Insights··3 min
Focus is not having it all together
On staying in the job through a war at home, a father in remission and a quarter that did not care about either. What I now call mental resilience.
Ghassan Nawfal, Director of Sales, GPOS at Geidea UAE · Updated
Between watching the situation unfold in Lebanon, supporting my dad through his remission, and dealing with the usual sales pressures, life felt pretty overwhelming for a stretch. Here is what I came to realise and wanted to share, because I know I was not the only one carrying something that quarter.
As a sales professional, staying focused is not about pretending everything is okay or shutting out the noise. It is about controlling the noise and learning how to keep moving forward anyway. And sometimes it is that very chaos that fuels you.
You can't control the world around you but you can choose how you navigate through it.
What resilience actually looks like at work
It is not a motivational poster. After twenty years in sales one thing is clear to me: focus is not about having it all together. It is about acknowledging the mess, accepting it, and pushing forward with purpose even when things feel uncertain. That is what I call mental resilience, and it is a skill, which means it can be practised badly and it can be practised well.
- Name the noise. Write down the three things that are actually taking your attention. Two of them usually cannot be fixed today. Say so and park them.
- Shrink the day. On the worst days the target is not the quarter, it is the next call. Make it, then decide about the one after.
- Tell one person. Not the whole team, and not LinkedIn first. One person who will ask you tomorrow how it went.
For anyone going through it now
You are not alone. Sales has a habit of rewarding people who look unbreakable, so we all learn to look it. Most of the best salespeople I know have had a year where the numbers were the easiest part. If you are in that year, the work is to keep navigating, not to keep pretending.