Beth Kennedy is a business leadership coach and author of Career ReCharge: Five Strategies to Boost Resilience and Beat Burnout.
In this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Beth explains how we can become more resilient and avoid reaching a point of burnout in B2B sales.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- Beth on Linkedin
- BethKennedy.com
- Book: Career ReCharge: Five Strategies to Boost Resilience and Beat Burnout
- Headspace – Mindfulness and meditation app
- The Oura Ring – Smart ring for tracking sleep and physical activities
- Benatti Training and Development
Transcript
Will Barron:
Coming up on today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The first area is wellbeing and that includes physical, emotional and spiritual health. So what are the key takeaways on that? Rest is huge, nutrition is huge. Those little, tiny recharge activities, getting into nature, meditation, mindfulness.
Will Barron:
Hello, sales nation. I’m Will Barron, host of The Salesman Podcast, the world’s most listened to B2B sales show. If you haven’t already, make sure to click, subscribe. And with that, let’s meet today’s guest.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I’m Beth Benatti Kennedy and I’m a leadership coach and also author of Career Recharge: Five Strategies to Boost Resilience and Beat Burnout and my mission is just to help professionals really be the best they can be but also be super resilient so that they have the energy and the life they want.
Will Barron:
On this episode of the show with Beth we’re going into how we can boost our levels of resilience within the marketplace as sales professionals, how we could eliminate the chances of burnout. We get into personality testing, which is absolutely fascinating, personal branding and a whole lot more. So with that, let’s jump right in.
What Salespeople Need Most: Sales Resilience · [01:10]
Will Barron:
To set us up and to add some context here and to put a positive spin on the kind of resilience side of things. Is resilience, is this a skill that is a competitive advantage in the marketplace? Is this something that if you get good at it in sales you can just beat the competition by being more resilient and lasting longer than when you’re competing over the competition?
“Resilience is actually moving forward. It’s dealing with those challenges but the being able to say, I have the toolkit, so I can move forward. I’ve had my coaching business for over 25 years and the individuals that have the resiliency toolbox not only do they handle the challenges, but they also hit their numbers and they also have very high career satisfaction.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [01:44]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Yes. And I think what’s important is I want to just take a second to explain what I feel resiliency is. You often think about resiliency is just bouncing back. So give it to me again and work harder and tougher, but resiliency to me, career resilience is actually moving forward. So it’s dealing with those challenges but the being able to say, I have the toolkit, so I can move forward. I’ve had my coaching business for over 25 years and the individuals that have the resiliency toolbox, not only do they handle the challenges, but they also hit their numbers and they also have very high career satisfaction.
The Thin Line Between Resilience and Career Burnout · [02:14]
Will Barron:
You may have a better idea to put this into a diagram, but would we have resilience on one end of it and then on a sliding scale have kind of career burn out on the other?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Yes. The piece about burnout that a lot of people don’t realise is they think of burnout as just someone that’s being admitted into the hospital and it’s really important to realise [inaudible 00:02:35] burnout. We want to catch it. We want to catch burnout before you become at this point where you’re just not productive. That’s where resiliency helps because what I work on with my clients is what I called the Benatti Resiliency Model, and there’s five areas. And basically the goal is to realise we’re all involved in it in flight mode all the time. We’re always going to have stressors. So whether it’s work stress, family stress, the world’s stress. So it’s having this toolbox. So instead of always being in fight and flight mode is making our brain actually it’s called the depleted brain issue. We’re producing so much cortisol, which is that hormone that makes us all exhausted, gives us fuzzy brain.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
When we have a toolkit for resiliency, we get some of those really good brain hormones like cortisol and oxytocin and serotonin, then we’re energised and then we can really have the kind of career and the life we want.
