Feeling overwhelmed by negativity? Sales trainer and author Anthony Iannarino joins the show to discuss his book, The Negativity Fast. He reveals a surprising secret: he started this negativity detox way back in the 90s! Discover why we, as human beings, are wired for negativity and how to reframe past traumas for growth. Dive into the science behind gratitude, how to navigate the perils of social media, and practical tips to overcome negativity bias and cultivate a more positive mindset. This episode is a must-listen for anyone facing negativity in their personal or professional life, and especially helpful for salespeople facing constant rejection.
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The Negativity Fast: Science-Backed Strategies For A Positive You With Anthony Iannarino
Team, we've got a fantastic podcast for you today because we've got Anthony Iannarino. Anthony has got 20 years of experience selling and leading sales forces in the staffing industry. You know him because he's the writer and publisher of TheSalesBlog.com, an enormously popular sales blog. Anthony is a keynote speaker. He's a sales trainer, and author of four great books. More coming, by the way, we're talking about his latest great book, The Negativity Fast.
Talk about an important topic, the negativity fast. In our conversation, we get into why we as human beings are wired to be negative. It's biological in certain ways. We talk about the fact many of us have been through some form of trauma in our life and how we reframe those events so it's not a negative experience, but we can pull some positive things from it.
We talk about the awesome power of gratitude. We talk a little bit about wanting and the perils of social media. Understanding we get somewhere between 17,000 and 50,000 thoughts a day. We've got to be mindful about mindfulness to figure out how we process all of these thoughts and make sure we focus on those things that benefit us. We have a great conversation about how important gratitude is to all of us, and the actual physical and mental health benefits of gratitude.
Team, we discussed all of this and more in the podcast with Anthony. He's a super interesting fellow. He is one of the top minds in professional sales today by far. Just a great conversation, which I enjoyed. I hope you do too. If you do, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast. That matters to us. That's how we get great guests like Anthony Iannarino. Enjoy the show.
Origin Of The Negativity Fast
Anthony, welcome back to the show. It's great to see you again. I shared this offline, Anthony, but I couldn't be more excited to talk to you about your latest book. I know you've got something about AI coming out with Jeb Blount in the not-too-distant future, but I was so excited to talk to you about the Negativity Fast, Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success.
Such a need for this in professional sales, but what an incredible need for this in society in general. In the book, you talk a little bit about your background. One of the things I was just amazed to pick up on was that you were negative. Given the sales career that you had, or you saw yourself as that way, this amazing career that you've had, everything you've done. First of all, welcome to the show, but tell me a little bit about that journey for you and that with the amazing success you've had, you may have been a little bit negative along that journey as well.
I was world-class. I had two brain surgeries, one on Friday, and one on Saturday. They took a piece of my skull out and then they removed something called an arterial venous malformation. After that, they gave me several drugs to take so I wouldn't have seizures. I only ever had one seizure and it was a surprise to find out that they cut a piece of my brain off only after they recovered me after the second surgery.
I didn't know that there was any possibility of losing part of my brain. I didn't know that at the beginning and they didn't either. They just had to open up and see what was in there. After I woke up, they said, “We had to remove part of your brain because it was bruised and it would mean you would have seizures for the rest of your life. We got rid of it.”
I wasn't prepared for that and then Phenobarbital, that's a drug that will prevent you from having seizures but it's also used to tranquilize elephants. That's what they use to do that because it's so strong. Between the drugs and having my head cut open, I started to become angry. Angry enough that I was trying to pull into an apartment complex and a guy was coming towards me and he was being a little aggressive.
I got out of the car and I started walking towards him and he got back in his car. I'm not a great fighter. I was involved with those but I'm not a good fighter, I was just angry. Over time, in your 20s, you want the world to look like what you think it should look like. It takes a little while for you to get past that and understand that the world's been here for about 4.8 billion years, and it's a lot older than you.
It's been burning and churning for a long time, and it's not going to change because you want it to change. That's a very hard thing to do, to change the whole world, but few people have been able to do that. I got angrier and angrier and angrier. I was in law school, very political. I was political. I had a great mentor. His name was Mike Distelhorst.
I went and got coffee every time we had class. He taught contracts. We would go get coffee and one day he said, you're angry and you need to stop being angry. He said, “You're so wrapped up in politics and global politics and all these things.” At that time, you're in Toronto, so this won't make any sense to you. We had Bill Clinton pass a law that said, “You guys didn't pay enough taxes in the past. We're going to retroactively give you a bill for what you still owe.” Even though we paid.
