Episode 244: Anthony Iannarino – The Negativity Fast: Transforming Sales and Life through Positivity and Gratitude

Anthony Iannarino  00:03

If you are somebody who creates content, you can get really good attention on LinkedIn. And you can be known for what you want to be known for. You might go to a network event occasionally, but LinkedIn is like the network thing is happening every minute of every day, all the time. And so you don’t have to wait for there to be some sort of event. And if you have anything to say that’s going to be helpful for people, you can just go do your thing there.

Intro  00:29

Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast featuring the top voices in Sales, Marketing, and Business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show! 

Brynne Tillman  00:55

Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I am very excited about my guest today, Anthony Iannarino. I have been following him for over a decade [and have] been fortunate enough to meet in person a couple of times; Once, he treated me to dinner, and believe it or not, that just sticks in my mind forever because he’s a giver and very kind. But that’s not why I absolutely love hanging out with him. He is probably one of the world’s leading sales minds, and he has recently released a new book called “The Negativity Fast” that we’re going to talk about today. I am beyond excited. Anthony, Welcome to making sales social.

 Anthony Iannarino  01:36

It’s good to see you again. We had such a good time when we were together in Vegas. 

Brynne Tillman  01:41

Absolutely. I mean, I love Earhart running a wonderful conference. And I had so much fun learning from you and talking with you and learning all the things, and it’s just a wonderful conference! And what came out of it is this podcast, one of the fabulous things, and I really understand a little bit about the negativity that excites me. And I’m very excited for you to share this with our audience. Before we jump in, into “The Negativity Fast,” I want to ask every client one question: What does making sales social mean to you? 

Anthony Iannarino  02:20

It means that you can communicate with an audience at scale. And I think this is something that people don’t understand when they’re using social. Sometimes, when I watch them, I mean, if you are somebody who creates content, you can get really good attention on LinkedIn. And you can be known for what you want to be known for. I have been selling for a very long time, and you might go to a networking event occasionally, but LinkedIn is like the network thing is happening every minute of every day, all the time.

And so you don’t have to wait for there to be some sort of event. And if you have anything to say that’s going to be helpful for people, you can just go do your thing there. So, I stayed away from it for a little while because I wasn’t sure what my role was going to be there. Like, what should I be doing because I write a blog post every day? But I do think that it’s really probably the best place if you’re going to do social activities anywhere – It’s LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman  03:16

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for that insight. So we’re gonna jump in a little bit. And I’m absolutely fascinated by this negativity fast, and I mean, when we think of fasts, it’s cleansing ourselves, right? It’s cleaning things up, talking about how negative the negativity fast is really going to transform the sales folks that embrace this.

Anthony Iannarino  03:42

Oh, say, everybody, I hope everybody reads this book. And I hope they do this. At one point I was angry, negative, really political. And at some point, I decided that it wasn’t worth it. And I was going to do something about it. And I had a great law professor who was a mentor to me. And one day, he said, “You’re just angry, and you’re negative and you’re upset about politics and all these things. And all you should do is worry about giving your children the life that you want them to have. Because the government’s going to have almost no impact on them at all.” And he said, “You should just let it go.” Now, that’s an easy thing to say. But it’s not an easy thing to do. And I wish I would have taken his advice. But it took me six months before I took his advice. And the first thing I did is I canceled every political thing that I had coming to my house. I stopped watching television news. I haven’t watched it since, Gosh, I don’t know 20 something years. And guess what? I still know what’s going on. 

Because everybody’s going to tell you if something happens, right? So you don’t have to worry about that. And what I did is start just getting rid of things. So getting rid of politics. Getting rid of negative friends, getting rid of sources that are triggers for me. And I decided I would do it for 30 days. And then I did it for another 30 days. And then at the end of 60 days, I felt really good. But I realized I got something wrong. Instead of just getting rid of the negativity, I didn’t put anything positive in. 

So then I started with Stephen Covey, Zig Ziglar, Les Brown, all the people who are just positively positive. I mean, you just see it, and you feel it from them. And that’s all I consumed for the next 30 days. And then I just never stopped. So I just kept going, I would tell you 13 weeks should make you feel a whole lot better. And if you follow some of the practical strategies in the book, it’ll be even better for you.

Brynne Tillman  05:51

I love that, Everyone talks about getting in the right mindset, but truly surrounding yourself. With a positive mindset. It’s not just the right mindset. It’s that positive mindset. It changes the chemistry in your body. 

