podcast. Well, I'm really looking forward to the conversation with Lena. I've known her for many, many years.

0:56 And she brings a real interesting perspective to leadership and I'm really excited to hear from her. But before we start with no book club today, next week we're going to continue with new sales simplified by Mike Weinberg and we're going to be covering chapter 8. So before we get to our guest, let's listen to this sales tip from Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony Enorino, a highly respected international speaker, best selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader.

1:26 Hey, it's Anthony Enorino. Today's question is, how do I expand my contacts in a large client? Let me start here with the first meeting. If you show up at the first meeting and you're not high in sight, you're not high value creation, you're not high trust and high caring and they don't recognize that and you don't teach them anything. And they don't realize that you know things that they should know. What will happen is that they won't invite you to talk to senior leaders and they won't want to bring in their peers because if you didn't create any value for them, they're not going to introduce you to the rest of their team.

2:03 So here's the first thing. You have to create value in the first meeting. If you create value and they think this was the best use of my time by any sales person I've ever encountered, you're going to have a lot more people in those meetings. But if you want to expand it, there's a couple other things that you can do. If it's a large account, start at the very beginning and start saying, who is going to be able to weigh in on this decision that we're considering and how soon can we get them in because if we don't get them into these conversations, then later on when you decide that it's time to make the decision, it's going to be very easy for that person to say, I'm not going along with that, only because they weren't part of the conversation at all.

2:46 And it makes it easy for them to do that. So the first thing, create value for every contact that you counter in a deal and then make sure that you're asking to bring the right people in at the right time. See me at thesalesblog.com or come out and say hello at LinkedIn. See you soon. So I think it really stresses the importance of making that first impression, asking great questions and being somebody that has information that they want to share with other people within the organization.

3:17 So just checking in isn't the really information that you're checking in and checking in and how's it going? Not a strategy. No way. It's a strategy. And don't open your first appointment with, tell me a little bit about yourself. Yeah. What do you do around here? It doesn't work out real well. That's right. That's right. Well, I am excited to meet Lena. I haven't met Lena before, but Lena's colored is with us today and she's a top rated professional speaker, facilitative program designer and consultant.

3:45 She's on a mission to help individuals and teams improve their confidence and sense of capability for achieving success. With this in mind, she produces live and virtual programs that inspire others to expand their awareness and take strategic action in order to improve their results. Lena, welcome to the Winning It Selling podcast. Hi, I am so excited to meet you, Bill and Professor Plum. Thanks to, nice to talk to you again.

4:11 Thanks. Let's start off with a little background, Lena. What's your story? What's brought you to our podcast and to talking to people about leadership? Absolutely. I have this passion for learning, I think, is where it all started. I have kind of grown my career. I spent over 20 years in hospitality and specifically kind of retail customer service. And over 10 of that, I spent in training. And one of the things that I discovered through a variety of courses that I facilitated over that decade is that people really make the biggest change and impact from their learning.

4:57 When the training is about them and it helps them understand themselves better and maybe challenges them to a mindset shift. Then they see the need to try something different, do something different, grow in some way. So in the 10 years that I've been speaking professionally, my messages have really been around this idea of mindset, followed by the choices that we make when we experience a mindset. Mindset shifts can be difficult for people to absorb, can't they?

5:31 Absolutely, because for many people, we kind of live life on autopilot. And we are creatures of habit. We are creatures of deep-seated belief, right, that is instilled in us from a time that we are very young. And we grow up seeing the world through a very limited and specific set of lenses. What I've found powerful, not only through my own experience with a massive mindset shift that pulled me out of a career funk, I was stuck, I was depressed.

6:09 But when I see other people have those mindset shifts where they realize I don't have to look at this circumstance in my life in a certain way, I can start challenging myself to see it in different ways. That can be really life-changing for people. Yeah, you talked a little bit in our pre-talk about emotional intelligence and what is emotional intelligence and why is it important for salespeople? I'm glad you asked that question, Bill, because I feel like we hear this term a lot, this emotional intelligence term.

6:43 But I also feel like it often gets misunderstood and a big part of its story doesn't get told. So yes, emotional intelligence is our ability to be smart about emotions, right? Our emotions as well as empathy and the emotions of others. The part of emotional intelligence that I think gets missed and that I get extra passionate about in this process is actually one of the pillars which is motivation. And when we talk about motivation, particularly for salespeople, I think it's an important piece to keep in mind.

7:20 We have to understand not only our own short and long-term goals, but we also have to take a minute to try to understand who the person on the other side of the table is. How they're feeling, but also what are their short and long-term goals? You talked a little bit about pillars, Nina. What motivation is one of them? What are some of the other pillars? Okay, so it starts with ourselves and we start with self-awareness.

7:47 Self-awareness is our ability to understand our own emotions. That's pillar one. Pillar two is self-management or self-regulation. It's in our ability to control our behavior in the midst of those emotions, to kind of separate. And then motivation kind of sits right there in the middle because that's where we have to make a decision. We feel these emotions and what I find many people do and it's why I'm so passionate about this message is that we often allow our emotions to be safe.