I was mad about that and he said, “Look, you can't do anything about those things. You have no power to do that. And you worry about the government and politics and all that stuff. No one is going to have a better impact on your children than you. It has nothing to do with that. Go and outrun them, get the money that you want so that you can take care of your family, and don't worry about anything else.”
No one is going to have a better impact on your children than you.
Now, I wish I would have taken his advice immediately. I did not, it took me about six months and then I remembered that conversation one day and I thought, “Could I get rid of all the politics?” “I can get rid of everything.” So I got rid of all the political magazines, and newspapers. I got rid of all my political books. I got rid of everything.
Is this when you were 20? You did all of this because you went back to university as a more mature student. You were 26 or 28 when everybody else was younger, but you did this back in those days. Wow.
Yes, and then I decided I'm going to get rid of every negative thing or person in my life and I'm going to clean up what's going on up here. I decided to do that and I decided to call it, I was going on a negativity fast. What I did is I got rid of all of the sources including television. I've not watched any kind of political news show since the early ‘90s.
I don't watch anything. I know now that Fox is for conservatives and MSNBC is for liberals. I know that they're like warring tribes now, and I think that's horrible for a society like ours. I don't think that it should be that way. I just ignore it. I describe myself as post-political. I can't do anything about it and look, if you read The Stoics, you'll find out If anything is out of your ability to do something about it, you just leave it alone.
Just leave it alone, don't worry about any of that, you can't do anything about it, nobody can probably do it, but so you just let it go. I did this for 30 days and at the end of 30 days, I felt better, so much better that I did it again. I did it the second time and I felt even better because I was just only paying attention to things that I could do something about.
After the second time I did that, I realized you've still got all that stuff in there, you got to blast it out. I was imagining a fire hose and trying to just like get it to blow out, get all of that out. I just listened to Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, all the people who are positive and I just only took in positivity and I realized that I should have done that the first time. I should have just started taking in all the positivity but I figured it out on the third try.
From that point forward, every day driving to work, driving to college, driving to law school, I was listening to something positive and future-oriented and I felt a lot better. Then I decided, “Why would you stop this?” “What would be your reason?” What would you decide that would say, “I need to go back and try to be angry again?” It doesn't work. You just stay and you feel better.
You know what? Of course, you do if you go through it. We've had a couple of guests on the show, Anthony talked about things and we're going to get into everything in the Negativity Fast, but they've talked about things like, “Why don't you assess how you feel after you just spend 45 minutes looking at your phone or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok?” Assess how you feel before you start and then assess how you feel afterward. You always feel worse.
I'm sorry, maybe I didn't pick this up in my research, but what I didn't grasp so much was that you were doing this back in the early '90s. That's the amazing thing to me because everything we're talking about seems hyper-relevant in today's world but the fact you got such an early jump on it and just cut it all out, like cutting out the news and nobody was doing that back in the mid-90s, it's interesting that you got such an early jump.
The Power Of Gratitude
I'd like to help the team as you know, the people who read this blog run businesses. They run large sales teams, primarily sales-focused, but business-focused, with lots of entrepreneurs. You've broken the negativity fast into 12 chapters, Why We're Negative, Talking Yourself Into a Negative State very relevant for me, Empathy and How to Lie To Yourself, and How to Stop Complaining. It's a chapter I loved, but not as much as this one. The Awesome Power of Gratitude.
I love to do a deep dive there. The awesome power of gratitude, Reframing Negative Events, and certainly you just shared a very negative event with your two surgeries. How To Live Happily with Political Divisiveness, Wanting, and The Perils of Social Media Like The Hedonic Adaptation Point, really resonated with me. How To Change Your State, Minding Mindfulness, How to Forget Your Problems and Concerns, and The Negativity Fast itself. By the way, team, this is absolutely a must-read, not for everybody in professional sales, but just for everybody. I also like the scientific research and how we got there. I wonder if we could jump in a little bit and skip the power of gratitude is just shocking.
I'm a wide reader. I read a lot of things. I'm always listening to an audible book at the same time like in the shower, my wife puts a little dope thing up so that I can put my phone there and I can listen. I'm always taking in content and trying to find good strategies and things that I think are helpful. When I started looking at gratitude, I knew some things about gratitude, but I'm finishing chapters and I'm sending the chapter to the editor.