Anthony Iannarino  06:09

Oh, yeah. 

Brynne Tillman  06:10

Yeah. So talk a little bit about that switch for you. And then when you realized that you had a calling to share this with the world. 

Anthony Iannarino  06:20

I wanted to do this for a long time. Jeb blunt is my best friend. So Jeb and I are really close. We’re writing a book together right now. He brought Shannon from Wiley to outbound to convert me from portfolio to Wiley. And we had a long talk. And I said, I just want to know, will you let me write a book called The negativity fast? Because I believe people need it. And I think it’s going to be super helpful. And she said, “Absolutely, we will love that idea. Let’s do it.” So I got to do that. That’s how that happened for me. I had to find somebody who would let me do what I wanted to do. 

So a lot of people would like me to just keep writing sales books, but I’ve already done five of them. So I feel like I deserve to write another book, that’s not sales. And I did that. And I thought, this is a really good time for us to do this. It’s still tough for people right now, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, something I call the AC DC environment, where you have a hot war in Europe. Now in the Middle East, highest inflation, interest rates, grocery up 20%. Like, I don’t even know if you can buy bacon anymore without a bank or with you like it’s so expensive. And it’s just a hard time for people. And I thought this would be the right thing to do. So I’m thrilled to get to do it.

Brynne Tillman  07:49

So on a high level, talk about the concept. So you Okay, creating more positive energy in your life surrounding yourself around positivity, habits that affect these folks that might be struggling, maybe they had an amazing year, two years ago, a year ago, they’re starting to see their sales drop off. I mean, sales is our audience here. So obviously, this book is for everyone. But I’m always stuck in the sales side for this, but how do you say to them, “Look, create that positive surround yourself with positive and positive things will happen?” I guess talk a little bit about that, let’s leave it at.

Anthony Iannarino  08:37

That’s easier said than done. So when you say something like be more positive? How do you do that? I can give you a couple practical things. While we’re here, if you did this, you would be a lot better. You’d be a lot less negative and a lot more positive. There was a professor in a researcher named Marty Seligman, and he was at Penn when he got there to study psychology, there was only negative psychology. That was it. So you’re broken. So here’s what we can do. 

We can give you pharmaceuticals, or you can get a psychoanalyst, and maybe both right? And at some point, Seligman realized that’s not a way to think about your life. What you should be thinking about is how do we have people flourish, and do well? And why don’t we work on that side of this instead of just that other side? And one of the things that he did, he got pretty popular, and he was on the cover of Time magazine at one time. That’s like, You got to be very, very influential to get on that cover. 

So he found this entrepreneur, and they built this website on the back of the Time magazine article, and what he did was put something there that they were practicing and looking at. It’s called three blessings. And it’s really simple. So if you want to feel better, I’ll tell you the rest of the story in just a minute. Here’s what you have to do at the end of your day today. And for the next two weeks, at least, longer if you can just write down the three things that went well for you today. And why they went well for you. Now, you have to write all three of them down before you go to bed. 

And I would say do it in a journal. And I’ll tell you why you should do it in a journal. Because after you do this for about 21 days, or 29 days, however many days it is, you’re going to look back to that journal and go like a lot of things go really well for me, like, I have a lot of things that are good that happened to me all the time, because you’re focusing on that instead of focusing on the negativity. Now I have to tell you what Seligman says about this. Seligman says, “When you compare the results of the people that do this for two weeks, they will not be stressed, have anxiety, or depression for as long as six months.” He says it’s more powerful than both psycho analysts or pharmaceuticals. 

So this is like the hot top guy of positive psychology. And this is what he believes he believes. And then when I started to think more about this after I wrote the book, and now it’s coming out, why wouldn’t we teach children this in like seventh grade? Like, why wouldn’t we do that? I mean, why wouldn’t you teach these practical strategies about taking care of your mental health in a time where people are really anxious? So now I’m trying to think, do I have to write negativity fast for kids? Yeah, I do. Yeah, I might have to do that next. 

Brynne Tillman  11:56

I love that. You know, and I’m thinking, Well, every night at dinner, I know you have twin girls, I have twin boys. And every night at dinner, we would sit around and we’d say, what was the best thing that happened to you, the worst thing and the nicest thing that you did? But now I’m thinking, why did I say the worst thing? Why didn’t I just stick to the best thing?

Anthony Iannarino  12:16

Yeah. And why focus on that worst thing? 

