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Disruptive Emotions

Thomas Waites

What are Disruptive Emotions?

Disruptive emotions are feelings that can interfere with a person’s ability to think clearly, make rational decisions, and engage in effective behaviour. Disruption emotions include:

  • Frustration

  • Insecurity

  • Impatience

  • Nervousness

  • Tension

  • Uncertainty

  • Anger

  • Anxiety

  • Arrogance

  • Attachment

  • Detachment

  • Fear

Disruptive Emotions in Sales

Disruptive emotions hold salespeople back from success. These emotions can ruin focus, derail relationships, and cloud situational awareness.

Situational awareness is huge in sales. It is our ability to perceive, understand, and effectively respond to people and our situation. It involves identifying the unique factors of a scenario and pattern-matching to past experiences. High performers use these inputs and patterns to tailor their interactions. They adapt their actions in response to the present situation.  The best “see” things others don’t.

If you’re feeling anxious during a sales call, as an example, your situational awareness will be clouded. You won’t be able to read your prospects, actively listen, ask the right questions, or respond accordingly.

These emotions override your ability to be present with your prospects. They also lead to irrational decision making, misjudgments, overconfidence, paralysis, and procrastination.

Excellence in sales happens when you learn how to manage your disruptive emotions. When you’re in control of your emotions, you can then influence the emotions of other people. This is critical because people buy emotionally.

Fight or Flight

Disruptive emotions lead to fight or flight responses. Most of us generally tend to respond with one or the other.

Flight: you fold in the face of perceived, potential or actual rejection. You become passive and non-assertive when asking your prospects for commitments or insecure and small when meeting new people.

Fight: you become hostile or argumentative with your prospects. You may cut prospects off to argue a point- a lot of salespeople do this when they’re facing objections from a prospect.

Managing Your Disruptive Emotions

The good news is that you can learn to manage your disruptive emotions.

You must teach your rational brain to tell your emotional brain that the obstacle that it perceives as being HUGE in the moment is actually really small. And the best way to do this is to face your fears. Your fears will diminish as you continuously practice facing them.

For example, if you’re afraid to set upfront contracts, commit to doing it in every call and don’t waiver. I often joke with people that my career in sales has broken my ability to feel rejection. And that’s because I’m constantly putting myself out there in the world. I get rejected every day… all of the time! This used to feel like a big deal. Now rejection just rolls off of me. And interestingly, the less you worry about rejection, the less you’ll actually get rejected.

Your ability to manage disruptive emotions is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger your self control will become.

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