I said gratitude is just overblown. You can't understand how much gratitude does. You can't imagine. It will give you better cognitive function. It will reduce your chances of having a heart attack. It will increase your immunity system. The list just keeps going on and on, sleep, lower blood pressure. All of these things, less inflammation in your body.
You see this and you're like, nobody's going to believe this. Nobody's going to believe that gratitude does all these things. My editor said, “You should cite that.” Then I said, “I can cite that. I've read a bunch of things as I was doing this and I have the citations.” I started putting citations in. As I started going through the rest of it, she said, “Why don't you just cite everything?” I said, “Okay, I'll cite everything.”
I went and cited every single thing that I said here because I don't want people to think this is my opinion or my perspective about any of these things. This is all from science. All of these things have been looked at for a very long time except for post-traumatic growth syndrome. There are only maybe two big papers on that. There's not very much yet, but it is starting to have people paying attention to it.
That one is also amazingly interesting where something terrible happens or something challenging happens can have a positive effect. We'll talk about the definition of that term. I learned so many terms speaking about this, but I'll just circle back on science around gratitude.
Team, this is chapter five, around pages 94 and 95 but you talk about theories from Xixi, Zen, Emens, McCulloch, Fra, and Bono. I apologize if I'm catching any of those names wrong and then the positive outcomes from gratitude, are just shocking. You touched on all of them. Maybe the other one just frankly increased self-esteem.
I brought something, just an artifact here today again because this book resonated so much with me. I've got a little gratitude journal for the folks out there and what happened, I think humans have this amazing way of trying to survive. For me, after being in the corporate world running large sales organizations for 15 years, when I started as an entrepreneur from zero, it was really important to start every day and just think about some great things that had happened.
The three blessings we bring up in the book were just writing them down and then I got into this habit weekly of loving a coffee on a Sunday morning, taking a pause and just pulling on my gratitude journal and thinking, “What about all the great things that have happened this week?” It was surprising to me how long the list was. When you take a little bit of that time and just go through writing things down, and there's something that happens when you write something down versus typing versus dictating, at least for me, I'm looking at it. It just gives you such a platform to build on. It's just amazing.
Suddenly you've got a book, three or four years later, I had this book that's 80 pages long of all the great things that have happened. The odd time there's going to be a little bit of a dip. It's nice to go back to this and just think of all the blessings and all the great things that one has in somebody's life. It's amazing the difference it makes in your future.
Yes, there's a book called Hope Circuit by Marty Seligman, and the three blessings were in that book. I liked to do the gratitude journal in the morning and then after I started practicing it the other way. When you write three things that were good throughout the day and why, it's 30 days. Go look at this and you're going to realize, “My life's really good. It's really good. I should be grateful for this.”
If you do it in the morning, you don't have any experience yet. You're going to go say, “I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my business.” You'll just be repeating over and over again. When it's something that happens each day and you have to find three things that were good and why, it changes this. Now you have to do it at night before you go to bed because you need that time to figure out what those three things were. I think if people would do this and put it in a journal like yours, and then go back after a month. Go back and look at each day and say, “It's really good here.”
Boy, it is really good here. I love the reference in the book Keeping Up with the Joneses and the hedonic adaptation. I've noticed hedonic adaptation from the time I was 25 onward. You're buying suits, you like going to the store, you get a nice new suit. Suddenly some good things happen to you so you start buying suits that are three times the cost. Then you're coming home thinking, “I don't feel any different.” Hedonic adaptation is when you buy things and think, “I'm going to get a new car, it's going to change my life.” It doesn't, you just revert back to the same baseline level of happiness.
I'm doing this right now, Mark. When I needed to buy a new car, it was in COVID. There was one car available to me at the Mercedes dealer. It's an S580. The most expensive car. That was the only car. I didn't buy it. I said I'm going to lease it and right now I think, “This car is amazing but I don't want to keep it. I don't want this kind of car.”
It was just the only car I had available to me and I'd leased it but I also gave back the car that I had before that and I said this car's problem. I live in Ohio, so it's like Toronto. There's snow, there's potholes. Every time I hit a pothole, I would lose not only the tire, I would have to get another wheel because it would break the wheels.
I walked into my sales manager there and I said, “What are we going to do about this car?” First I said, “Do you think I'm a good client?” He said, “You're a great client.” I said, “Do you know how many cars I bought from you?” He goes, “I know exactly how many.” I said, “Good. Okay. What are we going to do about this?” He said, “I'm going to buy it back from you.”
