July 11, 2026 | Read online
My daughter went to a volleyball camp this week. After the first morning session, she texted me, frustrated. She wasn't on one of the top courts, she wasn't playing well, and she was spiraling. I could feel her frustration through the texts. That feeling of "this isn't going the way I wanted it to go" was pulling her down, and everything after that first disappointment was being filtered through that lens.
I called her with the main goal of trying to shift her mindset. I told her this wasn’t a tryout; no one was judging her but herself. This was an opportunity to get better. If you're not on the best court, then be the best person on that court. Have the best attitude. Put in the most effort. And stop telling yourself you're not good enough, because your brain is listening.
That last part is the one that matters most.
There's real research behind this. A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports found that positive self-talk physically changes the brain's functional connectivity, specifically in the regions that regulate emotion and stress. The brain engages the prefrontal cortex when you affirm yourself, which is the part responsible for emotional regulation, resilience, and clear thinking.
Negative self-talk does the opposite. It activates the amygdala and triggers cortisol, the same stress hormone your body produces when it senses danger. Your brain literally cannot tell the difference between what you say to yourself and what's actually happening to you.
So when my daughter was telling herself she wasn't good enough, her brain was treating it as fact and adjusting her performance accordingly. And when I told her to flip that and start talking to herself like she belonged there, it wasn't motivational fluff. It was giving her brain different instructions.
Tony Robbins talks about this as "Changing Your State." He believes a monumental shift can happen in minutes if you deliberately change the conversation in your head. I used to think that was a little too rah-rah for me, but now I don’t because I’ve seen the impact it has on others and experienced it myself.
A while ago, I had a friend who was in a rough spot and couldn't seem to find her way out. Every time I talked with her, something had gone wrong, or something bad had happened to her. Eventually, I asked her to do me a favor and go through a little exercise with me. I told her to carry around a small notepad and write down every single positive thing that happened to her, no matter how small. Does someone hold the door open for you? Write it down. Hit a green light on your way to work in the morning? Write it down. Get a text from a friend you haven’t heard from in a while? Write it down.
She came back to me a week later with a book full of examples and was already in a completely different headspace. I asked her how her week went, and she said it was one of the best weeks she’s had in a long time. I then asked what was different about this week than the previous one, and she told me that people were nicer and she finally got a few positive breaks to go her way. I pushed her further to see if she felt that was just a coincidence.
Then she realized what had happened. The only thing that was different about the past week compared to the previous ones was that she had shifted her mindset and lens to focus on the positive instead of the negative, and her brain then followed.
This is directly applicable to sales, which is where I see the negative tailspin destroy people.
You know how it goes. A couple of deals slip in the same week. Your cold calls aren't connecting. A prospect ghosts you after what you thought was a great meeting. And then everything starts looking like more bad news. You miss a red light, and it feels like confirmation that the universe is against you. Momentum is momentum. It keeps moving in whatever direction it's going unless something deliberately stops it.
For managers, this is one of the most important things to understand about coaching reps who are struggling. Most of the time, the problem isn't skill. The problem is they're in a negative tailspin and don't know how to get out of it. So you have to go day by day and build positive momentum through small wins.
For instance, if a rep is struggling, take a step back and start with a completely reasonable goal for them to achieve that day. For instance, can you make 50 dials today? That's it. When they hit it, you celebrate it. The next day, you say, can you make 50 dials and get through to five gatekeepers? You celebrate that. Then it's 50 dials, five gatekeepers, and one real conversation with a decision maker. Then it's turning that conversation into a discovery call.
Each step is small and specific, and each one gets celebrated before you add the next one. What you're doing is rewiring their momentum. You're giving their brain evidence that they're making progress, and the brain responds to that evidence the same way it responds to the negative evidence when everything is falling apart.
I had to do this for myself recently. It seemed like every deal in my pipeline was pushed, closed/lost. I had A LOT of negative talk going on in my head about AI killing the need for traditional training and how maybe I had passed my prime and wasn’t good enough anymore.
Then, after realizing no one was showing up to my self-pity party and the tiny violin stopped playing in my head, I got back to focusing on what I could control: E.A.T. Effort, Attitude, and how you Treat other people.
I rebuilt my prospecting engine using Claude, Apollo, and Sales Navigator. I used Claude and Otter to analyze my last 10 deals and extract what I was missing and could be doing better. I started to look for the small wins and wrote them in my gratitude journal daily.
It took longer than I wanted, but all of a sudden my conversations started to get better, opportunities started to show up, pipeline started to build, and this week I closed two new clients for the first time in a while. I could feel the momentum shifting. I changed my state.
If you want to see how I did this from a prospecting perspective, you’re going to want to join me this coming Wednesday at 11:00am EST where I’ll be delivering a free webinar showing how I’ve rebuilt my prospecting engine and morning routine to drive results. It entails going after previous customers, using Sales Navigator to find warm intros and opportunities from 1x connections, and using Apollo to run a Tier2 sequence that highlights “intent” so I know when to personalize.
I also worked with Insightly on an Outbound Prospecting Playbook that highlights the approach and how you can operationalise it. If you don’t have time to come to the webinar, then you should at least check out the playbook to see if there’s anything you can use to adjust your own approach.
The bottom line is this. Whether it's your daughter at volleyball camp, a rep at the bottom of the leaderboard, or you staring at a pipeline that looks thinner than it did last quarter, the way out of a negative tailspin starts with what you say to yourself. Your brain is always listening. Feed it something worth believing.
#MakeItHappen
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