Be Mindful of Sleep and Exercise Habits Because They Affect Your Sales Performance
Annuity sellers are like everybody else. We have to use our common sense when it comes to eating better, sleeping right, and exercising. Any change in our lifestyle (good or bad) can affect our work. When we suspect that something might be wrong with our bodies, we tend to consult a medical provider. At the medical appointment, we expect immediate results, and we desire to return to normal with as expenditure of effort as possible. What our bodies tell us is crucial, but we cannot expect to stay healthy over the long term without changing daily habits. The Prevalence of Sleep Apnea One of the things we’ve read much about in recent years is when people have trouble sleeping. It interrupts everything they do. Many adults suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome, but they don’t know it. This could explain why you often fall asleep at your desk. People with OSA may have symptoms such as loud snoring, daytime sleepiness, and daytime fatigue. They may stop breathing while asleep and/or make jerking motions. After they resume breathing again, they may experience another fit. People with multiple episodes like these could have mild, moderate, or severe OSA, which calls for medical treatment. The Background on Sleep Apnea According to a study published by the American Thoracic Society, there are estimates that 3 percent to 7 percent of the general population has a form of OSA. “Increasingly, obstructive sleep apnea is also being recognized as an independent risk factor for several clinical consequences, including systemic hypertension, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and abnormal glucose metabolism.” What’s more, people with certain risk factors have a higher chance of developing this syndrome (i.e. age, being of the male sex, obesity, family history, menopause, craniofacial abnormalities, and using alcohol or tobacco). If you know someone with loud snoring or trouble breathing during sleep, you could suggest seeing a medical provider. A medical physician determines if a patient should be evaluated through polysomnography, also called a sleep study. Exercise Can Help As we get older, it’s important to use exercise as a way to keep our bodies strong and to prevent disease. One meta-analysis study published in Lung found “a statistically significant effect of exercise in reducing the severity of sleep apnea in patients with OSA with minimal changes in body weight.” This study also found that the important effects of exercise on cardiorespiratory fitness, daytime sleepiness, and sleep efficiency suggest the potential benefit of exercise in treating OSA. If you are feeling sluggish, you want to get to the root cause. If you aren’t sleeping right, you might see your sales go down, but you can also develop other health problems. Get Ready and Feel Positive The best thing that people with a suspected medical condition like sleep apnea can do is to seek early intervention. As an annuity seller, I would like to think that I could choose the eating, sleeping, and exercise habits that will help me to live a long and fulfilling life. However, I know that my sales job makes it important to find a balance. Of course, I will do my best to follow my physician’s advice. When I take care of “me,” whether that is getting some extra sleep each night before work or hitting the gym four days a week, I should be ready to sell more policies. My brain will be more alert, and I will have more energy to give to my clients. How else will I help them choose the best annuity product for their specific situation? If they talk to me now, their needs might be different from when they called me a year ago and decided to wait. I want to be ready!
How Mindfulness Benefits Agents and Registered Reps
I never thought I would write a post quoting what Aetna is doing, but life can surprise me! Yes, I know that Aetna is a big insurance company, but it’s also an employer of 50,000 people. I was reading on the Harvard Business Review blog that Aetna introduced mindfulness training to employees and over 25 percent of them participated. “Aetna also calculated the savings to the company, finding that, on average, mindfulness participants gained 62 minutes of productivity a week, which is an estimated $3,000-per-employee increase in productivity for the company each year.” Imagine if you had 63 more minutes each week. You could fit in one or two more appointments with customers (or perhaps 10 to 15 phone calls to prospects). In this post, I want to talk about mindfulness and how it will benefit your day. Why You Need Mindfulness Beyond the extra minutes that you will find in the workday, you could be wondering why you should try mindfulness training. You would go to a mindfulness training or try an app because you want to get the benefits for your mind, body, and spirit. I’m going to put this in layman’s terms instead of going on and on about medical studies. A typical workday has its own stressors. There are the tasks that you must accomplish and the interruptions of phone calls, emails, and people entering your office for which it’s hard to plan. These are factors that you must accept as part of your work-life unless you’re going to let calls go to voicemail, check emails only at certain times of the day, and work from home. However, if you work from home, you will have to spend more time on the road going to meet clients. How Mindfulness Helps You Given all these factors that affect a typical workday, you will have less productivity when you feel a lack of control over them. You will have greater anxiety, higher blood pressure, and you might forget to breathe deeply. With mindfulness, you take time for yourself, diverting your mind from these environmental stressors for a few minutes. You are going to be quiet, close your eyes, and listen to a voice telling you how to breathe in deeply, hold your breath, and then exhale. A guided meditation may also encourage you to calm different parts of your body, to let certain issues or pain points go, or to move you through a series of positive images. Guided meditations by experienced yogis are usually detailed enough that you feel calmer after you follow them. After a few minutes of meditation, you can feel less intimidated by environmental stressors and/or the anxiety that makes your brain go crazy. You will feel your chest expanding and contracting with fewer restrictions and then get back to work. It’s All About Perspective What I love about mindfulness is that it helps us to release anxiety and stress and to focus on our brain’s unlimited power. I will wind up with an example. The other day, an angry customer entered my office. She was disappointed with this year’s return on her annuity, and she suggested I should have sold her a different option. She couldn’t bank on the earnings of the annuity’s yield, and she was sure that she should switch to a new carrier. I hadn’t expected her arrival and I had to prepare for a first-time presentation that afternoon to a community group. Nevertheless, I understood her feelings of helplessness about how a financial product performs. She was ready for a guaranteed multi-year annuity. The next time this scenario occurs, I will excuse myself while an upset customer waits in the lobby. Then, I will do a quick meditation. Afterward, I will resolve the customer’s problem without letting my emotions get out of control. She caught me off-guard, and that was not a good starting point for helping her or for finishing my presentation.