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How to stay mentally and emotionally fit for life as well as physically fit

Written by: Paul Kernot

Article Overview: How do you measure mental and emotional fitness? Sprint - Rest - Sprint - Rest When I was young I was a competitive swimmer in a club. I trained three evenings per week at the local pool with my squad and I was physically pretty fit. When I was 21 I worked as a swimming instructor in London. I swam a mile every week day morning before work and I was still physically fit. These days I play football and train three times per week in Martial Arts. I am still physically fit, but several years ago I realised that physical fitness was not the only type of fitness I needed for life and particularly in business.

How to stay mentally and emotionally fit for life as well as physically fit

How do you measure mental and emotional fitness?

Sprint - Rest - Sprint - Rest

When I was young I was a competitive swimmer in a club. I trained three evenings per week at the local pool with my squad and I was physically pretty fit. When I was 21 I worked as a swimming instructor in London. I swam a mile every week day morning before work and I was still physically fit. These days I play football and train three times per week in Martial Arts. I am still physically fit, but several years ago I realised that physical fitness was not the only type of fitness I needed for life and particularly in business.

Back in my swimming days we regularly did sprint training. We had just 30 seconds to dive in, sprint to the other end of the pool, climb out and dive in for the next length within the 30 seconds. As you can imagine, sprint training got the heart pumping furiously.

Not built for sprinting I was usually the last out of the pool at the end of each of the 12 lengths in each set. At the end of each set we got a whole 90 seconds rest, then we would be away again to do it all over again! During those 90 second rest periods we were taught to put our thumbs on our wrists and to count the number of beats per second on the big clock on the wall at the end of the pool in order to check our heart rate.

PHYSICAL FITNESS IS MEASURED BY RECOVERY RATE.
It's not so much about how fast or how high or how long, but how long your heart takes to return to it's normal resting rate.

The other fitness I realised I needed not only for life but in business, is Emotional and Mental fitness.
So how do you measure emotional and mental fitness? The answer is the same.

MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL FITNESS IS MEASURED BY RECOVERY RATE.
How long does it take you personally to recover from the inevitable negativity, rejection and setbacks we all encounter from time to time? From a personal point of view, I have developed six enormously effective ways to instantly "Switch" your mind from a negative state of mind to a positive one, any time you feel the need to. For more on this, see my article on "The six ways to "Switch" from negative to positive, any time you need to". You will be amazed at how easy it is to do this once you have developed the "Switching" habit.

From a sales ad business point of view, I will share here a fantastic method for "Switching", even after you have been told no twenty times in a row.

THE CARD TRICK MIND SWITCH FOR BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS
As a young salesperson I learnt a mental card trick that saved my sales career. Without it I am sure I would have quit the business and got myself a desk job. What a relief! I would arrive back in my office having being told no twenty times straight. Eon, my first ever sales manager saw that I was getting desperate and was about to call it quits. He sat me down and asked me to write down how much I earned each time I did get a yes. As I was selling real estate in London at the time, the commission was pretty good. Let's say I cleared $1000 per sale on average.

Eon then took out a pack of playing cards from his desk. He asked me what my strike rate at the time was. From memory it was one in 28 i.e. I managed to list and sell one home from every 28 cold calls I made. He showed me the pack of cards and asked how many aces there were in the pack. "Four" I answered. "So if an ace represents each sale you make, how much is each ace worth?" "A thousand dollars" I replied. "Wrong" Said Eon. He took out a calculator and divided 1000 by 28. "$35 he said. Every time you ask the question, it's worth $35 to you WHETHER THEY SAY YES OR NO DOESN'T MATTER, every time you ask it's worth $35. All you have to do is get that into your head".

Eon's card trick struck an immediate chord with me and I never looked back. He suggested that I even go as far as thanking people who said no to me, telling them that it was worth $35 to me. The point is that I wasn't talking to the prospects when I said that, I was talking to myself. If you are in sales, simply work out your average sale value and divide it by your strike rate. Every no is closer to a yes. All you need to know now is how fast you can get rejected! Selling is just a numbers game.

Use the mental card trick any time you start to feel the next yes is never going to come.


Paul Kernot

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Article Tags: beats, clock on the wall, emotional fitness, encounter, evenings, heart rate, martial arts, mental fitness, negativity, personal point, physical fitness, point of view, pool, rejection, rest periods, setbacks, sprint training, swimmer, swimming instructor, three times



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