The Benefits of Practising Mindfulness in Sales · [03:33]
Will Barron:
I’m going to throw you a ridiculous question here but it’ll set up the rest of the conversation. Is the goal here to never be in the fight or flight… I always forget whether this is parasympathetic or sympathetic part of our nervous system. Is the goal to never be there and always be chilled and always be meditating and sitting on a rock in a field somewhere or is the answer perhaps to go between the two?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Right, exactly. It’s to go between the two. And I think that the challenge is many people feel like that whole… I think unfortunately, mindfulness sometimes people feel like really, how is that going to make me make an impact? But the reality is we have to figure out what of these mindfulness pieces work for us? I have a real issue with many stress management classes because I tell people you need to do A, B, C, D and E. And the reality is we have to figure out what are our stressors and what are the strategies that work for us. So I might meditate 10 minutes a day, but a lot of the individuals… I work with a lot of sales folks. They meditate two minutes a day and that works for them.
Why Salespeople Need to Start Meditating · [04:45]
Will Barron:
We’re big fans of meditation. I always recommend the Headspace app, I’ll ask you your thoughts on this in a second, on the practical side of things, but is a good way to look at this the fact that a whole lot of billionaires meditate? The CEO of Amazon, one of the fastest growing companies on the planet meditates. So if he can spend 10, 20 minutes out of his schedule a day where he is… His company’s probably turning over $15 million a minute. There’s probably some ridiculous number there that if he can afford to do it, that we can afford to do it. Is that a reasonable thing to put in front of the audience here?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
It is reasonable, but I think the unfortunate thing that happens is people take these classes and they feel like, oh, I have to start meditating for 15 minutes a day. So what I do, I actually have a full day training, it’s called career recharge where I introduced meditation and I say, you want to start really small. So Headspace is a great app, but the other two apps that I love, one is free, it’s called Stop, Breathe and Think, and that’s five years ago I began with that app and it was perfect because it’s… What I love about it is the first step on that app is it has you assess your emotions and then it has you say how are you feeling and you put that in. It’s incredible. It will actually customise and send you an app that will work for you for that day.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
That was wonderful for me for about a year And then I got bored and then I went to the Calm app, calm.com app. So, what I encourage people to do is to try it and figure out what… Sometimes it’s the voice. I have a lot of clients that say, “Beth, I can’t stand that voice.” I had to go to… The other one that’s very popular is Dan Harris’s Ten Percent Happier. Even if it’s two minutes, six times a week, you can get just as much benefits as these people that are meditating 20 minutes a day.
How to Measure Resilience · [06:21]
Will Barron:
Sure. You mentioned something in one of the apps. Is there a way to measure our level of resilience? Because clearly if we can measure something and we know where our baseline is, perhaps we can be more in control, more mindful of where we are at in the moment, but also perhaps we can look at increasing our resilience as well.
“We can tell our phone is charged to a hundred percent. How can I prove the ROI on resilience? It’s really something that I think you feel from your success.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [07:12]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Yeah. You know, that is actually a great question, the ROI on resilience. One of the things I have to go by is experiential kind of results. I usually coach clients for six months or to a year. So they start off doing a baseline for me and then six months later they do another self-directed, but then I also do interviews. So I interviewed their colleagues and their boss in the beginning and their colleagues and the bosses at the end. But again, it’s one of those things I wish I could… This is what I also say in my class. I wish I could say it’s like our phones. We can tell our phone is charged to a hundred percent. How can I prove the ROI on resilience? It’s really something that I think you feel from your success.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I feel really grateful that I have a very large coaching practise. I have a very large training and speaking business and I have a lot of energy and I credit it to really taking resiliency very serious. Many of my clients will say they have seen such a change in their energy and their focus as a result of working on my resiliency model. It’s very experiential, but I’m thrilled that… In my book, I have a lot of clients stories and they honestly have kept their names in the book because they wanted to share their success. I wish I could say it’s like a chemistry example where we could say…
Will Barron:
We’ll dive into the resiliency model in a second. But just on this because it’s something I’m focused on and thinking about at the moment. Have you come across a heart rate variability kind of testing before?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I have and I think the studies they’re fascinating. We can also see the results now, The MRI scans as far as meditation goes. The other interesting thing is they’re showing how they can see the matter in the brain actually change. So I think the science is there to support all these areas that I believe is so important for our resiliency.
