I saw the show rate drop under 40%, and my first instinct was to push it downhill. I wanted to scold the team. I wanted to say, do better, set more. Instead, I looked at what was true, and the numbers told a completely different story. Welcome to Calm Under Quota. I'm Steven Werley. I served in the 75th Ranger Regiment. I'm an ultramarathon runner. And for work, I've led and built both marketing and sales teams. I'm also early in my stoicism journey. So in this show, I'm not here to preach. This is an introspective dialogue. It's me practicing out loud. In the moments where leadership gets messy and it's easy to get reactive. Each episode is one real moment, one stoic lens with the actual text and sources to look through, and one small practice I'm running that week. All right, here is the moment this week when inputs break and pressure spikes. What does good leadership look like? How do you respond without sugarcoating anything, without dumping anxiety downward and without grab grabbing at random tactics, just to feel in control. That's what this episode is about. So I was inspecting data on an account I was running in my sales agency. We had an SDR manager in place. So to be honest, I wasn't looking at the numbers as much as I should have been. I noticed that the show rate was under 40% when I did look at the numbers, and I felt it immediately, my heart rate spiked, I got tense. My brain went straight to the worst case scenario. We're going to lose this client. And when I felt that fear, my first instinct was not calm leadership. It was control. I wanted to go scold the team. I wanted to tell them to do a better job and set more deals. I wanted to push. But instead of reacting, I decided to look at what was actually happening. I dove into the numbers, and what I found changed everything. The SDRs had just over a, 4% answer rate. Not conversation rate, answer rate. So it took roughly 200 dials to get a single set. When I saw that, I was like, oh, that's why this whole thing feels heavy, because it wasn't a motivation problem. That's not Try harder. That's not a math problem. That's. That's an inputs problem. Right. And the uncomfortable part is this. My fear was about losing an account. It wasn't about, the team's effort. It was about me trying to protect something. So we made the right move. We reworked the script for what was said to people who booked on their own because we needed to control what we could control. And when we did that, the show rate went up over 80%. But the bigger point for me wasn't the script. It was the moment right before all of that where I wanted to push pressure downhill because I was afraid. And that's the tension. I wanted to scold the team. I wanted to tell them to do a better job and set more deals. But the better move was to listen to the data and make the appropriate moves calmly. This approach of being calm and decision making, I credit to the leaders I had in the military personally. You know, in the, the 75th Ranger Regiment, we had a standard to live up to. And I, I'm sure, you know, some folks have had bad leaders, and I've heard stories of that, but I was blessed to have really good leaders when I was in. And it helped teach me how to operate in a calm way and think through and don't just be reactive. So it's not about saying, you know, I'm afraid, it's, you know, we need urgency. And then the team, what happens to the team is they start managing a leader's emotion instead of fixing the actual constraint. So big thing to just, you know, think about in, in my background as I reflect on, on some of this stuff and why I react the way I do or why I think the way I do. That's one thing that I come back to. So I want to bring this into the stoic lens that helped me name what was happening in me. So I'm going to use my good friend Marcus Aurelius. He has a line of meditations that, I kept coming back to in this. And the older translation reads as, as this, it will but little avail thee to turn thine anger and indignation upon the things themselves that have fallen across unto thee. The modern rendering, I like that it keeps the meaning, but it reads a little bit better is this. And, and this is more of a, my rendering of this, you know, to say so probably not perfect. It won't help to aim your anger at what happened. The event can't feel it, only you can. So that hits me because in, in that moment, my anger wasn't actually solving anything. It was just a way to discharge fear. And what Marcus is basically pointing at is simple. Anger at the situation doesn't move the situation, it changes you. So my translation for leaders is getting angry at the numbers doesn't help. The only useful move is to turn back to what I can actually do right now. Inspect causes, decide clearly and hold standards. And that's the key stoic move for this whole show. Not outcomes don't matter. This is the real world. Of course they matter. Right? But panic and anger are not leadership tools. They're emotional reflexes. What's in my control in that moment, My pace, my tone, my clarity, my decision quality. Whether I look at facts or stories, whether I pressure people or diagnose the system. What's not in my control, what already happened. A prospect's mood, whether a client freaks out. How someone interprets a number before I even speak. So I'm not trying to be emotionally flat. I'm more or less trying to be accurate. The gap is everything. Numbers are bad is a fact. Right? I'm failing and people are letting me down. Is a story. That's the story we tell ourselves. So a lot of leadership damage happens when we act on the story instead of the facts. So that's what this is about. Let's stick to. To that. So I have a second passage here. This is really the part where I wanted to blame the team. And, this is from the Hayes translation of meditation. I'd just like to give credit to the. The translator on this. Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People with rabies are terrified of water, and a child's idea of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you? I'm going to read that one more time. Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People with rabies are terrified of water, and a child's idea of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you? I'm going to tell you. My translation of this is. People don't experience reality cleanly. Their habits and distortions change what they see and how they act. And as a leader, my job isn't to rage at the distortion. It's to understand it and coach the cause. So, yes, reps do miss things. Teams miss things. People behave in ways that make no sense. But most of the time, there's a cause under it. There's a blind spot, a habit, a misunderstanding, a broken input or a system that rewards the wrong behavior. Or like in my scene, a math problem that makes success feel impossible. And I'll say something else that this, passage makes me face. Leaders have distortions too. My distortion under pressure is control. When I'm afraid, I want to tighten things and push. Not because it's wise, necessarily because it makes me feel like I'm just doing something about it. The passage reminds me, don't be shocked that humans are human. So you need to coach the cause. You need to hold the line and not lose your head. We're living in reality, not a book that's written in stoicism. And I think that's really important to think about as we apply stoicism to our real lives. Being, calm doesn't mean pretending that things are okay. Stoicism isn't about ignoring things. Calm just means that you can really admit reality without letting the emotion write the plan. So each episode I, I want to do what I call leader move, which is how you can apply this. So when performance feels off, the leader's job is to separate facts, facts from stories before changing anything. That's it. And in real life, that usually looks like three things. First, you're going to name what's true without adding heat to it. Second, you inspect causes before you talk about solutions. And third, you make one clean decision you can control instead. Instead of 10 reactive changes that make everyone feel whiplash, this is one of those moments where leadership is less about intensity and more about restraint. Restraint from blaming, from thrashing, from sending pressure downhill just because you're holding it. And just so you know, you know, I've done the opposite too. I've made mistakes, I've pushed harder. I picked a story where, you know, there was a way that I, I overcame it. And there's good and bad in reflecting on how you acted in a good way and a negative way. So I just, you know, want to know that this isn't me preaching about how perfectly I handled the situation. And honestly, I think I probably still could have handled it better looking backwards. But it is what it is now. So here's the practice for today for you and it's really simple. It's just a really quick three step check. So before you react to anything, before you send a message to your team, or you know, fix the team, just run this first. The story I'm telling myself is blank. The facts I can prove are blank. The one thing I control is blank. So the story I'm telling myself is the account isn't in a great place. The facts I can prove is, I'm sorry, the facts I can prove are the answer rate is 4%. The we had to make 200 dials to get one set. The show rate is under 40%. Like 38%. The one thing I control is how we approach the conversations with prospects. That's takes a minute, but what it does is it forces you back into reality. And the standard I'm holding is is this. We deal in facts before stories. Even when everyone wants answers fast. That's really important. Facts before stories is important. Anyways, that's it for today. If you want to learn more about what I do, here's a little about Closable AI. The simple version is I help AI enable sales teams so leadership gets clearer and not louder. And I created this out of my own shortcomings as a leader as well my inability to keep clean systems at times. This is what came out of it. It was me fixing all those problems the best that I could. Stoicism is how I lead myself and AI enabling teams is how I reduce noise so we can lead from facts. When the system is messy, reality gets fuzzy. Then leaders start guessing, people feel the pressure and teams thrash. I've lived it. And that's why I care about clean data, clean follow ups and coaching that's grounded in what actually happened, not what someone thinks happened. If you're a decision maker and you want a steadier revenue operation, you can learn more at Closable.AI Appreciate you being here and I will see you next week.