8:25 We allow our emotions to drive our behavior. We're very reactive. I've noticed, especially since the pandemic, we are very reactive when it comes to our emotions. That's what we call wearing our emotions on our sleeve, right? Yes, absolutely. Everything has to be expressed. And what I found is very, very seldom is our first gut reaction, the best reaction, especially in a professional setting. Right? Motivation then lies in the middle.

8:57 And motivation, like I said, it's our ability to really think about the situation and what do we want from that? Pillar number four is social awareness or empathy. Do I understand the emotions and the perspective that the other person might be going through? Do I understand how my approach might be making them feel? And then the fifth pillar is social management or what I like to call the ability to influence, right? So, once I've understood someone's kind of emotional state and perspective, then I can adapt my approach to try to get not only what I want in the short and long term, which correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like that is the foundation of sales, right?

9:50 That win-win help them get what they want, help us get what we want. Everybody wins. Everybody wins. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's fast. I get fascinated by the self-awareness so much because I see people that aren't self-aware. I have a friend whose mother just passed away and their family is very separated from each other. And I think it's because this mother was so destructive in the way that she handled things. And my wife and I were talking this morning about how do we just try to not open our mouths when we shouldn't open our mouths?

10:24 How do we hold back when the world seems to say, say whatever's on your mind and let the chips fall where they may? Right. Sure. I think the biggest thing that we can start to do, especially if this is new, is find moments of time, pockets of time in the day where we can really check in with ourselves and just ask ourselves, how are we feeling in this moment? Or maybe we just got off of a call with someone or we just had an interaction with someone to check in and ask ourselves, how did that make me feel?

11:03 Was I intentional in the words that I used in my behavior with that person or did I allow my kind of subconscious emotional state to drive that? When we can do that kind of mental work, then we can start to practice what I call the pause. And the pause comes from Victor Frankel. If you're familiar, Victor Frankel was a psychiatrist who was imprisoned during World War II in the concentration camps. And after they were liberated, he survived.

11:36 He wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. And it is a foundational book for me in my life. What he said in that book that lives in my mind is he had observed how people that were imprisoned were responding to the absolutely atrocious, horrible things that were happening to them. And he observed a very stark difference. And he said, what do you notice is for those prisoners that survived and thrived after. There was a very clear difference in their mindset.

12:12 And in this book, he published this quote that I use. He said, between stimulus and response, we have a space. And in that space lies our greatest human freedom. And that is our freedom to choose. So when it comes to practicing self awareness and self management, practicing kind of stretching that space, recognizing where we react subconsciously to things and creating a space where we can instead stop for a moment. Our society has gotten to a place where it feels like everything requires an immediate response.

12:56 And it doesn't. Someone can say something challenging to us. And we can just sit with it for a moment and ask ourselves. First, how is that making me feel and why going back to motivation. Second, why did they say it and what was their intent. And then third, what do I want? And what am I going to say and do in response to get the best outcome possible. What happens then is rather than escalating conflict, what we end up doing is deescalating what is a challenging situation.

13:35 And then we carry less stress with us when we feel like we've responded well and responded intentionally. Here's something I've observed and use the word intent. And I think what we do is we ascribe evil intent to the actions of others with no forgiveness for making a mistake and total lack of bad intent and total grace to ourselves for any mistakes that we make. What's your observation regarding that? I think it can go both ways. I have met some people who are very hard on themselves and don't necessarily always give themselves that grace.

14:16 But when it comes to other people, I love thinking about it this way. Other people's behavior and approach has very little to do with you. I think that is really helpful to keep in mind. Their approach and their response is a product of their perspective, their history, their reality. And I always ask people when they get really offended by something or someone isn't treating them the way they want to be treated, I always ask them two questions.

14:52 First, do you think they intended it? And if the answer is no, then why are you allowing yourself to have these negative emotions around it? If they didn't intend it, let it go. If they did intend it, if they did it on purpose, if they push the button, if they poke the bear, why would you allow someone else to have that kind of power over you? That makes a lot of sense. When we were talking earlier, you launched a new program called the Chaos to Calm that transforms conflict with emotional intelligence.

15:38 What strategies from this program can sales people use to turn conflict into positive outcomes for both the customer and the sales person? Oh, I love that question. I'm really excited about this program because it really does focus on interpersonal conflict, which I think is such a huge challenge for so many people. And it's because those emotions get so big. So one of the first things when it comes to self-awareness, like I had mentioned, is really being in tune and recognizing that emotional, I call it a chemical cocktail, your subconscious brain is like an obnoxious bartender.

16:18 And you meet conflict or you meet challenge with another person, and your subconscious brain immediately goes to work with all of your history and the things that you believe about the world. And it starts mixing up this negative emotional chemical cocktail that it just serves to you. You do not get a choice on whether you're going to drink it or not. We don't get to actually choose how we feel contrary to popular belief.

16:46 But we can recognize that we have that dose of chemicals running and we can take a pause. Right, and recognize that chemical response for what it is. It's just information based on some past perspective or history. And we don't have to use it or react to it. There's a couple of techniques that I actually teach people on how to unhook from those emotions when you experience them. And they come from mindfulness and meditation, but I think that they're powerful.

17:18 So if you imagine the chaos of conflict as say a tornado. All of those emotions are swirling around you swirling around you stop for just one minute and ask yourself what direction your tornado is swirling. Is it going clockwise or is it going counterclockwise identify it see it in your mind. And then you're going to take a deep breath and on your exhale, you are going to slow the tornado and reverse it. And what happens when we do that visualization is we actually switch our brain from the emotional side of our brain where we're living into a logical or rational decision making an intent based side of our brain.

17:58 And that seems to be built on that pause, doesn't it? It's such a powerful, it's such a powerful practice and habit. And it can be developed, right? It has to be practice. You would never go out and run the New York City marathon without training first. And if you've never run a mile in your life, you're going to start small. So that's kind of what I teach people is find those moments in your day where you can stop and practice kind of finding that pause or stretching that space.

18:29 And the more you do it, it becomes kind of your new impulse, your new habit is to stop and reflect for a moment. What if I'm just such an emotional person? You know, I just really have trouble. It's calming that tornado down that I feel like everyone's out to get me. And so I just tend to react really quickly. Obviously pausing is helpful. Any other techniques that people can use, maybe if they have more challenge, just even getting that pause in.

19:02 If you are someone who sees yourself in that way and our self images are very deeply rooted, we've been creating those self images for our entire life. But there's a, there's a quote here that I want to challenge those listeners with. And it is whether you think you can or think you can't. And so the first thing, if you are in kind of that mindset of I just can't do it, the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is to challenge yourself.

19:30 To address that mindset. If you begin to believe that you can do it. Through self talk, through journaling, again, through kind of practicing self awareness after the fact, going back and asking yourself and saying, wow, I got really emotional there. Did I get the outcome I wanted? No, what might I have said or done differently? Okay, the next time I'm going to do it differently. When we have that kind of reflection, we practice that mental muscle.

20:04 So, for those of you that are feeling overwhelmed by your emotions and you feel like you are missing that self management piece. That's my challenge is to spend some time in moments of your day reflecting on how things just went. And how you might do it differently or more intentional or use that space better the next time. Right, Lena, you mentioned the book, Manstarch for meaning I read that book in high school, great book, profound book. What are some of the other things that you took away from that book.

20:36 The concept of scarcity versus abundance mindset is really powerful for me in my life. His observations that those people and you see it in our world today, those people who have the very least tend to be willing to give the most. And that is an amazing concept just in psychology between an abundance mindset and a scarcity mindset. Wow, that's profound. You know, it's that old thought that whatever we hold on to too tightly, we won't be able to keep it all. But whatever we give freely, we get an abundance.

21:20 Absolutely. Yeah, amazing. Well, Lena, this has been a wonderful morning. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. Any, any offers anything that you can provide for our audience that can help them understand what you're, what you're doing a little bit better. Maybe you're obviously we have will link to your website anything else. You can also find me on almost any of the social medias and bonus for me. I'm the only Lena scholar that exists on the Internet.

21:49 So if you Google me, you will find me in in many places and I would just really love to connect with anybody who is curious about emotional intelligence, especially with sales, or maybe was struggling with any of the concepts we talked about today. I would love to have deeper conversation. So there's many, many ways that you can even set up a zoom call with me. So we'll get my website out there. And then I have an infographic that gives a very quick snapshot of what emotional intelligence is in its big picture.

22:24 So I will go ahead and send that and we'll link to it in the show description. That would be great because I know I missed some of those as I was trying to take notes and you were going through the five pillars and, and I probably only have one of those pillars. So Scott knows I have no emotional intelligence. I think that's why he brought you on Lena is he's a bill a little bit of maybe if he was next to me, he'd be nudging me. Hey, yeah, you're listening.

22:47 Yeah, exactly. We'll also have a link to Anthony and arenas the sales blog.com on the show notes. Our golden nugget today is inner piece begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions by Buddha. One of his famous quotes. So that might indicate to us that our goal to control our emotions isn't something new. No, definitely not. We always, we always tend to live in the now and we forget that, you know, people have been around for four or five thousand years screwing up.

23:21 So thank you for that. It's universal. Our emotions have gotten us into trouble from the beginning of time and it's something AI will never help us with. All right. Thanks, Lena. Thank you. All right. So for all the information for the contact information and the links that that Lena talked about, go to winning at selling.com and all that information will be in the show notes. This is episode six, 39. Next week, our topic is who goes first? We're going to talk a little bit about negotiations and the book club. We're going to be doing chapter eight from new sales simplified. Please subscribe and share this podcast with your colleagues and on social media.

24:00 Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.