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It's 6am at the airport. I finally get stable wifi. I open the dashboard and I don't need a meeting to know what's happening. The quarter is not behind. It's unwinnable on paper. And the second I see it, I feel the thing that gets leaders in trouble. Not sadness, not fear. It's that hot urge to prove I'm in control. That urge is where bad leadership starts. Welcome back to Calm Under Quota. I'm Steven Werley. This is episode three, when you can't win the quarter leading without despair. This is for the leaders who are staring at the math and thinking, if we don't pull off a miracle, I'm going to wear this. And the pressure is not subtle. Board pressure, exec pressure, team pressure. And everyone is waiting to see what you do next. Most leaders do one of two things here. One, they sell a miracle. Or two, they mentally check out. And both are weak. Both create chaos. Today is the third option. You tell the truth about the gap, you protect standards, and you pick the next controllable bets. No drama, no fantasy, no collapse. All right, here's the scene. There's two trips I have back to back. One, I'm on a Disney cruise with my family. I get home next day going to Colorado where I'm prepping for a 50 mile race and I need to get there a week early to adjust to the altitude because I, I live in Pennsylvania where I'm essentially sea level. My availability was choppy this entire time, not fully online, but I'm, you know, not fully offline either. So that already starts to mess with my head. And because even if nothing is on fire, I start to think if this slips, it's going to be my fault. Then I'm at the airport early.

It's you know, like 6: 2:02

00am I finally have a stable connection. So I open the dashboard and we're way behind than the month before. The trigger wasn't one rep. It wasn't one deal. It was the math. It looked like it would take a miracle to catch up. And my first story was brutal. This is slipping because I wasn't fully on top of it and now I'm going to wear it. Then I hear the CEO's sentence the next day and it just sits in my head."We're having a problem and I think you're the guy for the job, but I don't know, how do we fix this..." that sentence, it's not feedback, a test. And the nervous system response is predictable. You want to do something big, something loud, something that looks like leadership. So here's the urge. You want to manufacture urgency. You want to send the hard slack message. You want to tighten the screws. More meetings, more reporting, more pressure, more accountability. And it feels good for about 10 minutes. Because it's not strategy, it's relief. It's you trying to get the pressure out of your body. And the easiest way to do that is to dump it downhill. Here's what I'll own. I didn't handle this one perfectly. I put pressure on the team because I was carrying pressure from above, and I wanted to prove I could save it. That wasn't discipline at all. That was pure ego and identity. I didn't want to be the leader who took two trips and came back to a broken month. And if you don't admit that part, you will keep repeating it. Here's the tension I wanted to manufacture urgency to prove I could fix it. But the better move was to tell the truth about the gap and choose the next controllable moves calmly. That's the entire episode. When the quarter is unwinnable. You don't get to lead with emotion. You lead with facts. So here's the leadership question. How do you show up when the quarter is unwinnable? How do you tell the truth about the number without crushing morale? How do you protect standards without turning into a tyrant? How do you keep the board informed without selling fantasies you cannot deliver? And how do you keep your own anxiety from becoming the team's operating system? The stoic lens for this episode is Seneca. This, is from letter 47, and it's the Robin Campbell translation. This letter is not a motivational quote. It's a warning. It's Seneca calling out what happens when people with power start acting like they've been injured, and then they use that injury as an excuse to strike it downward. It's exactly what I did. Here's an excerpt, and then I'm going to tell you how to apply it."We assume the mental attitudes of tyrants, for they too forget their own strength and helplessness of others and grow white hot with fury as if they had received an injury, when all the time they are quite immune from any such danger through the sheer exaltedness of their position. Nor indeed are they unaware of this. But it does not stop them seizing an opportunity of finding fault with an inferior and maltreating him for it. They receive injury by way of excuse to do one themselves." Here's why this matters for a sales leader. When the quarter is slipping, you will feel injured. Not physically, but status wise. Identity wise. Potentially career wise. Like the CEO line is questioning whether you are still the guy. Like I got asked. And the danger is you start looking for a place to put that feeling. So you start scanning for fault. A rep, a, manager, a process, a marketing team. Or maybe a lack of urgency. And yeah, look, sometimes there are real issues. I'm not denying that. But when you're dysregulated, you don't diagnose, you prosecute, you don't coach, you punish. You don't create clarity, you create fear. And fear does something specific. In sales, fear corrupts truth. Reps start telling you when what you want to hear pipeline becomes fiction. Forecast calls become performance. People hide problems instead of surfacing them early. Then leadership gets louder. Team gets more evasive. Now you're not managing sales. You're managing a hallucination. And that's how teams die. Not because they missed a quarter. Every single team that been in existence for a while has missed a quarter or they set really low standards. It's because they lost truth. That's how they die. So here's the checkpoint from Seneca. When you feel that white hot urge rise, ask am I about to lead or am I about to vent? Because if you're about to vent, it will come out as urgency and it will cost you more than it helps. Let me be really clear about what this does and does not mean. This does mean. You tell the truth about the number. You narrow focus to controllables. You protect standards. You finish the quarter cleanly. This does not mean you check out because externals don't matter. You lower standards because it lost anyways. You hide behind philosophy to avoid hard conversations. Stoicism is not passivity. Stoicism is staying rational when your identity is under threat. Now I'm going to give you the tactical advice. I call it the no miracle reset. This is what you run when the quarter is unwinnable on paper. Not to surrender, to stop lying, to stop thrashing and to protect the team. Here's the script for the exec team. You just say it like this. We are not on track to hit the target. Here's the factual forecast. Here is the gap. Here are the assumptions. Here are the Deals that would have to close for it to be winnable. And here's the probability based on our historical conversion. Then, this line. We are not going to confuse hope with a plan. That sentence alone separates leaders from performers. Next, you need to freeze chaos. You say this week we do not launch new strategies unless they do one of two things. One, increase contact rate. Two, reduce cycle time. That's it. Because most leaders, when they panic, do the worst possible thing. They introduce uncertainty, new rules, new initiatives, new reporting, new talk tracks. Now the team is not only behind, they're confused. Then you have to lock some standards. So pick three non negotiables. Here are the three that I like. Forecast honesty, follow up discipline and pipeline hygiene. Meaning every real deal has a next step, a date and an owner. Standards are not for winning quarters. Standards are for protecting trust when the quarter is losing. You choose one to three bets that you can show signals inside seven days. Not ten things, just one to three. So some examples of that would be, For bet one, it could be deal desk. The top ten deals. One. Next step. One date, one owner. If there's no next step, it's not a deal. Your bet two could be stage definitions and exit criteria. If it's not real, it doesn't move. Bet 3 could be fix 2 talk track leaks. The top objection that kills momentum in these conversations. And the moment you lose control of the call, write it down, rehearse it, stop winging it. Then here's the exact team script for you to say. I'm going to tell you the truth. The quarter is not winnable on paper. From where we are today. We are not going to pretend otherwise. That does not mean we are giving up. It means we are finishing the quarter cleanly. Here are three things we control this week. Here are the three standards we are not relaxing. Here are the bets we are placing. Winning this week looks like clean execution, clean data and clean leadership. Then say this and mean it. I will not use pressure as permission to be sharp with you. If you feel chaos coming from me, call it out. That line rebuilds trust fast because it proves you know the real enemy is emotional leakage. Now if you're in an organization where there's a board, here's your script for that. We are not on track to hit the quarter target. Here is the factual forecast. Here is why. Here is what is controllable in the next seven days. Here is the plan to protect standards and reduce thrash. Here is the earliest signal we will track. And here is what we are not doing. We are not demanding miracles. We are not destabilizing the team with panic. We are not corrupting the forecast with fear. And, close with this. Our job is to finish the quarter cleanly and set the next quarter up to be winnable. That is leadership. And I was listening to Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic podcast and he posted a clip of him talking to super bowl, I'm sorry, him talking to the Cleveland Browns about control. And it plays directly in. And. And just for example, so you can just get an idea of what he was doing. He was saying, you cannot control how the other team plays. You can only control how you perform. You cannot control the weather. You can only control how you perform. You cannot control if your teammate drops a pass. You can only control how you perform. You cannot control if a coach is treating you unfairly. You only control how you perform. Just to give you an idea, I think it just fits in perfectly here as I think it fits in with anything with Stoicism. I just found it really insightful and I wanted to call that out. Now I want to talk about rep one to one coaching and all of this because this is where leaders either get soft or they get cruel. Do neither be direct and useful. So here's your rep script. I'm not here to punish you. I'm here to get you clear. Your job this week is not to save the quarter. Your job is to execute the next controllable moves. Let's talk about your top three deals For each deal what is the next step? Who owns it, and what date is it happening? If you can't answer that, it's not a deal. Then ask, what are you avoiding? Because the quarter feels lost. When they answer, you say, good, that's the work. Then ask, what standards are you tempted to relax right now? Follow up, prep, discovery, pipeline hygiene. When they answer, you say, that's the standard you protect this week. And then you close. Send me your next three steps by end of day. Three next steps with dates, not a story. Or, or how you feel about the deal. That, right there is calm leadership and provides clarity. So now here's your practice. Before you speak to anyone, take seven minutes to evaluate the following facts. Forecast gap,

main driver. Control: 14:20

You need to figure out three things you control in seven days. Standards. 3. You refuse to relax and then you need a tyrant checkpoint? Ask yourself, where am I tempted to use pressure as permission? And one calm next move. Pick one action that reduces chaos today. Then write your first sentence out loud. Here's what's true. Here's what we control. Here's what we're doing next. If you cannot say that calmly, don't call the meeting yet. So here's the standard. We say it and we live it. We don't beg fortune for miracles. We choose the next controllable move and execute it well. Again, we don't beg fortune for miracles. We choose the next controllable move and execute it well. When the quarter is unwinnable, your job is not to perform confidence and it's not to punish people. So you feel in control like I did. Your job is to tell the truth, protect standards, and choose the next controllable bets. That's how you finish the quarter cleanly and that's how you stop dragging leadership damage into the next quarter. If you want help building a system that keeps your team sharp when emotions get loud, that's what we do at Closable.AI. We help you AI enable the workflows that keep execution clean, pipeline hygiene, follow up, forecasting, deal execution, and leadership cadence. If you need that, go to Closable.AI and book a call. And if you know a leader who is trying to save the quarter with panic, send them this episode or video depending where you're watching. They don't need louder urgency, they need a cleaner next move. Hope this episode is helpful either now or in the future when the inevitable down quarter happens. Keep this in your back pocket as a helpful sidekick. If you're listening on the podcast, you can Also watch on YouTube if you prefer, on my channel named Steven Werley. On the other side. If you you're on YouTube and you prefer to listen on the go search for calm under quota wherever you listen to your podcasts and subscribe there. Thanks so much. Have a prosperous and calm week.