ritory in Peoria. He applied himself on the learning curve and hit the ground
running. Mark made a good living his first couple of years in the business but
felt a growing sense of frustration with the pace of progress in his career and
with the extraordinary demands on his time.
On a weekend visit with my brother, I asked him why he thought he was
feeling stressed. He immediately began to vent his frustrations regarding
the difficulty of seeing so many prospects, completing so much paperwork,
and making the President’s Club. He felt stressed about how to produce
more without killing himself in the process.
I felt stressed just looking at the disheveled piles of binders and pa-
perwork lying around his apartment! Mark admitted that he suspected or-
ganization was not his strong suit (noting that he had two colors of socks
on that morning, I was inclined to agree) and asked if I had any ideas on
how to organize his business to reduce the stress levels. I began immedi-
ately to inquire about:
- How far spread out geographically his territory was
- How much time the selling cycle took for each of the products he
sold - What he tried to accomplish on a typical appointment
I guided the inquiry down this path because I had come to the conclu-
sion in my experiences as a counselor and then a consultant that a high de-
gree of stress that people experience in their lives can be traced back to the
manner in which they manage their time. When I asked Mark to describe
what his job felt like, he characterized it as “constantly putting out fires.”
Up to this point, he had convinced himself that there was no time to
get organized with such a busy and unpredictable fire-fighting schedule
(demonstrating how disorganization ultimately becomes its own excuse for
not taking time to organize). Mark had now reached the breaking point
where he was willing to confront head-on his personal shortcomings. At
this point, I decided to dive headfirst into the discombobulated bowels of
random activity that he liked to refer to as a “schedule.”
I asked him to describe in detail the past two weeks of his schedule. As
he recounted the past two weeks, I was grateful that I was sitting with my
brother and not a client—a client would not have been quite so forgiving
of the laughing fits I could not restrain. In his first day, he drove three
hours to an appointment. Two days later he drove down the exact same
road one-and-a-half hours to see someone he had driven by twice two days
before. This was just the beginning of a comedy of scheduling errors. One
month later, he was scheduled to go back to the client three hours away to
see someone else in the same business.
50 SELLING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE