This is part two of Samuel Gbadebo’s interview with Mark Metry about social anxiety. Mark will go deeper on how you can use mindful meditation to fight off anxiety. Discover how social anxiety can hijack your intuition and change the way you think. Listen in so you can discover the power of meditation and why you need to focus on the now. Deal with your anxiety in the second part of this interview.
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Mark Metry On The Power Of Staying In The Present With Mindful Meditation
This is a continuation episode from Mark Metry part two. We have been talking about social anxiety and how it gets in the way of making sales. When it pertains to a sales rep, someone who wants to get into the industry or a sales leader, anyone that’s doing something that they might not have had success with or they might have a little bit of angst going into can develop anxieties around.
In this episode, Mark gets into how to get in front of that, what to actually do so that you can get in front of any situation and make happen whatever you’re trying to make happen. I’m not going to spoil it. I’m going to let you read the rest of our interview. This is part two of a three-part series. We still have one more after this. This is great stuff that can be applicable to anyone. As always, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy this interview.
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You have to create your own world before you step into the world. What an introvert means is that your brain has a natural tendency to focus inside and be more introspective. An introvert’s brain, they are naturally more focused on their internal environment. Whereas extroverts, in the way that their brain is built, are more focused on the external environment. What I find to be helpful is before you even hop on a call or do whatever, you have to sit down by yourself and create your own world.
What that means is, you could do this on a walk, a conversation with a friend, a journal or by writing things down. What you want to do is you have to choose who you are. You do that by identifying what is the most important to you and any pitfalls that you can imagine in your day and how you’re going to approach them. For me, one of the things that I do is I try to focus on like, “What are the most important things to me?”
For example, I was like, “I’m focusing on my podcast and getting these episodes done because I want to help you if I want to grow it. Number two, I have all these meetings with people. I want to make sure that I’m able to be myself in front of them because, for all I know, this could be my last podcast interview ever.” God forbid that happens.
You start off with very few simple basic aims. You have to make sure that these are not just professional. These are also personal. A lot of times, people might journal and say, “I got to call these ten people. I got to make sure I prepare for this meeting.” That’s great and everything, but you also have to address yourself first. That may be like, “I’m worried about this. I have this underlying anxiety about my finances or this family member.”
You have to address who you are on a more personal level and then you can address these external aspects of like, “I got to go to this meeting. I got to close the sale for this company in order to increase my commissions.” Step one is you have to sit down before the day starts and create your own version of the internal world.
When you say address your internal journal and come to a conclusion on what you think about it, what do you mean by address?
Everyone is different. I use a journal. However, for some people, they take a long morning walk or have a long morning drive where they sit there. Rather than letting themselves overthink about all the stresses and anxieties, you sit there and you’re like, “Here are my intentions for the day. Here’s what we’re going to focus on. Here are the most important things. Here are things that I may be nervous about like, ‘I don’t know how this meeting is going to go.'” Simply writing those things down builds more stability in a person’s mind. That’s number one.
Number two is I’m a big fan of managing your biochemistry as long as that doesn’t include drugs or anything that’s bad for you or unhealthy things. I’m a huge fan of making sure that you sleep well at night. You have some form of exercise. You’re eating healthy. Maybe you take some certain supplements. Number three is I have yet to come across a better tool for what I said about establishing your identity and also any performance issues than mindfulness meditation.
[bctt tweet=”You have to create your own world before you step into the world.” username=””]
I’m sure that a lot of us have heard of meditation and maybe we have different beliefs around it. Out of all the science that I have read, mindfulness meditation is probably the best thing that you could do for social anxiety. For example, in 2009, Stanford did a study. What they found out is that a lot of people who have social anxiety also have issues with substance abuse, social isolation, depression and work performance issues. A lot of times, when you boil that down, it comes down to how they think that their image is perceived by other people and that’s social anxiety.
