Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Malisa Nguyen

"If you're operating in survival mode, that's when it leads to burnout. That's when it leads to the rock bottom moments that a lot of reps struggle with." - Malisa Nguyen, Mental Performance Coach and Founder of MTN Collective Malisa went from top performer to burning out in a role she earned through a promotion she worked hard to get. She did everything sales culture told her to do: more volume, more hustle, longer hours. She worked weekends and twelve-hour days and still couldn't find her footing. The pressure gave her anxiety attacks at night and made her unable to be present in her own life. She went to an Anderson .Paak concert and spent the whole time thinking about quota. That experience sent her down five years of studying mental performance and nervous system science, and what she found reframed everything she thought she knew about sales inconsistency. Her core argument: inconsistency isn't a skill problem. It's a nervous system problem. Spraying and praying is a fight response. Procrastinating on cold calls is flight. Freezing in analysis paralysis is exactly that. Over-discounting to please a prospect is a fawn response. None of those are fixed by more roleplay or more pressure. In fact, piling on pressure usually makes all of them worse. The reps who bounce back from rejection quickly aren't tougher. They've just stopped making it mean something about themselves. The moment you tie the outcome to your self-worth, the spiral starts. "You can only go so far hustling and grinding your way through. Eventually you're going to hit a wall. I hit that wall."