Growing up as a kid, I loved watching the wrestling on Sunday mornings. The heroes and villains created powerful images in a young boy’s mind.

I still remember the painful disappointment of discovering that the matches were staged, or choreographed, with a script and story arc.

As an adult, I was even more fascinated to further understand how wrestlers developed their character – either as The Face or The Heel.

The Face is the crowd favourite. The Face is a charismatic hero with a clean-cut profile espousing popular patriotic, moral or ethical values.

The Heel is the villain. The bad guy. The Heel fights dirty and riles the crowd with his antics. He espouses poor values, unleashes vitriol and never follows the rules.

Through this pandemic, it got me thinking about our choice in being The Face or The Heel.

What mask are you wearing in your fight?

Less anxiety is the new superpower.

In a state of anxiety, we fundamentally have four choices in tackling a task, decision or project:

1. Ignore

2. Procrastinate and defer

3. Partially complete

4. Complete

How can we better understand the psychology of execution while surrounded by anxiety?

I’ve spoken before about accepting the uncontrollable aspects of your life while really nailing the controllables.

When life is going your way, you might be able to get away with being disorganized and just wing it. At least for a while anyway.

But it works out, that in isolation, being disorganized just doesn’t cut it. Adding disorder to a high-anxiety environment only makes things worse.

Unsolicited sales communication is on the nose like never before.

Even traditional business development is currently parked.

So what should we do in relation to targeting customers and prospects during the epidemic?

I believe we need to pivot from sales and business development activity to an external communications model.

There are three choices to make regarding your sales and marketing within the current climate.

1. Continue with traditional sales & marketing activities.

2. Do nothing.

3. Pivot to a Communications Model

Let’s look at these three options in turn.

With your teams working virtually, your internal communication has never been so important.

Without the physical collision zone of the office, incidental interaction and face-to-face meetings have been replaced by Zoom meetings and phone calls.

Speaking with business owners each week, so many of them want to discuss how they can manage effectively and efficiently with a virtual workforce. Owners are struggling to find a balance with the frequency, mode and messaging of their communications with employees.

I thought it would be useful to explore the frequency, mode and messaging around internal communications with team members.

A few years ago, I read Dr Russ Harris’ excellent book The Happiness Trap in which he outlines powerful psychological research outlining ACT – Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.

Harris advises us to ‘accept’ our thoughts and feelings while being present, ‘choose’ a valued direction and ‘take’ action.

It turns out in business that we often set goals, avoid taking action and get stuck. We freeze and fail to follow through. ACT helps to navigate a path forward and get unstuck.