Through a result of these different studies, people can look it up. It’s called the Stanford Philip Golden Experiment. They found that specifically mindfulness meditation is probably the fastest, most sustainable way to stabilize somebody’s brain and to get them to not be socially anxious and for them to choose their own identity rather than stepping out into the world and then letting anyone’s perception of you dictate your identity, which then controls your behavior and how you act. Those two things are huge. There are more things I can mention, but those are great places to start.
You defined social anxiety. Define that again because I want to make sure there’s not a misconception of what social anxiety is. We probably should have started with this. When I heard you say this, I was thinking, “Because you said so many things that a lot of people experienced that I have never even thought to be to have social anxiety, maybe it needs to be defined.” What exactly is social anxiety?
Social anxiety is this fixed perception. It’s a fixed lens. Imagine these glasses. They are social anxiety. When they get put on, whether you have had social anxiety your entire life or you get put in a very socially anxious stressful situation, all of a sudden, it’s almost like this lens gets put on your brain. What this lens does is filter everything you see. In the same way that if you put on sunglasses, you see the world in a darker filter. The same is true with social anxiety.
What this lens is, is that if people perceive you based on who you think you are, then you’re going to somehow be embarrassed, judged or people are going to hate you. You have this false perception of yourself. That false perception of yourself then has to do with how you think other people perceive you as, “You suck. You’re not as great.”
Sometimes it’s also even the opposite. Sometimes this can happen a lot with people who are successful or they have a certain title. A lot of times, it’s leaders, managers and bosses, where a lot of people look up to them in high regard but they themselves look much down on themselves and it creates this hollow feeling where they are not living their life. They are not able to be themselves in front of other people. It runs the gamut and it depends.
In the most basic way, social anxiety is this fixed perception that there is something wrong with who you truly are. Unless you work very hard to hide that, then people are going to find out who you are. They are going to judge you, make fun of you and embarrass you, even though that’s not true. That may have happened once, twice or earlier in your past. What it’s like is it comes from experiencing a socially traumatic event where what happens is your brain is now stretched to this level.
I don’t want to say you start seeing these things in front of you, but you start to experience it. It’s like someone who was in a bad car accident. For example, they may not get in the car anymore or whenever they get into a car, they feel their heartbeat tense up. Any car that drives fast, they feel like they are about to get hit. It’s the same general rough analogy but when it comes to their social circles, it’s how they are perceived by other people.
The worst part about social anxiety and why I decided to write my book about it and dedicate so much of my life to it is that social anxiety is so far encompassing. It’s one of the most serious problems that we have now because it leads to addiction, social isolation, suicide, people not doing the career they want to do, people being stressed out, having low self-esteem and having no motivation. Humans aren’t very social.
If you have what I would call a mental disposition to have some issues around the social aspect of life, unfortunately, that’s going to be a very debilitating condition that most people never even realize that they have. For example, I get people who reach out to me all the time who are 40 or 45, who are like, “I have had this my entire life, but I just didn’t know the language to define it.” The worst part about that is that person thinks it’s them, which is exactly what I thought.
What happens is, let’s say, someone goes through a sales call or sales meeting and their social anxiety acts up. They are like, “Why did I say that? Why didn’t I say this? I probably embarrassed myself.” What begins to happen is unless that person lacks the training and awareness, they go home and they are like, “What is wrong with me? Why am I so stupid? Why can’t I talk to people?”
They go down this moral ladder where they start to take it personally and think it’s their fault and think it’s them when they never make the distinction between, “There’s me, Mark, and me using my conscious mind to communicate, but then there’s the default anxiety brain disposition that I have that sometimes hijacks my mind and makes me act in certain ways.” A lot of times, unless they do that, it causes more issues, problems and stress.
How do people that experienced this not confuse it with intuition? Sometimes you have intuition like, “I bet this is happening right now. I need to make sure I’m doing this, that and the other so that I can get in front of this thing.” If you have social anxiety, you completely misread. I want to believe that intuition is still very real for people that have had it that experienced a traumatic event and they have social anxiety now. They still have an intuition. How do you not confuse it with intuition? How do you keep your intuition sharp even though you have social anxiety?
I’m always trying to figure this out. What sucks is that when I think back to my earlier life, I honestly don’t think that I could use my intuition because it was hijacked. A lot of times too, people with social anxiety can read people’s minds if they are talking with someone. For example, I’m in a meeting with you. Before, if I didn’t deal with my social anxiety, there would be this part in the back of my brain, which is like, “Look at Samuel’s face. He is not smiling. He is giving me a certain look. That probably means that he doesn’t agree with you, he hates you or he does that.”
The way I think about it is social anxiety for many people hijacked their intuition, same with their mind. Social anxiety is the low-buzzing anxiety that’s constantly in the background. Whereas your intuition, that comes up when you’re not with anybody. You’re by yourself. You’re on a walk and it’s very faint. It’s a whisper. One of the things that I have learned is that I have had to work on my intuition because I have realized like, “If you spend most of your life not listening to your intuition because the voices of anxiety were louder, then you have to rebuild that relationship.”
I know for me, the only time when I heard my intuition was when I was eighteen. I was in the middle of being suicidal in the middle of a late-night walk. I don’t want to say I heard a voice but all of a sudden, it’s a feeling of a very small whisper in the back of my mind. That’s the only time in my life where I truly experienced my intuition again. It wasn’t until I started to meditate that I began to tell the difference. The reason why is because there are many different forms of meditation, but this one I’m talking about specifically is mindfulness meditation, where all you do is sit down and you don’t focus on anything.
All you focus on is the sensation of your breath being inhaled through your nose and then going through your body and out of your lungs and being exhaled through your nose and mouth. For people who are trained in meditation, the reason why you focus on your breath is that your breath is the only thing that exists right now. If I think of a thought, it’s already gone. Whereas the only thing that I can truly think about and experience in life is your breath because your breath never ends.
[bctt tweet=”Sit down before the day starts and create your own version of the internal world.” username=””]
If you sit down for 10 to 15 minutes, meditate and try to focus on your breath, all of a sudden, what you’re going to start to realize is that all these thoughts start to come into your brain and get you to focus on something completely different. These thoughts are like, “What is your next meeting? What am I going to do next? Did I respond back to this person? What did that person mean yesterday?” All of a sudden, you’re going to notice all these different thoughts. It’s a never-ending stream.
Once you do that enough, you can start to tell what is your unique thought versus what is a random thought that is being spit out by your anxiety and ego. Through doing this practice, again and again, you start to see this. I know for me, when I started to meditate within the first two weeks of me doing it, it was by far the biggest thing that truly made me question like, “Who do I think I am?” When I get anxious, all these thoughts start telling me, “Mark, you suck. You have no value to add to people. People don’t like you.”
It’s not instant for everyone. For some people, it takes months or years. When you meditate, when you’re sitting down and you’re in silence, you start to be like, “Why did my brain think that? I don’t think that about myself.” You start to build this distinction. What happens is when you’re going throughout the day, whether it’s about your initial question about your intuition or even how you do not listen to anxiety, meditation is by far one of the biggest tools that people can use for that because what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself in this mental simulation for ten minutes a day.
For the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the rest of your day, now your brain has a reference to like, “This isn’t me. This is anxiety.” What you can start to do is you can then start to go throughout your life and make the actual decisions and the things that you want to say to people without this voice of anxiety either telling you what to say or what not to say.
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That was Mark Metry with part two. It gets even better. We’re going to close it out next episode with the last part of our interview, where he goes deep into the four levels of social anxiety. You don’t want to miss that next episode. Make sure you tune in. I know that some of you identified with this. I work with sales reps and sales teams and things like these have come up. To be able to have a resource that’s breaking down what the experience is, how to notice it and what you can do about it is invaluable. Make sure you reach out to Mark Metry if this is something you’re experiencing. You can even reach out to us and we can patch you to him.
