A technical sales engineer at a semiconductor firm approached me asking for help on how to manage stress. During the client interview, it was clear that many things recently weren’t turning out as he had supposed them to, and this was causing him to do more work, and potentially miss his revenue quota.

I led him into relaxed state of alertness and suggested to him a new way of reacting when things didn’t go as expected. When he emerged from trance, he said he felt refreshed, free of the stress that he’d had before, and filled with confidence in his ability to act.

The key to the session was instilling the right attitude to have about mistakes. The right attitude to have when things don’t go as expected is to smile to yourself, say “Oops, that’s not it.” and try something different. Attaching too much importance to failure is paralyzing. In fact, failure is good in that it’s a sign that you’re experimenting with new things to improve the way you work. So - go out, interact with the world, and when things don’t go as planned, say “oops, that’s not it”, and adapt