Will Barron:
Because the reason I asked this, I’ve just got it delivered. They don’t sponsor show. This is just a personal plug, it’s called the Oura Ring, O-U-R-A. I’m that bad at spelling. I can’t visualise words in my mind as I go for it, the simplest words like that. You just wear it. It’s tiny. Looks very similar to just a normal ring, but that measures your sleep. It can pull in data from your exercise activity. It doesn’t do things like monitor meditation or anything like that, which would kind of add a novel level to all this, this is more for athletic performance and becoming more resilient in that realm. But each day it gives you a score basically and tells you yesterday, your heart rate when you slept because you do sleep tracking was super high and going off your heart rate variability during the night as well, it’s very likely you need a day to recover.
The Five Areas in the Resiliency Model · [09:57]
Will Barron:
So I was just interested to see if this has trickled down from the, not that I’m an athlete, but from the world of athletics down into the business world. Because I know that if I don’t get enough sleep, it doesn’t matter how resilient I am, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I could take all kinds of smart drugs or whatever it is and I’d still be a mess the next day. And get my sleep right, the ROI in that was just incredible in itself. With that said, Beth, what else is in or what is it in the model and what do we need to kind of prioritise day to day so that we can improve our own resilience?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Right. That’s a perfect place to hit off. There’s five areas. I’ll give you the big picture and then we can dive into details if you want more details. The first area is wellbeing, and that includes physical, emotional and spiritual health. What are the key takeaways on that? Rest is huge. Nutrition is huge. Those little, tiny recharge activities, getting into nature, meditation, mindfulness. Again, it’s that whole health area. Then we go into the second area, is self-awareness, and that’s where really knowing what’s your purpose. Why are we on this earth?
“Do you have a growth mindset? It doesn’t mean being positive about everything, it means saying you’re open to learning.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [10:44]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The second part is, do you have a growth mindset? We’re seeing all the research and it doesn’t mean being positive about everything, it means saying you’re open to learning. And the third is personality type, being aware of our type and how we flex it and that’s really important for when we talk about making impact in our career and in our personal life.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The third area is your personal brand. What are your natural attributes? What are your strengths? What’s the impact you are making in your department or in your business and what’s your reputation? I’ve seen a lot of people go out of business. They forget that we have to really be thinking about what’s the impact? What’s the reputation? So that’s the third area.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The fourth area is connection, and this is an area that I feel very, very passionate about because I feel like with a lot of my business folks, I work with many workaholics that are so passionate like you about what they do. I’ll say to them, ‘What’s your connection plan?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?”
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
So this is the importance of nourishing personal and professional relationships and having a plan. Who were the people that champion you? Who were the people that support you in your career and inspire you and motivate you? Then also, who are the people you reach out to? Who are the people you mentor? Because we know give and take is so important for connection. And then the final one is innovation. And I don’t mean innovation just like the buzz word like Apple or… I mean innovation as far as what are the personal and professional challenges you’re taking and being aware that risk and failure is part of developing resiliency.
“Whatever profession you’re in, what are you doing to invest in you, but also what are you doing to invest in your fun and to make sure you’re budgeting both to help you be productive?” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [12:46]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
People love my personal innovation examples. What’s the awesome vacation you’re going to take this year? What’s the awesome new thing you’re going to learn? I personally 25 years ago got involved in career coaching organisation and budget that every year. In two weeks I’ll be leaving for San Diego for my… It’s called the Career Thought Leader Conference and it’s something that I just feel is so important. Whatever profession you’re in, what are you doing to invest in you, but also what are you doing to invest in your fund and to make sure you’re budgeting both to help you be productive? So those are the five areas of the big picture.
The Importance of Understanding Personality Types · [13:23]
Will Barron:
It’s about what’s funny five things I want [inaudible 00:13:00], Beth. So there might be a part two to this episode in the future. And it’s interesting because there’s a lot of inadvertent but clearly we’re in similar bubbles here kind of thing of what I’m trying to do, my podcast and clearly what you’re doing with your consulting and the coaching and all that side of things and the speaking. I don’t know why I’m coming up with these terrible analogy today, two sides of the same coin. But with that said, a few things that stuck out to me. One, personality types. So I want to just touch on this for a second. How important is it for the audience to know what their personality type is and then how that perhaps interacts with other people and how game-changing can that be?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Okay. This is unbelievable. 30 years ago I worked at UMass Boston and I was so fortunate. I was one of these people, I always wanted to get more development. So I asked my boss, could I go to California to get trained in the Myers-Briggs type indicator? So he agreed, I got certified. I have used that tool personally and professionally non-stop. And not only do I did it one-on-one with clients, but I have a training class and I will tell you, I just taught it last week, after the class is over, I would say at least 50% of the participants come up to me and say, “Beth, could I have that link from my partner?” And others will say, “I wish I had this 10 years ago.” I wish I had this 15 years ago.” I even had a gentleman say to me, “This would have saved my marriage.”