There’s another guest I want to talk about that I keep on bringing up because it’s valuable. I’m a part of it and now you need to be a part of it if financial independence is something you care about. This is Chris Larsen. He is someone who walked away from medical device sales. He had a stint in pharma early on in his career. He went to medical device sales and then became a medical device sales leader.
He walked away from a role that was giving him $300,000 a year to throw himself into his lifetime passion of financial investing, more specifically, real estate investing. He knew that making that transition would give him more time with his family, more time to spend with his kids and allow him to fully focus on what he loves doing for other people, which is helping them reach financial freedom.
What I love about the way Chris does is not only does he have this entire organization that helps him reach financial freedom. He decided to write a book that wraps up exactly what he believes, sees and utilizes to make people more successful. That book is called Next-Level Income. If you would like to learn more about his secrets, how he became financially independent and how you can become financially independent as well, then you need to get a copy of this book. You can find it at NextLevelIncome.com/book.
You can learn what he is doing for doctors, medical sales reps, medical sales executives and even myself and why we’re all on board for this amazing organization, what he is doing and how he is changing our lives. Be ready to get your life changed. If financial freedom is something you have ever wanted, thought about it and you’re not there already, then make sure you take a look at this book and look into Chris Larsen.
Another thing that I want to talk to you guys about is, for those of you that want to get into the industry, you need to go to EvolveYourSuccess.com. You have been thinking about getting into the industry. Maybe you have been going to interviews. It’s not happening. Maybe you have been trying to get an interview. You can’t get a single one. Maybe you’re not even sure what you want to do and you’re thinking, “I think I wanted to do medical devices or pharma. I heard about this other one called biotech, MedTech or software.” You’re not sure which decision you want to make.
If it comes to getting into the healthcare sales industry, click on Attain Medical Sales Role and set up some time with us. Let’s have a conversation and see if you’re a good fit for one of our programs that could change your life. The program I’m specifically talking about is called the Medical Sales Career Builder. It changes people’s lives because it gets them into the career that they want to be in. Let’s get some time and talk about how we can help you.
For those of you out there that are medical sales professionals or medical sales leaders, you have been looking at LinkedIn. You have been on the LinkedIn platform. You might have even used it to get your current role or currently using this to try to get a different role. You’re thinking to yourself, “I keep seeing these medical sales reps on here that are creating brands. I keep seeing these people connected to the healthcare industry that have a voice and I’m curious about that. I have heard that you can generate business through the LinkedIn platform, but I don’t know what that is about. What is that about?”
People do not understand the value of being able to get access to people you would not be able to have access to otherwise, provide resources for other people and leverage relationships with people that you wouldn’t have any idea how to get in touch with. This is what this platform is doing. It’s generating business for people, myself and my clients.
If you’re someone that has been curious about it or you want to change your business or do something that’s going to bring you more in regards to sales, your network and your business, let us help you make the same thing happen for you. Go to the LinkedIn Branding tab. Let’s set up some time and have a conversation with someone from our team.
Lastly, for those medical sales professionals out there that are trying to enhance their performance, it’s the same site with the same resources. Click on Improve Sales Performance and let’s have some time to talk. It will be me or one of our sales reps. We can have a nice conversation about what you can do to change your career trajectory and sales performance.
As always, we do our best to bring you guests that bring you insights into this industry, unique ways about how to get in, what happens within and the different touchpoints and relationships that are developed within this industry. Make sure you return for another episode because of part three with Mark Metry. Always check in with us because we’re doing our best to bring you guests that are bringing you this valuable information. Thank you for reading.
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About Mark Metry
Mark Metry is a 24 year old entrepreneur, author, creator, mental health advocate, coach, teacher, keynote speaker, podcast host, and loving human being.
Mark has interviewed over 300+ top leaders around the world from billionaire philanthropists, to neuroscientists, professional athletes, New York times bestselling authors, philosophers, and innovative disrupter’s on his Top 100 Humans 2.0 podcast, which NASDAQ, and Yahoo Finance placed in the “Top 21 Growing Podcasts you must listen to..”
