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Today’s show featured an interview with Antonia Van Becker and Greg Lee from the Self Health Institute.
Find Greg on LinkedIn. Find Antonia on LinkedIn.
GREG’S ADVICE: “Our body really pays attention to what we do in our brain, and really pays attention to what we do in our body. If we can consciously take a breath when we go to do important actions, and that breath is actually anchored in some of the things that we learn in processing our emotions, a conscious breath is an amazingly powerful thing to do before we pick up the phone to make the call. “Aah,” call.
ANTONIA’S ADVICE: “When you’re taking that breath, whether it’s before you’re going on stage or picking up the phone, you’re breathing in and you are right here, right now. You’re thinking of present moment awareness, not worrying about the past or fearing the future. You are right in the present moment where the love happens, the healing happens, the knowing happens so that you can project your true spirit right in the moment.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Antonia and Greg, I’m excited to have you here because we’re going to be talking about a really important topic. As I was telling you before this show, it’s even something that affects me. It’s basically you’re a sales professional, you know what you need to do, but you don’t always do it. Sometimes it’s the most important thing. I’ll give you an example. We have a program at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. It’s called our Premier Sales Employer Program, where we recognize great companies around the world for sales professionals. We’re producing our next guide. It’s going to come out in May of 2024. A big part of my job is helping companies enroll for that particular designation. It’s one of the most important things we do.
For about a week now, I haven’t done any outreach to companies that should apply for it, companies that have asked me how they can apply for it. We’re going to be talking today about what’s the issues to address, why do sales professionals struggle knowing that they have really important things to do, and then of course, what should they do?
To get us started here, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey and what led you to where you are today? I don’t know if Greg or Antonia, if you want to take that, but let’s get started.
Greg Lee: Thanks for having us. We both come from a background in corporate. Antonia worked at Intel in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I was the director of sales at a music software company in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We kind of know the feeling around what you guys are going through and some of the things that come up. We were burning out in the ‘90s and had some severe health problems and had to reset our lives. We had a couple little kids and we weren’t doing healing at that point. We were both in corporate world. Those health challenges sent us to somebody who we knew who was an energetic healer. I went through a session with her and I’d had these really bad gastrointestinal problems for about six months, and they completely went away with one session.
What I didn’t know and what we didn’t realize at that time yet, and we then studied with her and did her certification program years later, we actually taught her certification program. Since ‘95, we’ve been working with individuals who would come to us with symptomatic stuff. What we realized is it wasn’t just physical things, that over time it was the mental and emotional state, really the energetic spiritual part of people’s lives that were going upside down, that were causing them to not have the success that they wanted, not only in physical realm, but also with their jobs, their relationships. We started to really see that what we did directly affected the results that they would get.
Antonia Van Becker: Whether it was procrastination or self-doubt, or even the big thing, the big banana behind all of it, which is the fear that feeds into all of it, that can create fight and flight and set your system on fire. Or just creep underneath all of it as this silent stopper of our actions or the starter of our negative self-talk around all of these issues, stuff we want to get done. Our business has really changed, but it’s actually really more grown into not just all the physiological stuff, but all of the mindset, people might say, or all of these negative and limiting beliefs that we have, as well as those rollercoaster emotions that end up driving the train and making our decisions.
There’s a lot of research out that shows that those emotional settings underneath it all, sometimes they’re quite far underneath it all if we’re not used to expressing and knowing what our emotions are. Because so many people live from the head up and they don’t really go in and say, “How am I feeling? What is that? Oh my gosh, what are the thousand things that just went through my head, and it somehow ended up that I’m a loser? What is all that stuff that’s going on in there that’s driving the train and making all my decisions for me?” Which goes back to what you were talking about, “Somehow I’m just not doing this.”
Well. It’s that pattern and series of decisions that we make tiny decision at a time all through our day, because we make thousands of decisions every day. That one little emotional setting that says, “I don’t really want to do that because maybe it’s scary,” or maybe it’s whatever it is under there that you’re feeling, which could be many, many different things. That’s what’s driving the train.
Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. Again, on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, the people who listen are typically high-performing sales professionals. You mentioned Intel before. Intel’s actually one of those companies that was on my list to reach out to. They’ve been a partner at the IES for a long time. The people who are listening are successful. We’ve been through a challenging couple of years. Sales has changed dramatically over the last couple years with the advent of AI, of course, coming on board has shifted a lot of the thinking.
I want to mention something, and a lot of the listeners of the Sales Game Changers Podcast know this. I also host a podcast for survivors of Lyme disease, a chronic illness called Lyme disease. There’s a lot of work that says that you need to address childhood trauma before you’re able to heal yourself from a chronic illness like Lyme.
We talk about the past. Do we have to go all the way back to something that happened when we were four? Maybe we didn’t get dessert, or maybe the neighbor yelled at us, or something like that. I’m not minimizing childhood trauma. There’s people who’ve been through horrible, horrible things. But give us some insights. How far do we go back? You talk a lot about how adverse experiences from the past affect the results that we get now. What does that look like for a sales professional in a business setting? It’s a loaded question there. A lot of things to go through, but that’ll take us through a good portion of the podcast, probably.
Greg Lee: One of the things that’s really interesting about people, and especially when you step into a role that might not be the same role as when you’re at home. All of a sudden you have a little bit of a persona going on, and this is very normal for sales professionals because they’re delivering something to people that’s more than just the thing they’re buying. It’s the know, like and trust thing. Because of that, we invoke strategies to make sure that people are going to let us in, that they’re going to like us, that they’re going to trust us. Where do those strategies come from? They do come from those times when we’re invoking, “How do I get what I want when I’m three or four?” Actually, studies show that it happens the most up to one and a half years old, just like pre-verbal, all this stuff of where these little babies are trying to figure out, “How do I get what I want?” To your question, do we have to go back to this time?
We have this intelligence within us that’s more than just what our head thinks of. Our body is constantly experiencing our life and taking that into our tissues in a way so that we can feel what’s going on in our life. It’s this incredible feedback loop that if without it, we’d be clueless of how we feel about stuff. That feedback loop is including everything that we’ve ever done. What I love is that we can ask the body, because we literally talk to bodies, we can ask the bodies, “When did this start?” and it’ll tell us, “Oh, it started at three.”
“Can we just release that stuff from that time?”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
Really, it’s like, who wants to go back and recount traumas or try to figure out what went wrong? Your body knows exactly what went wrong. It’s a matter of allowing it to let go of the energy that it’s holding to make sure that we don’t just pass by the emotions that are so important for us to feel in a deep way so that we can fulfill our destiny in sales jobs, in our family, in our relationship with ourself.
Antonia Van Becker: But what’s so interesting also about that, and how we work with people, we don’t wallow. There’s no wallowing aspect about it. But what is important is that awareness aspect. Because just like history repeats itself in our lives, in our journey, we can often repeat the kind of experience or emotional response that we’ve had, maybe starting when we’re that little and then moving on through life. If we’ve had a pattern where we never got what we wanted or needed, then if we are not able to resolve that at an early time, that same experience can be repeated in a cyclical manner throughout our lives. It’s like, always choosing the bad boy, or always biting off more than you can chew, or whatever, of all of those kind of things.
It’s until we be become aware of why we’re doing that, where that is in our bodies, and heal it, that we tend to continue repeating those patterns. While we don’t wallow in the past, we become aware of the situation so that next time we see it, we can be like, “Aha, I get it.” The beautiful example that affects so many salespeople is how they deal with people with authority. Because if you’re having to make a sales pitch to a team of managers or VPs or whatever it is, and when you were younger, you got yelled at a lot or hit a lot by a male or female authority figure, parent, teacher, whatever it is, that’s going to be something that will create resistance in the future. Until you’re able to heal that so that in your present-day life, you’re able to be like, “Authority figures, no problem.” This is one of the things that can really impact you from those adverse experiences in the past.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get a little bit deep into how you do that. Greg, you mentioned before that you went to see an energy healer. After one session you said your gastro problems were gone. Antonia, you mentioned a couple times in your body. Give us a little more insight into physically what you do and what sales professionals would consider to get rid of those things. Are they just thoughts or are they actually physically resident in various places in your body that you might be stopping, maybe in your chest or wherever it might be? Help us understand exactly what the process is to get rid of those. I’m really interested in this.
Greg Lee: For thousands of years, people have addressed the body’s energetic system. If you look at the traditional Chinese medicine, they’re talking about acupuncture points. What’s interesting is that this system in our body of meridians, in the traditional Chinese methods, they do many things. For example, your stomach meridian services energy to your stomach. It helps the physical organ to feel better. It also governs certain muscles in your body. It’s the organizing factor, and a really interesting thing, it does system. The stomach meridian is governing the system of the stomach and some of the digestion.