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
So it is actually crucial. And I will be honest with you, there’s lots of them out there. What colour are you? There’s the discs. They’re all fabulous. It’s just the importance of having that. Self-awareness where me being an extrovert, 80% of my clients are introverts. So it’s so important for me to be focused on them and not just filling in all their sentences. And then my introverted clients, they have really big jobs. They’re not going to get that next promotion unless they learn to flex a little bit and speak out at meetings. So we could spend a whole session just on personality types.
Will Barron:
One, it’s fascinating, but then the reason is with The Sales School, our product which we’re building kind of version two of at the moment, the first thing you do is you go in, there is a personality type. It’s not Myers-Briggs and I’m not going to say it is similar to Myers Briggs. I don’t want to get sued, but it’s similar to Myers Briggs. I did the content and work with a psychologist that we’ve hired to consult with us as well on this to go in details what we possibly can and make it super applicable to sales professionals.
Will Barron:
One of the things that I uncovered from writing the contents with help of the psychologist on the back of it was that the seemingly bunch of different personality types that if you have that personality type, sales might be genuinely an uphill struggle for you. And sales is one of those roles where you typically fall into it. There are very few people, myself excluded, and I can tell the tale of this if we’ve got time later on, but very few people go when they’re seven, “I either want to be an astronaut or a fireman or a sales person selling SaaS accounting software or whatever it is.” And rightly or wrongly, it’s a career that both people fall into as opposed to something that they aim for from a young age.
Can People Change Their Personality Types · [16:27]
Will Barron:
Kind of a long-winded question here, Beth. We have a personality type where the data comes out and says, perhaps this isn’t the role that your… You’re more likely to have success in another role versus this role. How fixed are the results of Myers-Briggs or any personality type? Is this something that we can leverage and change or is this something that is set in stone and we should change careers and change our future plans on?
“Every personality type can do any career, but we’re going to have more or less stress depending on our natural preferences.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [16:56]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Okay. This is a great question and this comes up a lot. The first thing which is really important is, every type can do any career, but we’re going to have more or less stress depending on our natural preferences. So you nailed it perfectly. There are some types that get into sales, and I’ve coached many of these individuals that they’re like, “Beth, it feels like oil and vinegar. I’m not like the rest of these people.” I have taught them how to flex their preferences. So yes, you can stretch. You can flex, you can learn strategies but the part at the end of the day that we all have to realise is we are according to Jung who… This goes back to, believe it or not, the 1940s. He honestly believes we’re hardwired one way and a lot of his predecessors felt like it’s very hard to change. So I have challenge them a little bit even though they’re not around anymore.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
What I have learned over the years is if I have someone very determined that there is a career they really want to do, they can learn to enhance that preference. But this is where the resiliency is huge because even if… Let me just say, it’s a sales role where you have to be extroverted 85% of the time and you’re an introvert. The piece that you really want to focus on, your resiliency, is for you, your recharge is going to be you really need that time alone. You really need that time whether it could be a martial arts that you might want to do. Sometimes you need to have time out in nature. Another way I would think of resiliency is, what’s the personal recharge you need to be at your best? For example, some of these sales individuals that I’ve coached, they call me, they are on what I call the burnout escalator. They are going down quicker and quicker and quicker and they need to press stop and then they need to build in strategies daily because the week in the Caribbean, that’s nice, but you need more than that. You need more than that. You need daily recharge.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
And that’s the part about personality type. The reason why I became so passionate about it is it’s not like one of these tools where it says, this is who you are, sorry. No. If you want to, you can be proactive and you can turn… What I call it is flexing. You can learn to flex. For example, I’m an N in the Myers-Briggs, which means big picture, visionary. I love to design training, very creative, but to run a business for 25 years ago, I have to do my taxes. So I’ve learned. I hate it, but I’ve learned to work on my S part. I have little strategies. I have little cues and that’s helped me. And with my clients, I have a lot of S clients. They like details. You definitely can develop both preferences.