I said, “For how much?” He said, “For what you paid.” I said, “How are you going to do that?” He said, “I'm going to sell that car for more than you paid for it. There are no cars here. I'm going to sell it for more money than I'm going to.” Then I was able to put a lot of money down on this very expensive car, I love the car, but I don't need that car. It was just the only thing that I could have.
This is the beauty of the book. You get into the science, you have a beautiful way of writing, Anthony, so that complex ideas become very simple. Martin Seligman, a leader in psychology, and one of the first people to say, “Psychology is a little less about eliminating misery and a little more on focusing what's good in life.”
Yes, flourishing is what he calls it
Why Are We Negative
You reference a couple of great things throughout the book and maybe I skipped this at the beginning, but I do think it's interesting to think about for everybody reading. Why is the default mechanism for so many people negativity? Why are we negative? Why do we become negative by nature?
It is our nature and it is because we have something called the negativity bias. Most of the time, while you have all these thoughts over and over and over again, and they're mostly all negative, 80% of them tend to be negative and you keep repeating them. You just keep burning in the negativity bias and it's just because of how humans evolved on this planet. That's how it went.
If you were optimistic, probably a dangerous world, it's still a dangerous world really, but you have to do something to beat that back. For me, it was getting rid of the negativity. Not that I don't have a bad day occasionally. Of course, you do. Some of it I think is also just because your chemicals and you have all this stuff going on in the human body and sometimes it's just out of whack. You could probably get yourself into a bad attitude just by eating wrong or drinking, whatever you do. It can turn that for you.
By the way, those who do enjoy a little bit of TV, they'll remember those Snickers commercials. I'm not sure sugar is the best cure for this, but there were Snickers commercials about somebody being in a bad state and they would be some other person, some other actor, and being very chippy. It was very, very funny, and say, this Snickers will fix that. I'm not sure sugar is always the answer.
It works perfectly at the beginning, but then an hour, it's not the same.
I can't remember where I picked this up, but in the amygdala, the fact that through evolution, we were always, as you say, being a little scared and worried and careful. Five times a second, even today, our biology is set up so that we're scanning the universe for things that could be harmful to us, five times a second. That comes into play a lot in our sales training. I know you're one of the world's top sales trainers.
When we're in a room for the first time training some sales leaders or salespeople, they're worried and they walk into an event going, I wonder if this is a sales training event where they're going to pull me up at the front and make me do a role play and make me feel uncomfortable. We go through very intentional processes to talk about how this is a safe space and nobody ever looks silly in a workshop except us.
I can physically see the change in people when we say that. There's this wall and then as soon as we say, don't worry, we're not going to do that. You're not going to feel silly. We're going to look silly. It changes everything. Everybody's worried about this negativity bias, it's also the same reason none of us or few of us are very good investors because the concept of losing $10 is so much more painful than the concept of making $10.
Maybe from an investment perspective, we take it a little bit safe and that's certainly a wealth management issue for all those financial planners out there trying to help people break through that bias to be negative. I think there are lots of things, there's biology that causes us to feel negative. There are events. You and I are the same age.
People live through things. You had a traumatic event in your life with double brain surgeries and the story of waking up being abducted and trying to break out of being abducted until you realized you're actually in an ambulance. Very impactful when you read that and then you were negative after the surgeries where they removed part of your brain, you didn't know that was going to be part of the AVM treatment. I think, Anthony, everybody's got events they could view as negative in their life. Anybody would view them as negative.
I think that the data on that is it's about 98% of people. That's a very high number.
Post-Traumatic Growth
In chapter six, you share about research. How do we reframe those negative events in our lives? We talked a little bit about Freud, and we talked a little bit about Adler, but one of the most interesting points that came out of that reading was the post-traumatic growth concept. The idea is that these terrible things that might happen to us are challenging things that can have a positive outcome. Let's talk a little bit about that.
Adler is interesting because he was on the opposite side of Freud. Freud thought that if you have some traumatic event that happens to you, that will go with you for the rest of your life. Adler's like, “That's the past, that past can't come and get you now because you're already out of this.” That's it and that was what he contributed to this.
We know, that there's not very much science yet on post-traumatic growth syndrome, what it does say is if you can find meaning in that suffering that you had. When you have trauma, I'm reading a guy from Toronto, Gabor Maté. It's called Myth of Normal and the book is all about trauma. It's a very good book. It's a helpful book if you've had those traumas.