Brynne Tillman  12:22

I don’t know why I did that. I just thought, Okay, this is the best way to get them to communicate. They knew the game, they were ready. But if I could do it over again, and one thing I did is the worst thing, the best thing and the nicest thing you did? Yeah.

Anthony Iannarino  12:36

Yeah, That’s good. My daughter’s called that. The Rose and the thorn. And so you had to say, This is what my roses are. This is what the thorn is. I didn’t have any thorns. So, but that’s how they did it.

Brynne Tillman  12:50

Interesting. Yeah, I loved the nicest thing you did. Because there were times where they didn’t have something. So the other one would like, help the other one with homework real quick before dinner, because they had to get a nice thing in or like, okay, or I held the door for people, because, you know, in their head, they needed to get the nicest thing in, and now, they’re just nice. So that they’re 21. So anyway, I love that. Okay, so you talk a lot about gratitude. That has a huge impact on the negativity fast. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Anthony Iannarino  13:28

This book is researched. So in the back of the book, there’s hundreds of citations to the claims. And the reason that I did this is because of gratitude. As soon as you start reading the literature about gratitude, you’re like, no possible way, and no possible way, it can’t be true. They will lower your blood pressure, increase your immune system, and it will allow you to get rid of stress, anxiety and depression by itself. It will also do things for you with relationships with other people. I mean, the list just keeps going on and on and on better cognitive functions, better sleep. 

And like everything, everything that you like, how many things does gratitude have to do like gratitudes like the most, like busiest person you’ve ever met? Because this is what it’s doing. And you’re like, you read this and you think all of those things, just from gratitude, and we don’t even teach this to children, or even high school kids like it makes no sense. You would be much happier, you’d feel a lot better. And when you read it, I decided I better cite this because people are gonna go like, no, that’s too many things. It’s too many things for just something as simple as being grateful for the life that you have right now.

Brynne Tillman  14:53

And we’re in a day and age where if you’re living in the United States Let’s be grateful. 

Anthony Iannarino  15:02

Yeah, absolutely. 

Brynne Tillman  15:03

Yeah. I mean, it’s a, we really do have privilege and appreciating that is, is really important. your gratitude for being grateful for your life to the people around you all those things are amazing. But often, you’ve mentioned that we lie to ourselves. Yeah, about things. And does that contradict gratitude? Or what is.

Anthony Iannarino  15:31

No, no, no. I’ll tell you this. So my younger brother, Jake, you probably saw him in the animal. And the hot chick, Rob Schneider movies. He’s a comic, he has to travel everywhere. And he drives, he drives a Cadillac of some kind. It’s red. I know that much. I’ve seen it once. And he was really unhappy with the way people drive. So he was really just really, always miserable on the road because people drive bad. And they have some road rage and things like that. 

So we had these incidents. And then one day, he shared a story with me. Somebody was trying to jump in front of him. And they were sort of swerving around. And he looked over at this guy’s face, and he recognized what was going on. And he thought, This guy has to go to a rest stop, like, immediately, like he’s swerving because he’s under some sort of duress. And I said, “How would you know that he goes?” because sometimes I can’t get to the rest, rest stuff close enough. It’s not. It’s too far away, it’s hard to get there. And so he rolled down the window, and he told the guy like, “Go in front of me go, you can make it, you can make it.”  And then I thought, you don’t know if he needed to get to the restroom or not. 

And he goes, Yeah, but it doesn’t even matter. Because I thought, if he was in the same position that I was in, I would want somebody to let me go. And now he lets everybody go in front of him. Anybody who wants to go in front, like just go in front, it’s fine. He’s not in a hurry. And I thought, That’s amazing, you lied to yourself about this, you have no idea he could have road rage, I have no idea. But it doesn’t matter. And one of the things that when we do something like this is we complain, and I’ll tell you a little bit about that. When you’re complaining, you’re not doing something that’s very healthy for you. It’s also very negative. 

And so we have to be very careful about what we tell ourselves about ourselves. And when we complain about things like these words, people in your life, the people are making me unhappy, I have to tell you, that’s not true. Albert Ellis, who created cognitive behavioral therapy, which is really, really powerful and great. He said, “All you need to know is the ABCs.” There’s an activating event. There’s your belief about what it means. And then there’s the consequences for your actions. And what Jake did was he changed the belief, instead of that person having road rage. 