It also is connected with specific emotions. Each of the meridians, there’s 12 of them, governs different emotions. As we are in an experience and our mind is experiencing and feeling, and all of our senses are firing, that emotion goes into the body through these meridians, and there it lives. That’s where you go to unravel the emotional stuff, because our head really has all these strategies to not deal with it until we do, until we start to. We literally go to the body and ask it, “Where is this energy about this fear?” We can ask what emotions it is, we can discern what the emotion is, and then go directly to the meridian that holds that. By lightly tracing the meridian in the body, the body says, “I’m so glad you did that. Now I don’t have to hold onto that in relationship to this type of situation that you just talked about.”
Antonia Van Becker: Just to clarify, the meridians, they have physical, energetic location in your body through your body. When those adverse experiences happen, they get congested, they get stagnant. That’s what clearing the energy through that emotion according to that situation, that’s how it clears that congestion and stagnation. All of a sudden you have good, clear energy going to those systems and organs. Because so many people, if they have issues with say, lung meridian, it’s about grief. If you have a lot of grief in your life, like we have seen so many times, children who, and this can affect speakers also with speaking, and salespeople with how they can breathe. But the lung meridian, we’ve seen kids who their parents get divorced and then they get asthma. Two months later they have asthma. That’s because all of the grief that happened when their parents got divorced, split up, they don’t see their dad or mom anymore, tons of grief. Naturally, the lung meridian’s all about grief and it resides there and it congests all of the lungs.
This is what happens with, and we were talking about with the fear, in the bladder meridian, and that can really cause you to go, like we were talking a little before with the fight, flight and freeze, it can cause you to freeze. When you freeze, you get that deer-in-the-headlights kind of thing where all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh my God, I couldn’t remember my mother’s name if I tried right now.” Everything goes out of your head. That’s something that happens when we go to have that important conversation as well with maybe people that, and again, with authority figures, if you go into fight and flight with that, with an authority figure, then it makes it very difficult to think and to act.
Fred Diamond: I have a question for you. Again, on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, we talk a lot about some techniques you could do or tactics you could do to get better. I just did an interview before we did this one with some sales leaders and we talked about preparation, better ways to prepare for the sales call that you may have with the CXO, if you will. Talk about some of the things that you do to help sales professionals get better at their skills. Now, sales is getting harder. AI is playing a larger role now in things. Customers now can go to the internet or social networks, or even AI for that matter, ChatGPT or something like that, and type in, what are the best solutions for accounting software, whatever it might be. It’s getting harder and harder to be a successful sales professional and there’s a lot of potential to be great at sales. The great salespeople are constantly looking for ways to get better.
We’re talking today about ways that you could get better by uncovering some of the reasons why you’re fearful, why you’re not going all the way, why you’re reaching an upper limit. Tell us a little bit about the work that you physically do. Do people have to come to your office, fly out to California? Do you do online? Is it one session? Greg mentioned you went one time with the energy healer and boom, you were cured. A lot of stuff takes maybe a month, two, three, five months. Give us a little bit of an insight into how you would work with a sales professional to uncover some of these blocks that are leading them into fight, flight, freeze.
Greg Lee: It really is a process. Just to go back to the time when I was healed, the physical part was done in one session. The mental psychological part then spun out for a number of years as far as how I integrated that over time. That was very helpful for many things, especially for sales and starting a new business and going into an area where we had never been before as entrepreneurs. That was interesting. That whole area of working with, what is going on? Why am I resisting? Why am I not taking action? When you ask yourself that, sometimes it’s like, it’s a hard ask for your mind, because your mind is actually trying to make it better all the time, until you get so frustrated after four or five times of not doing the thing that then you say, “God, I’m an idiot. Why aren’t I doing this?”
This is what happens with salespeople, is they get to a certain point and they say, “I don’t get it. Why can I do this but I can’t do that?” It’s very frustrating. We need to go past either the anger or the fear of doing it, and we do that by creating some awareness. In our programs, it’s a big part of what we do, is allowing people to really understand how they can tap into the inner wisdom of their body.
Antonia Van Becker: Well, to answer what you were saying, is that we work online all day long. We can do this work online over Zoom. Before, we did it on the phone, we did it on Skype, whatever, Pigeon, Telegram, we’ve done it all over the years. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world or what’s going on with you, because of these beautiful and energetic bodies that we have, we are able to communicate and connect with anyone anywhere in the world. Sometimes people have had a rough upbringing, sometimes these problems are deep. We love to work with people for three to six months in order to really get down and to make huge changes. The transformation is what it’s about. How can you change how you’re showing up, how you’re talking?