Will Barron:
Love it. And I will double down on this in that when I was a kid, I was extremely introverted in that I didn’t want to hang out… No, maybe I did. I had friends. I played in a band. I played on stage, but I didn’t want to be the front man or a woman. There was always kind of a dude in all the bands, but I wanted to be at the back by drums. Playing basketball. I always wanted to play team sports but with a small team as opposed to a football team and a butcher like rowdy lads or again women kind of go drinking afterwards. That didn’t appeal to me. And it’s only when I got into kind of 22, 23, 24 when I first started in the medical device sales roles, then I kind of had to… I jumped in the deep end and just had to force myself to become more extroverted. And it’s interesting because now I started to understand some of this or maybe I don’t understand it. I can test some of the personality side of things of myself and the people around me.
Will Barron:
I know now that the friction that I had with my sales manager at my last job it wasn’t anything to do with the fact that we hated each other, we had clearly different personality types. I don’t think we understood how to communicate with each other from numerous levels. We don’t need to go into that, but that was a point of contention. Now with my partner, happens every night, she’s more introverted than I am and she’ll go, “You’re going to bed? Because I want to watch TV on my own for an hour before I go to bed.” And I’ll go to bed early so that she can… She’s a doctor, so she’s got things to think about and actual things to decompress on as opposed to me who thinks I’m busy and stressed, but I’m not really, I’m taking a chance at people like yourself. She will literally demand to kick me out of the room and I’ll either go read or go to bed an hour, half an hour earlier than what she does and we work really well together because we understand that we need that kind of bit of time of alone. I probably would do a head in if I was constantly hanging out with her and winding her up and being high energy when she needed that kind of moment to chill out.
How to Communicate with Other People Based on Their Personality Types · [21:40]
Will Barron:
Where I’m going at with all of this is, how important then is it not just to understand ourselves, but to be able to make even if it’s just a glancing view of the people around us and how much more effective does our communication get when we can say that person is this type or that type of that type and I’ve got a good gist of how to communicate with them?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Right. That piece is huge. It’s funny that you said about your partner being a doctor. In Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, I worked with a lot of doctors and I worked with a lot of cancer scientists and a lot of them are Is. Again, so passionate, hardworking. And when they learn this, a lot of them need that individual recharge. I actually had a woman yesterday I had to teach during the day. She’s at meetings, a lot of meetings and I told her. One of the things I tell people to think about is during your workday, how are you presenting yourself? Are you looking focused or frazzled? And I had to share with her during our coaching session because we were face-to-face. I said, “You’re looking very frazzled to me.” And she’s an I who’s been back to back to back to meetings and I said to her, “One of the little strategies you need to learn is even when you’re walking from meeting to meeting, great time to just do some nice, deep breathing.”
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
At lunchtime, get out of the building because Is really… So even during the day. But the other question which is fabulous is knowing the people you’re working with. I work on a lot of progressive companies and what I do is that we do the personality type for the entire team. And then everyone knows, oh, no wonder why John and Mary are constantly conflicting. For those of you that are familiar with personality type, the last letter in the Myers-Briggs whether you’re more a J or judge or a more a perceiver. And what happens in the world of work is there’s a lot of conflict among that. But once I teach it, you see the light bulbs go off in the class because all of a sudden again the manager or the colleagues thought they couldn’t stand each other, but it’s not that they couldn’t stand each other, it was that personality preference.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The J gets things done almost instantly. The P gets it done but at the last minute. So the two things they’re doing it against each other and it shifts our natural style.
Will Barron:
Yeah. I’m lost minutes to every project I’ve ever done in the whole of my life whether it was GCSE exams whether it’s launching the Sales School. We’re already kind of massively behind but we’re going to be fine on that front and it’s me to hold it all together when everyone else is stressed out. So I appreciate that. And the reason I delved down into in that, and you give us another 25 points to run through here which we’ll touch on and the second, Beth, is that sales it’s just such a beast of an industry that perhaps you’re slightly introverted, you need that little bit of time between phone calls to have a second and then you can jump back in. Well, if you’re working in an office as a SDR sales development rep and your quota is 500 phone calls a day, not 50 good conversations or 10 follow up calls or whatever that would be more appropriate to move the sales forward.
Will Barron:
If your quote is just number of calls, clearly you’re not going to have as good as success likely versus a role where perhaps you only need to make two or three calls but you’re managing an account as opposed to just trying to drum up new business by just masses of a phone calls versus an extrovert might absolutely love that. Just getting on the phone with random people and going back and forth. I’m not saying that if your personality type isn’t suited to one thing in the sales space, it might not be suited to another, but I know when I align what I’m doing with what my personality type is or even what I want it to be, perhaps I want to be slightly more extroverted or introverted at certain occasions, I’ll try and consciously conjure up where I want to be with everything and move towards that.
Building Resilience by Taking Breaks and Celebrating Success · [25:27]
Will Barron:
With all that said, Beth, something that we kind of touched on just before we click record and something that I am not very good at is both celebrating success and having a minute to take the gas off the pedal and just go, “Wow. We’ve done X, Y, Z, that’s awesome” and taking holidays and breaks. How does this affect our resilience over perhaps not just the month but over the weeks and decades as we’re trying to level up our careers?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Great point. One of the things again is I want you to think about stress like a rubber band. We go through our day and we have stressor and we have stressor and we have stressor and we stress. So what happens is, again, it’s that flight or fight mode. Our amygdala in our brain is being hijacked and we think, oh, I can keep going. I can keep going. And again, we’re going down that burnout escalator. So what we need to do is we need to realise, we need to have regular recharge strategies. So let’s say for example, going on holiday. I can’t tell you how many clients I coach. They get five weeks vacation, they’re lucky if they use one. So the piece that we need to figure out is how do we spend our vacation time, but how do we get recharged on the weekends?
“What the research shows is when we take time to recharge, we are going to have more action, influence, and productivity.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [27:03]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I actually have in my book that make Sunday fun day. Now, some people might be listening to this saying, “Oh my gosh, who wouldn’t have fun on a Sunday?” Well, if you’re passionate about your career or if you’re an entrepreneur, there’s a lot of people that spend Saturdays and Sundays catching up, doing work, doing errands. And we’re really not having that time to actually recharge. And what the research shows is when we take time to recharge, we are going to have more action, influence and productivity.
“I’ve actually seen studies where once you start working more than 10 hours a day, the productivity just goes down and down and down and down. But it is a myth that just because you work long hours, you’re going to get burned out. But if you can work, say, a nine hour day and you know how to turn it off, so when you come home, you’re present to your partner, you go for a walk, you go exercise, you can keep yourself recharged forever.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [27:13]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I’ve actually seen studies where once you start working more than 10 hours a day, the productivity just goes down and down and down and down. But it is a myth that just because you work long hours, you’re going to get burned out. If you can work, say, a nine hour day and you know how to turn it off, so when you come home, you’re present to your partner, you go for a walk, you go exercise, you can keep yourself recharged forever. And I would say, that’s very much how I am. I might work a long day. I’m very passionate about what I do, but people would probably describe me if I wasn’t in the room, they would say, “Oh my gosh. Where does that woman get her energy from?” I take it so seriously and that’s a strategy to it.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
If we have time, I’ll talk about the strategy, it’s called The Friday Five where I have my clients every Friday just take five minutes to assess your resiliency. Ask yourself three questions. Will my resiliency win? So for example, oh, you know what? I exercise two times. I got a great night sleep. My nutrition has been excellent and I got together with a friend who I haven’t seen in three months. Then I say, what is my resiliency goal for next week? Maybe it’s that I want to sign up for that conference. Maybe it’s that I want to take that training. Maybe it’s that I just need to work on my relationship with my boss. But then question number three is, what’s my first step? So I have them just take five minutes. So no matter how busy you are in your career I really feel like we need to recalibrate and we need to reflect once a week what’s going on because I heard the stories of too many people that get let go or that are in these careers for 7, 10, 15 years and they say, “Beth, I’ve been miserable for the last eight years.” And it’s heartbreaking to me because the world needs you and needs you with your brand. Again, that’s part of resiliency is figuring out what are your attributes that you have to share with this world.
The Link Between Nutrition and Productivity · [29:11]
Will Barron:
We’re coming to brand next and we’ll wrap-up would that, Beth. You mentioned some in here and I assume there’s a straightforward answer to this, but I don’t know. Not to put you on the spot, but I assumed there’s a tonne of data on this, but you mentioned nutrition. Coming at this from the context of a sales professional. Like me, I was driving around in my dull grey BMW to all the hospitals here in Yorkshire. I was drinking terrible hospital coffee day in, day out just out of politeness when a member of the nursing team or a surgeon would make it for me, but it was difficult to have anything really healthy for lunch. Sure you can make some kind of salad and that perhaps you keep for three, four hours. But again, it’s more and more difficult. It’s not like you just at an office and you can… for me now I’m at home. I’ve got a Vitamix blender next door. I can make green smoothies. I can do all this kind of cool stuff, but how important is your daily nutrition and are there any high-performing individuals in the world of business who are eating McDonald’s every day or does that not exist?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Nutrition is huge. I think it’s like everything else too. It’s that whole piece of moderation. I’m not going to tell everyone you need to be having everything organic, but throughout the day, we want to be aware of… Again, it’s our energy. The individuals that are eating McDonald’s, we don’t even need to talk about what’s going to happen. That first hour, you might be okay. That second hour you might crash. So it’s the same with the coffee. We know that two or three cups are okay. Not like we have to eliminate coffee completely, but I’ve had clients I start coaching, they said, “Beth, I drink four or five cups of coffee. Then by two, three o’clock, I have my next two cups.” Oh my gosh, what is that doing to your system?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
So nutrition is huge. And again, some people aren’t as fortunate to be able to make a smoothie in two hours. But I recommend to my clients, pack your snacks. Bring the little nut bags. Bring the little yoghourts. And for individuals that have travelling now they make things so much more accessible. I just had a client email me. She found little hummus and carrots. So she’s like, “Beth, you’ll be so proud of me when I get my little…
“Success is taking a step back and saying, okay, what do I need to do to make today the most productive day for me?” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [31:24]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Again, it’s preparing. I think that’s like a theme if you think about success is taking a step back and saying, okay, what do I need to do to make today the most productive day for me? I’m usually in Boston two or three days a week. I packed my little snack bag and then I’m fortunate there’s cool salad places. I’m very, very fortunate. But if you don’t have that option, well, what’s that good, simple thing you can pack up to bring with you? Because it really it’s all connected and that’s why my resiliency model is different than many others because wellbeing to me is the first thing we have to take care of, then we can talk about really being productive in our career because if we’re not taking care of ourselves, what’s going to happen? We’re going to fall apart.
Beth’s Resiliency Model · [32:08]
Will Barron:
Sure. So if you had your resiliency model and you married it, you just put in a pyramid shape, what would be the order of the different layers with regards to the biggest bang for buck or the must haves versus what levels things up or multiplies things later on?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Okay. And it’s interesting because I’ve had people ask me this question and I always say, “I wish it could be simply a pyramid, but it’s more like a circle because they’re all interconnected.” It begins with well-being. It’s like the thing on the aeroplane, putting your oxygen mask on first. We have to really take care of ourselves first so that we can have the best impact in our career. Then it’s the self-awareness, so it’s knowing our personality, knowing our stressors. Then it’s the brand because we need to know what are our strengths? What are our attributes? How can we add impact? Then it’s the connection because isolation is the dream killer.