If you can find meaning in it, you can move forward with post-traumatic growth syndrome because you gained something from this terrible trauma that you've had. That is, and I'm reading that book right now, it's a giant book, maybe 600 pages. Very good book, very good writing, very science again. If you can find the meaning in it and turn it into something.
My favorite philosopher is Nicolas Taleb. He wrote Anti-Fragile, The Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness. Those are his main books. His thinking about fragility, robustness, and anti-fragile is if you are fragile and if something happens to you, you break. If you're robust, you're the phoenix. You burn down but then you just come right back the same way you were before but his Greek reading, you want to be a hydra. You cut off a hydra's head, it grows two more.
“Go ahead, keep cutting my head off because all you're doing is making me stronger and stronger and stronger.” I think that that's true for some of us if we can get through the trauma. I want to say something about trauma. If you've had trauma, I'm not downplaying that. If you had that, you had that and you were right to feel how you felt when you had that.
I've had probably more trauma than a lot of people just because of the life that I've had early. I think that you have to pay attention to trauma in this book, The Myth of Normal. If you've had a lot, it'd be a good book for you to read and try to get some perspective on that and see if you can change that from something that Freud would say would hold you back and move to try to get the growth part of this, because it is part of growth.
First of all, great reference to a book. We'll put that in the show notes folks. Thank you for that and then, you talked about some of the philosophers, you referenced Nietzsche's, “That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” When I read your books, Anthony, I like physical books. I always buy books and physical books, but they're dog-eared. There are notes all over them. We've all had trauma.
Assessments
I won't share the details of mine given our time here, but I thought about some of those things and then it was helpful to write down and ask, “What did that do?” “How did that help me?” There were very good things that came from it that changed the rest of my life and put it in a different place. The other thing this book caused me to do was to go back into some assessments.
I was wondering why this resonated so much with me. We read hundreds of books a year because of the podcast. I went back and teamed into something called a Clifton Strength Assessment. There are different assessments you can do, but I like that our team has to go through the Clifton Strengths if you work through the funnel. It comes up with these top five things about you. My top five are learner, input, achiever, and election and number five is positivity.
Just by having this conversation that we've had several times, I would have said number one was sexual charisma for you at the beginning.
Thank you for that.
That's what I thought would be number one. I would say stunning personality. Is that fair?
You know what? I think it's fair if the only person rating is my wife and on a good day. It's one of those things in my life. I've always had almost a bit of an allergic reaction to negativity. I'm an entrepreneur like you're an entrepreneur and we have these visions and ideas and growth. Thankfully, a lot of times somebody has to pull us back a little bit to reality, but I have difficulty with that.
This idea of, “No.” I can't have that be the first reaction to everything. The other thing was surrounding yourself with positive people. That's almost been a bit of a survival mechanism for me my whole life. It's just ended up working at great people. You might come across somebody who's super funny in short bursts. They have value to contribute to the world. If they're organically negative, suddenly they don't come into those five or six people in the group.
Have you ever have you ever done an Enneagram? It's a very old structure that puts people into nine different categories. I happen to be what's called an eight, which is a challenger or a protector. Everything from my childhood made me negative. Everything did. My dad left, like all these things that happened to me throughout my childhood.
A lot of violence, all kinds of bad things but I think if you would do an Enneagram, you probably would be a three, which is somebody who's chasing success. They tend to be more positive about all those things. I have an adaptation because I'm an eight, I'm a protector. It's very hard to take advantage of me. Just from my childhood, I have to do a lot of work to be positive.
You are probably just naturally positive, I'm naturally negative. I have to do a lot of work to not be negative. There are only three real angers in an enneagram. If you are a perfectionist, you're the most angry. If you were the second, you would be my wife. My wife is a nine, which is a peacemaker. That's another anger. I'm an eight, anger. I know those and I can almost tell people what they are just by looking at them and having a short conversation, I can pick it up very quickly.
The Perils Of Social Media
Chapter eight, it's so obvious, but still such an issue, Wanting and The Perils of Social Media. Team, this is just shocking. Anthony earlier talked about the number of thoughts and ideas we have and in the book, he references that in a given day, between 17,000 and 50,000 thoughts go through our minds. Many of them get repeated.
The other stat that just floored me was the fact that many of us on average, pick up our phones 52 times a day, and it goes up to 132 times high users pick up their phones 132 times a day. Then we're jumping into social media. There's an author named Morgan Housel. He wrote a book called Psychology of Money.
It's all about your emotions about money if you're an investor. His second book is called Same As Ever. In that book, if you were to ask my dad, probably my mom, they would say the ‘50s was the best time in America. They will say that that was the best time. He explains why that was true. Everybody was just about in the same place. There was not this disparity of 1% that owns like 50% of this. You have a house and you have one parent that stays home and one is working. Everybody's got a car. It's just a parody. Everything's parody.
Everybody's got a job. The world economies were exploding. The baby boomers needed everything. It wasn't too crowded. You could progress if you did the right things.
The disparity now is, there's so much disparity. It's causing us to have more problems than we probably should.
There's so much disparity. It's causing us to have more problems than we probably should.
Yet in the book, you bring up the fact that 99% of the world makes less than 33k US a year.
If you're in that range, you're in the top 1% of the world.
That's not something that most of us would ever think about or put front of mind when our neighbor just bought the same Mercedes you bought during COVID. That comes in and you suddenly got a little bit of a desire for this and a little bit of a desire for that. I've got maybe a little bit of a pet peeve on this one, but I do try with social media, just a trick for us.
Being an entrepreneur, again, I come up with these tricks where I get to recharge. I'm an extrovert, but I absolutely have to recharge. I can be the life of the party, but I can't be the life of the party seven days a week, I need to recharge. On Saturdays, what I typically do is go device-free. I'll have it in my car turned off in the event there's an emergency or I'm by the side of the road and I get a flat.
I'm driving in Ohio and I hit a pothole but I just feel that everything seems a little simpler when I'm not trying to stay up with anything else except enjoying that particular day, doing the three or four things I want to do in that day and making sure I show love to the people I care about. By the way, great tip in the book gang. At the end of each chapter, this book is so beautifully laid out. It gives you easy exercises to start moving in the right direction or continue the positive momentum. One is just to tell the people you love that you love them.
That's one of the things that people always comment about my family. We never say goodbye without saying I love you to everybody, every single time. Every single day. Every time I call my mom, every time I call my dad, every time I talk to any of my children, any of my family members, and if anything happens, that would be the last thing they heard from me. We do that and people always comment on that when they see us. Even my son and my two daughters, do it all the time with all their friends around. It's just how they grew up and people comment and they think it's noble but I think you should just do that anyway. Make sure that they hear it.
Never say goodbye without saying I love you.
How To Get Rid Of Negativity
I think the other thing is maybe they think it's noble, I bet it's also contagious. That's the beautiful thing about a positive dynamic, it can be contagious. For those folks reading this, Anthony, let's get into some tactics. There were so many great tactics. There are strategies here, but then we get into some tactics of how to get rid of that negativity. How do we continue to do this? So many good ideas. We talk about exercise, we talk about food, we talk about empathy, we talk about helping others.
I just picked this book up. I want to say something about this because I don't often say this, but what I can tell you what I was doing here is I did so much reading that I realized that in all of these first 11 chapters is the fact that you are making yourself negative and you can stop it. Then I thought that if I didn’t provide all of this proof you are making yourself negative. I don't know that the negativity fast would work as well as it does.
I get all kinds of notes from people who just tell me, “I feel a lot better.” Mostly, it starts with the political thing, “I gave up politics.” “I'm not watching TV.” “I feel way better.” Yes, that's because you're not eating poison every day. They're poisoning you against your neighbors and your family and it doesn't make any sense to do that. You're here for 4,000 weeks. Don't spend it like that. Don't eat poison every day. Don't ingest that. It will harm you. It does harm you.
You know what? It's so interesting it's chapter seven, How To Live Happily With Political Divisiveness. There was a time, you pointed out, we're Canadian. I live in Toronto where Canadians up hear. In our formative years, our politics was shockingly boring. It's just so boring and everybody's the same. Everybody's nice, all these things. I used to love watching Meet the Press on a Sunday morning because I have always been such a fan of the US and spent lots of time there.
It was entertaining at one point in time. I'd enjoy it on a Sunday morning watching Meet the Press over coffee and bagel with Donna. Then over the last, again, I didn't get a jump like you did, but I'd say over the last 10 years, I used to pop in at night, coming home from work and off our living room, there'd be a TV with CNN on. Eventually, we decided that we had to turn it off. It cannot be on because it seemed to go in a different direction for us when I said, “It's just negative.” “I can't have this.” “I can't get pummeled by this negativity.”
As soon as I come into the place, I'm happiest to be in the world. There's no place for that anymore. Again, controlling these 17 to 50,000 thoughts that go through our head and all these images, somehow we've got to control what's going on in there. You talked about the 11 chapters saying this is about us making ourselves negative. I could have done this wrong.
Been a long time but I believe the early books of Tony Robbins talked about your state. Whether you're feeling great or whether you're feeling terrible, it's the same effort to put yourself in that state. It's hard to stay negative and to be in a miserable mood and all those kinds of things. It takes effort to do that. If you're mindful of it, you can just make an effort to be in a positive state.
I defy you to stay in a negative state while you're running. You can't stay negative. Your body is getting too much air in it and now you're breathing and once you start breathing, the negativity starts to wane and all you have to do is lift heavy weights if you're allowed to lift. I'm not allowed to do that but if you can, that'll change your physiology, your biology, it will change everything for you. All you have to do is run or work out. That'll do it.
I share again, I'm no perfect example of anything, but I share. I am a junkie for working out. I've always been an athlete. I've always continued that on. You have periods of up and down. I tell people I've never left a gym feeling worse than when I came in. For me, it's the sprint training where I go, “You've got to gun it as fast as you can.”
Minding Mindfulness
Your brain saying, “I'm not getting enough oxygen.”It's telling you that while you're doing it, you're looking at this clock but if you can get yourself there, you just feel so much better. You're being in a room with other people who are doing it, everybody feels better. Before we get to the negativity fast itself, let's touch a little bit on minding mindfulness.
I meditated for a very long time. No, let me rephrase that. I thought I was meditating for a very long time. I was not meditating. What I was doing was something called Samadhi which is the preparation for meditation and mindfulness. I have studied with two Zen masters, Goshen Roshi and Gempo Roshi, two very different guys. One of them has this thing that can get you into a state very fast.
He did it to me and it lasted for maybe 24 hours. It was amazing. When I started talking to them about what I was doing, they were explaining to me that that's Samadhi. What you're doing is getting ready to do meditation and mindfulness. I figured out how to do that because I was working with these two Zen masters.
Genpo said, “Don't ever sit on a mat for 40 years. You don't have to do that. All you need to do is to sit down. Then he asked, “Do you wake up in the middle of the night? “Yes.” He said, “Sit in a chair, put a blanket on, just meditate and then you'll feel like you slept eight hours anyway.” That was very helpful for me but what I learned to do is to just be aware of what's going on. That's it.
Just like a bird is chirping out my window right there and you don't focus on it, you just go, “There's a bird.” I got some sort of a crick in my back and you just notice and you keep doing it over and over again. Just breathe and that's it and then everything starts to settle. Now, if you're not a Zen Buddhist and maybe you're not even religious, but if you could do any contemplative prayer, same exact thing. It works the same way, it lets everything fall to the bottom. It's worth learning how to do that and to practice it.
Just notice and notice and notice. Keep doing it over and over again and just breathe. Then everything starts to settle.
I have not done transcendental meditation which takes training. I've done, I'm not sure what is, but cheap and cheerful meditation. Frankly, it's the Peloton meditation I do every day and listening and going through it. Even that completely changes my outlook on a day where some days I'll wake up, team, and feel like, “I got a lot of work to do today.” I've got all these things and all of these meetings and there's a certain perspective on that.
I'll find if I meditate even for 10 or 15 minutes, take a little bit of calm. I come out of that thinking, it's not work. I get to do this. I get to have this amazing conversation with somebody I respect, Anthony Iannarino. I get to work with clients, to help them achieve some meaningful business outcomes or train amazing people. That's what I want to do.
Feeling The Gratitude
I get to hug and kiss my wife before I go out who I love very much. I get to text my family members who I love. Just understanding what we have again, and sometimes it's just turning everything off and then realizing it is intentional and then it leads to everything else in the book, feeling the gratitude. I want to say one quick thank you for touching me when you want to feel better, be generous, or help others in need.
I've felt that team. If you're ever feeling a little down, help somebody else out. I just like to spread this idea. My wife, whenever we are out or we travel to different countries, but even in downtown Toronto, there are a lot of homeless people in downtown Toronto. There are a lot of homeless people in every US city we go to.