He said “This person is under some duress, and they need some help getting somewhere so they can be not so let’s say uncomfortable” Is that’s the best word I think. So I think that when you start to think about, they’re making me mad, you’re triggering yourself by what you believe. If you believe they have road rage, you’re gonna be mad at that person. If you think they’re trying to get home to their sick kid with medicine, you’re going to have a very different opinion. Right? And change that belief yourself. And that will keep you from being angry and upset about something that probably has no impact on your life at all.

Brynne Tillman  18:48

Interesting. And essentially, you’re choosing empathy over anger.

Anthony Iannarino  18:52

Right. Choice, Right? 

Brynne Tillman  18:57

Well, you know, and I don’t remember the author, and I tried to Google to find this, but 30 years ago, I had heard a line that just stuck with me for the rest of my life, which is it was contemplative Freedom is the freedom between the time that something happens, and we respond, we have the freedom to decide. We have contemplative freedom, the freedom to decide how we respond to what happened. And that always stuck with me and I feel like this is a.

Anthony Iannarino  19:34

Zack Covey? That’s what Covey said between stimulus and response. There’s a gap for you to decide what you’re going to do.

Brynne Tillman  19:42

So maybe it was used. I’ve Googled contemplative freedom and I can’t find it. And that was the phrase maybe he used it once. I don’t remember. I actually recently did a podcast with Stephen R. Covey. Also the amazing And empathy and humans. Maybe it was because I just couldn’t I have not been able to find it. But it has stuck with my soul, which really you’re talking about. Right? You’re talking about a decision. It’s a choice. We don’t have to be a victim, we can take the negativity fast, right? And turn it around, reframe it, and have it be positive for ourselves.

 Anthony Iannarino  20:25

Absolutely.  Yeah, it can make you feel a lot better when you have some practical strategies. All of these are science backed. And I had one of my editors write down that you’re more likely to give your dog What’s your dog’s name? 

Brynne Tillman  20:41

Ash. 

Anthony Iannarino  20:42

Ash, you are more likely to give ash, his medicines than take your medicines yourself. And she said, “That can’t be true.” And I said, “No, it’s true.” And she said, “I don’t, I don’t believe that’s true.” Can you cite that? And I said, “Well, I spoke to 600 veterinarians two years in a row.” And I know this because they taught me this. And then I cited it for and then I was like, we might as well just cite everything the whole way through. So if you’re curious, you can go look at the science yourself if you want, or you can just trust that I did. And that everything cited if you want to find it, you can.

Brynne Tillman  21:18

So yeah, so when people buy this book, what are they going to, what should they expect?

Anthony Iannarino  21:23

They should expect to enjoy reading the book because it is a little bit playful. So it’s not like, You’ve known me and I know you. I’m known for being a serious person. But I’m a playful person. Like I am not serious about a lot of things. I hold things dearly, but lightly, you know. So the book is good. It’s a good feeling book and it should be right. It’s the negativity fast. So it’s fun.

Brynne Tillman  21:56

I love that. In fact, I’m gonna buy a couple copies for my kids, for sure. Which I’m very excited about. So tell folks where they can get the book. I assume Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all those funds places.

Anthony Iannarino  22:11

Amazon, everybody wants to go to Amazon. And I’ll tell you why because your credit cards are already in there. Right. Yeah. And it’s being dinged all the time. Barnes and Noble would be better for me. So if you like Barnes and Noble and you ordered it from them. That’s a better thing for me right now, because I got a whole bunch of Amazon’s on the preorder so wonderful.

Brynne Tillman  22:38

Well, by the time everyone is listening to this, it will be out.  

Anthony Iannarino  22:42

Yeah. And you can just go get it. Which is so exciting.

Brynne Tillman  22:47

So again, it’s called the negativity fast. Before we close this out, Anthony, is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have?  

Anthony Iannarino  22:57

What  was it like to go up on stage right after I did?

Brynne Tillman  23:00

Ah, so you’re gonna laugh? You did such a great job. You’re gonna you’re gonna laugh? Um, I probably shared it with 40 or 50 people since then. That Nina Reno opened for me.

Anthony Iannarino  23:18

I think you should keep telling him that. So, really the opening band again?

Brynne Tillman  23:23

Yeah, no, that was awesome. You were amazing. I was nervous following you. But I had a really good time. You did. Great. 

Anthony Iannarino  23:31

Thank you. I learned a lot from you. 

Brynne Tillman  23:33

Wow, I appreciate that. Well, I thank you so much. And to all of our listeners you’ve brought great value and when you guys are out and about don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro  23:46

Don’t miss an episode, visit socialsaleslink.com/podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next, register for free resources at LinkedInlibrary.com You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.