Now, Mark hosts the Social Anxiety Society podcast, and is the bestselling author of Screw Being Shy: Learn How to Manage Social Anxiety and Be Yourself in Front of Anyone!
Mark has been featured in Forbes, TEDx, HuffPost, Mindvalley, Inc and many more. Mark‘s been mentioned alongside Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and can be found speaking at Universities like Rutgers to Nonprofits like Coptic Orphans, to conferences and high schools across the nation.
Mark has spoken alongside Olympian Athletes, New York Times Bestselling authors, and Fortune 500 CEO’s.
Mark’s story has been featured in 3 books, including Ditch the Act by McGraw Hill, Standing O! alongside Billionaires and other mavericks, and We’re All Marketers. Mark has also been a guest on over 250+ podcasts, radio stations, and television.
Additionally, Mark advises startups, and volunteers his time as an advisory board member at an education based nonprofit.
Medical Territory Manager!
I was a Regional Sales Representative for Long-Term Care pharmacy services. I had dreamed of getting into the med sales industry when I went into my career as a nurse, but the pharmacy sales job came to me, and I had just settled. Fortunately, I had a job shakeup that allowed me to determine that now was the time to pursue my original vision.
I absolutely would not have this position without Samuel and the Evolve Your Success community. A lot of people my age would just stop trying, but EYS believed in me.
EYS allowed me to break into the industry in 90-Days after I had been trying on my own for over two years! I had lots of recruiter screenings, and a few interviews with hiring managers, but I was never offered a position.
Before EYS, I didn’t realize I was doing the bare minimum to get hired. I was applying everywhere, hoping to get noticed and waiting. It just wasn’t working! I didn’t know that that was not enough to compete in an industry this sought after, and against people who knew what I didn’t know about the process.
Of course, I had to think hard before making a financial investment that’s reasonably substantial. But when I read the testimonials of real med sales reps on the site and learned that I wasn’t the only one taking a chance on my success, that EYS was sharing that risk also, I knew I had to do it. Though you might be able to cobble together some of the steps of getting a role in med sales from online research on your own, you just can’t know what you don’t know!
The process of going through EYS presents this insider knowledge to the student, as well as giving you a progression of difficulty as you obtain the information, and you begin to master it. Not only that, but they give you access to amazing mentors and instructors, allow you to practice your interview skills, and teach you how to market yourself through social media and your own website! I cannot stress enough that EYS was the factor that made the difference in my successfully landing my dream job! The support, structure, and knowledge gained was invaluable!
I would recommend this course to ANYONE looking to break into medical sales
Thank you so much, EYS! This journey has been life changing and has resulted in the successful culmination of my 18-Year ambition! 
Sports Medicine in Phoenix! I extend so much gratitude to the Evolve Your Success group as I land this role and get ready to pursue my dream job. I am a Physical Therapist who became a little stuck in the profession due to issues with reimbursement and the difficulty for continued growth upwards. I turned to EYS to assist me in learning about the medical sales industry and gain knowledgable mentors who were able to help coach me in this process. I am a strong believer in surrounding yourself with the best and good things will happen. I did work hard, but with the support of my mentors and other colleagues going through a career change, I felt a sense of community and it confirmed my drive to get into this industry. I have already learned so much through the interview process, and feel very blessed to have had the resources this group provided. I have made lifelong friends and I cannot wait to continue to follow others’ journeys to pursue this incredible field. I urge you to give Evolve Your Success a try to gain mentorship, guidance, and support through any career transition.
and am excited to make a difference in patients’ lives as a Pharmaceutical Sales Specialist.
! Though I truly enjoyed working as a physical therapist, I can’t wait to start my career in the sales world as a Clinical Account Executive.
. I owe this opportunity to Samuel, the program, and the incredible mentors at EYS.