Her whole life, she's been that person who will go up to the homeless person, and have a quick chat. Maybe give them some money, get them a meal or a coffee. Admittedly, in my heart, I was always thinking, “Don't do that.” or, “Let's just move on.” or, “It doesn't have to be every time.” I was almost put off a little bit because I had to reframe the way we look at this type of thing. Now that I understand most of those folks are going through a mental health issue, I've taken Anthony's tip as a great one. In this day and age, nobody carries money. You don't need to.
Carry money now because Anthony's tip was, “See how you feel if you just give them 20 bucks or 50 bucks.” or, “Give some, and see the impact.” Help somebody else. That's a great one. I love to spread the word on that through this podcast so everybody just helps some of those people most in need. I think everybody in their sphere of influence has someone in need and boy, do you feel good if you can help somebody else, gets you out of your own head into helping them.
I'd say it's just a shift just like that. I was in Austin doing a keynote and I was walking down the street and overtook a guy who was in a bad situation. I could just see I was looking at it and I only had a 50 but I chased him down and I gave him the 50. I've done this a whole bunch of times. I had a guy with me when I was in San Francisco and there's a very old lady who looked like maybe 100, and she's got this cart.
We were on our way to an event, and I said, “Listen, you can either run with me because I'm going to run and chase her down and I'm going to give her some money or you can just go and I'll meet you there.” He's like, “Nope, I'll run with you.” I said, “I'm not going to let her keep going.” She was stuck over something like a hose, she couldn't get her thing up and I was like, “I just have to go do something.” Why wouldn't you?
Stop Complaining
It would have helped you also right before that event. Anthony, I know how busy you are. We've got to wrap things up here a little bit. I've got to ask you questions or ask you to share with us. What are you recommending with the negativity fast to the people reading this? What are you suggesting they do for the next 30, 60, or 90 days?
The next 30, 60, or 90 days may be if you do this. Maybe forever you leave a whole bunch of these things behind. I do want to tell you one thing that I found only after I wrote the book. If you are a chronic complainer like I was for a long period in my 20s, you are shrinking your hippocampus. You're shrinking it. It starts shrinking.
I always want to tell people that because I want to scare them into stopping complaining. It's horrible for you. It also has an impact on your mental health and your physical health. You just have to let things go. The stoics are worth paying attention to. Just let everything go. If you can't do anything about it, move on with your life, don't even worry about it. That will make you a lot less susceptible to negativity.
You list out the things that people complain about most and the vast majority of them are things we have no control over. The weather, traffic, politics, noise, public transportation. Here's a gray one. I do this all the time. Internet connectivity. Internet, because it could impact this. We have a regulated telco industry in Canada, I'm always complaining we pay too much for too little. Inflation, waiting in line.
There are other things we do control. Our relationships, lack of time, and lack of money but like all of these things, if you can't control it, why waste any space on it? Improve your life, improve the lives of those around you. Focus on the things we can do. The amazing power of positivity is in my view, it's just contagious and it's exponential.
Everybody, of course, Anthony, they're going to enjoy this conversation. First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us again. It's great to have you back on the Selling Well podcast. I can't wait to have you back again after your next book coming out with Jeb Blount on AI. Everybody get on the pre-order for that one, please, and thank you. How do people learn more about you or where should we point them outside of the link to buy the book on Amazon? Team, please do that. Outside of that, how do they find out about you?
Two places. One great place to connect is LinkedIn. I do a small post on LinkedIn every day. I write a thousand words at four o'clock in the morning but then I take Gemini now and I have it break it down into something easier for people to read in a short post. That's one place. The second place is TheSalesBlog.com. If you go there, you should sign up for the VIP newsletter. Those are two places.
The Negativity Fast: Proven Techniques to Increase Positivity, Reduce Fear, and Boost Success
Thank you. All those links team are in the podcast notes. A special thank you to Anthony Iannarino. Fantastic book, The Negativity Fast. Highly recommend it and a thank you to all of you. Team, we run this podcast because we want to help improve the lives of salespeople. We hope this episode was helpful and you enjoyed it as much as I did.
We're growth-oriented and we love constructive criticism. If there are other ways that we can keep improving this podcast so it's of more value to you, please email me directly, at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. I respond to that email and I respond to everybody who gives us an idea and thank you for doing that. If you liked this episode, please like and subscribe to the Selling Well podcast. That's helpful to us and actually, it helps us get amazing guests like Anthony. Thank you again, Anthony. We look forward to seeing you soon. Good selling to everybody.
Thank you.