I really wanted to address what you were saying about AI. What people want is you. They want you. They don’t want AI. They’re going to buy that product because of the salesperson and that person showing up as they truly are with their amazing gifts, and voice, and talents. It’s not going to be the AI, it’s about being vulnerable and brave and strong enough to put your own unique voice out there in your full strength and courage. That’s what’s going to get the sale. That’s what we love to uncover, getting off all the fear, all the anger, whatever else it is, so that your unique voice can shine through. You can speak to authority, you can speak your truth, and you can be that trusted messenger for whoever you’re representing. Because people, as you know, I’m preaching to the choir, but people respond to that, “I know that she’s telling me the right thing.”
Fred Diamond: We spend a lot of time with sales leaders. They’re looking for ways to make their people better. Can a sales leader or a business leader say, “Hey, Joe, I want you to work with Antonia and Greg. They’re going to help you. I see something they can do.” Or does the person have to want to uncover what might be blocking them, the fear that may be coming up and why it’s rooted in them? Do you know what I’m saying? Like they say, when you want to be hypnotized, you have to want to be hypnotized. Give us a little insight into does it always work, or do you have to come in willingly wanting to understand? Again, I also do the podcast in the Lyme world. I’ve seen a lot of people who are sick for 30 years because they don’t want to let go. Being sick is their identity. Now, in sales, you can’t be fearful because you have to succeed or else you’re going to get fired. You’re not going to be successful at your chosen career. Give us a little bit of insight into that.
Greg Lee: What I love about being able to help people address the things that are holding them back is that it’s simple. Then the evolution that happens from that point on is a matter of following a simple process. We love working with people who have teams because the person can say, “I got this result. It was really easy.” Then the team can follow the process. They can actually, if they want, they can do some self-training. They can come to a session where we can work with the group and they say, “Oh yeah, I relate to that.” Then we actually do the healing in the group. It doesn’t have to be one-on-one. We really believe that we don’t want to be feeding everybody fish. We want to actually teach people how to fish. It’s a simple process. People look at this whole thing and they think, “This sounds complicated. How would I do this?” That’s why we have created programs specifically for businesses so that they can go through that process of awareness and then get the change that they’re looking for.
Antonia Van Becker: Just like you’ve seen people that are holding onto a certain identity because they have a reason, we can help their body realize that and perhaps make a different strategy. But you see it everywhere, is that if somebody is dead set against change, there’s not a lot other people can do. We can talk to their higher self. We can sweet talk their brain. We have a lot of strategies to deal with that. I’d be lying if I said we’re always 100% effective across everything we’ve done for thousands of people. Nope.
Fred Diamond: Before I ask you for your final action steps, this is a fascinating topic to me, procrastination. Let’s address that for a little bit. Everybody listening to today’s show, even if they’re the most successful salesperson in the world, hopefully if you’re listening, send me a note, I’d be happy to meet you, they could do better. I remember in sports I used to be a big basketball fan. I remember I read an article that Larry Bird, who was the best scorer at the time, wanted to score two more points a game, but he was the best scorer in the history of the world at the time.
There’s something that’s stopping us. Again, we talked about fear, but talk about procrastination a little bit. Why does that happen? Why does it get in the way? Give us a tip on what we could do to get past procrastination? That could be something like calling your biggest customer. Salespeople are here. They know who they need to call. We always say, a success in sales is making the next phone call. Why aren’t you picking up the phone today? Why are you doing emails? Why did you go shopping today when you should have made five phone calls?
Greg Lee: One of the most important parts around procrastination is looking at what would it be like if I got the result from doing that thing that I’m not doing? What about that result am I resisting? Is that the way other people are going to look at you? Is it the ability to move forward? Does that procrastination also allow you to not take other actions in your life about relationship stuff, about health stuff for yourself? Is it all in one pot, but it shows up as that one thing in your consciousness?
Antonia Van Becker: What is behind it again, and what Greg’s talking about, is so often is it fear of success, or is it fear of failure? Many times, you’re procrastinating because of one of those fears. We have the bladder meridian is all about fear. In our work, we teach people how to clear it. It is amazing how that can turn the switch from doing it and not doing it.
Fred Diamond: Talk about fear of success. Again, this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. Most of the people listening are successful sales professionals and they want to keep getting more successful. Or we have a lot of people who are new to sales, but they’ve chosen sales because they know that they could be successful, make money, have the type of livelihood that they choose. What does it mean to be a fear of success? How does that represent itself? Give us a little insight into that.
Antonia Van Becker: We have upper limit issues many times. We get to a certain point in success, and then all of a sudden that next number looks really big. It could impact us in many, many different ways. We are continually hitting these upper limit issues, whether that’s it with how much we earn, how much we take home, how much love we have, how much self-care, all of these things. That’s a constant upgrading of our mindset to break through those upper limit issues and why we’re scared of that.
Greg Lee: Any of you who haven’t, you should read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, where he talks about this upper limit, and it is always part of something that’s a deep feeling and it’s not what you think it is. Almost all the time. It also many times has to do with not doing the thing that you’re here to do. As sales professionals, many times we’re not doing the thing that we’re on the planet to do, but being successful at our job is part of that. Sometimes it’s the other things that are not in your job, outside of work, that you’re not going for, that you’re not doing. That hobby that you love so much. You’re not developing your relationship the way that you would. You’re not taking care of your body the way that you might. When you don’t do those things, your brain says, “I can’t have it all the way I want it, because I’m not doing these other things.” These are very fine lines that are hard to discern in our mental way of looking at things. We think that we’d just be able to figure this out. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I just make that call? It’s complicated and we’re complicated.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to tell people, I interviewed Gay Hendricks for the Sales Game Changers Podcast, and I’m a huge fan. If you’re still listening to today’s show or you’re reading the transcript, reach out to me. I’ll give you a free copy of The Big Leap. I have a whole stack of them I bought to give out to people, and I’ve actually read that book out loud to people in my life as well.
We’re finally talking to Antonia Van Becker and Greg Lee. I want to just acknowledge you both. This has been a fascinating conversation. I know that you guys have done amazing work for thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, over the course of your career with the Self Health Institute. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you and we could talk for another four or five hours on these topics.
It’s interesting too because sales professionals who want to be more successful, they’re always looking for an edge. It’s not a hack. There’s no shortcuts to sales success. You need to be a professional persuader to get people to do things that they may not necessarily want to do, or if they want to do, you have to understand sales is a profession, et cetera. What we’re talking about here is understanding where the fear is in your body and where the self-limiting emotions would be and uncovering them and getting past them. You can’t just say, “Okay, boom, I’m going to get past it.” We have all these motivational things in the morning. I say, “You know what? Today is the day that I’m going to call these 30 companies.” Then next thing I know, I’m watching Gilligan’s Island repeats during lunch, and then two hours goes by and all those things that we should be doing. Most of the successful salespeople, they’ll get past it because they have to, they learn some techniques. But working with Greg and Antonia and doing the things that they talked about is definitely going to be helpful.
I usually don’t ask this question, but what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you to learn more about what you do?
Greg Lee: The best way is to go to our website. It’s www.selfhealthinstitute.com. From there we have some tools. One that’s great for salespeople is The Switch. It’s a document that tells you how to prepare in the day when you go to do things that are really important. It’s a three-step process that we teach. As people start to go through our processes, they use that over and over again as they’re kind of, “Okay, now I’m ready. Now I’m going to do it.” That’s a great way. Then you get on our mailing list, which is really important because one of the things that is really transformational is when you are actually in a group that we’re working with doing healing, and you feel it. Then you say, “Wow, this is real.” That’s where the transformation journey really begins.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to acknowledge you both. Why don’t you give us your final thoughts now for people who are listening to today’s podcast, or people who are reading the transcript, give them an action step, something specific that they can do to take their sales career to the next level?
Greg Lee: These sound so simple and they’re so effective once we do it. Our body really pays attention to what we do in our brain, really pays attention to what we do in our body. If we can consciously take a breath when we go to do important actions, and that breath is actually anchored in some of the things that we learn in processing our emotions, a conscious breath is an amazingly powerful thing to do before we pick up the phone to make the call. “Aah,” call.
Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. Our breath is the only thing that we have from the moment we’re born until the day we die. It’s the only constant. I’ve started doing what I call, I think it’s the Navy SEAL square, where you inhale for four seconds, then you hold your breath for four seconds, then you exhale for four seconds, then you hold it for four seconds. I’ve actually started deploying that recently. Antonia Van Becker, why don’t you bring us home?
Antonia Van Becker: When you’re taking that breath, whether it’s before you’re going on stage or picking up the phone, you’re breathing in and you are right here, right now. You’re thinking of present moment awareness, not worrying about the past or fearing the future. You are right in the present moment where the love happens, the healing happens, the knowing happens so that you can project your true spirit right in the moment.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Greg and Antonia for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Great podcast! I love Greg and Antonia. They have a fantastic way of connecting emotional and physical health to success. They do such a great job of marrying energy work with practical advice so that it’s super helpful for anyone wanting to improve both personally and professionally. Great job!