“Isolation is the dream killer. I have seen so many professionals ruin their career because all they do is sit in front of their laptops. You need to connect with others and you need to make it a habit.” – Beth Benatti Kennedy · [33:02]
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I have seen so many professionals ruin their career because all they do is sit in front of their laptops. You need to connect with others and you need to make it a habit. So even for my introverts, I give them homework assignments. Once a month, you need to find someone in your organisation to have lunch with. And they keep saying, ‘Beth, it’s so much fun.” Again, “I wish I would have done that 10 years ago.” And then the final one is that innovation because yeah, it’s great to be innovative, but if you’re… I like to say this to my leaders. If you’re a stressed out leader with all these innovative ideas, I’m not interested in being with you. So that’s where the wellbeing and the self-awareness comes because no one…. I think we’ve all had examples of working with managers or individuals that are arrogant or stressed out or poor leaders. It just doesn’t work. So innovation is great, but work on these other things and then be innovative. But it all interconnects.
How to Build an Authentic and Genuine Personal Brand · [34:00]
Will Barron:
We’ll wrap up with this, Beth. With regards to personal brand, are we talking about having a flashy website of willbarron.com and having some cheesy video of me stood there with a green screen and then some pointers on the board behind me or is there more to having a personal brand with regards to becoming resilient?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Okay. This is great. The two words that I’m going to say that are most important is authentic and genuine. I think that when we think about personal branding, it’s so important to… I love the example that you just shared. I feel the more we’re flashy and the more we’re phoney , that just does not resonate with customers, doesn’t resonate with clients. And this comes up a lot. I actually did a branding webinar two days ago and someone said, “But Beth, what if I’m realising it’s not coming across the way I want it to be?” Well, that’s great room for opportunity. If you want to be more strategic or if you want to learn to connect better with people, that again would be that product five that I talked about. You make that your number one Goal. And that’s where learning about personality type might be really important for you.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
I like to use the word authentic and genuine. I’m actually a certified personal brand analyst with a company [inaudible 00:35:18]. And when I learned about this many years ago, I felt like, oh, why would my clients want this? So what clients have shared with me was many of them have, believe it or not, PhD degrees or MD degrees or they have just been super successful in their career like a sales position for 20 years and they never thought about this very powerful question. What is the legacy I want to leave? What’s the impression? What’s the reputation? When you’re not in that conference room, what do you want people to be saying about yourself? And I think that’s just so powerful for all of us. At the end of every day, what is the legacy we’re leaving? What’s the impact?
Beth’s Advise to Her Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [36:12]
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well, with that, we’ll wrap things up because I feel like…. I’ve circled three more things to go through here, so we’ll perhaps go through them on another occasion, Beth. But there’s a tonne of content to got here already. So we’ll wrap things up. And with that, I’ve got one final question to ask everyone that comes on the show. I know you’re not an out and out “sales professional” but you’ll definitely have some insights on this, and that is, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what would be the one piece of advice you’d give her to help her become better at selling?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
The one piece that I would share if I went back is something that I do, again, in my Friday Five every Friday is I open up a spreadsheet and I just bullet what my achievements were from that week. And it’s so powerful. For example, with just writing my book. It’s so exciting when I look back at last year going to the publisher. I wish I would have done that 15, 20 years ago and it takes less than five minutes tracking your wins every week.
Parting Thoughts · [37:00]
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well, with that, tell us where we can find the book and tells a little bit more about the book and where we can find out more about you, Beth?
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Okay. You can find Career Recharge: Five Strategies to Boost Resilience and Beat Burnout on Amazon. It’s also available in the Kindle version. And check out my website, is www. bethkennedy.com. And if you like some of the tips you’ve heard today, I offer a free monthly easing. You can sign up on my website. I also have a Facebook business page, Benatti Training and Development and I’m also on Twitter, Coach B Kennedy. I think that about covers all my social media. Oh, and LinkedIn. So LinkedIn, oh my goodness. So LinkedIn is my number one connection tool. I share lots of great sparks success tips and I also share different success stories. This wonderful podcast will be on my LinkedIn at some point.
Will Barron:
Good stuff. We’ll add a link to all that in the show notes to this episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Beth, I want to thank you for your time, for your insights on all of this. I really enjoyed having this conversation. And with that, I want to thank you for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.
Beth Benatti Kennedy:
Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.
