Earlier in my sales career, I used to get wrecked by failure. I still hate to lose, does anyone not? I’m not talking about dramatic, fall-apart failures. I’m referring more to the ordinary kind, the simple stuff. A good deal that went quiet. A prospect who stopped returning calls. Critical feedback from a manager. Missing quota, not making the leader board. I felt it. I didn’t have a way to mentally separate who I was from what happened in my role as a sales person. These micro-negative feedbacks affected how I showed up in my work, and it wasn’t good. As an added bonus, I’d usually let it downgrade who I became in my other roles too, as a parent, husband, and friend for example. Just over-indexed on reacting emotionally to success and failure.
I didn’t have language for it then. I do now.
After the Knicks completed their comeback from 29 points down in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, Shaquille O’Neal asked Jalen Brunson whether doubt had crept in. I love this answer. Brunson said: “I thought about it. You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario, but you gotta go out there and do something about it.”
Then in the press conference afterward, someone asked what was said in the locker room at halftime. His answer was: “Really wasn’t that much to be said at that point. It was really just we need to chip away. We need to hit singles, get on base and make plays from there.”
I aspire to that mindset . Not fearless or in denial really, he admitted he thought about the worst. But grounded enough that the fear didn’t change his process, which was the only thing he could control.
The Idea Behind It
David Sandler called it I/R Theory — Identity versus Role.
Your Identity is your inherent worth as a person. Your Role is everything external: the calls, the proposals, the wins, the losses. Sandler’s argument was that the two need to stay separate, and that many salespeople’s biggest performance problem isn’t skill or effort. It’s that they let the Role erode the Identity. A lost deal stops being a thing that happened at work and becomes evidence of something about them.
Sandler drew on Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis to explain the mechanics. Berne described three ego states: Parent, Child, and Adult. After a hard loss, many salespeople slide into what Berne called the Child state: reactive, deflated, quietly defensive. The Adult state is objective and grounded, focused on the next useful action rather than the emotional weight of the last one. That’s what I heard in Brunson’s halftime answer. Not bravado. Just process.
Where Brunson Built That
Brunson has a phrase he comes back to: “The magic is in the work.” His parents Rick and Sandra Brunson put it in front of him constantly growing up. He told ESPN it was on the wall, in the mirror when he woke up. The message wasn’t about winning. It was about where to anchor your sense of yourself, your value, in preparation and effort, not outcomes.
Rick Brunson went undrafted out of Temple in 1995 and scratched his way into the NBA before building a coaching career. Sandra played collegiate volleyball and went on to work in corporate law. Neither of them handed Jalen a blueprint for handling failure so much as they modeled what it looks like to keep working when outcomes are uncertain. That’s the thing about the mantra it wasn’t motivational decoration. It was a daily instruction about where to put your identity.
I wonder sometimes how much time I’ve wasted in my early career getting spun up on someone else’s viewpoint or action that I had no control over. When a rookie correspondent at the Finals asked Brunson what goes into a championship-caliber performance, he said: “I think the one thing that stays constant within all that is I’ve always told myself, and been taught by my parents, never be afraid to fail. If you do fail, you’re going to learn anyway.”
That’s very similar to Berne’s Adult ego state, described by someone who may have never read Berne. It’s also what good coaching looks like, translated into one of the highest-pressure environments in professional sports.
What This Costs Sales Teams
Ask a sales manager what happens to us sales folk in the 48 hours after a significant loss. The picture is usually not so great. Follow-up slows down. Call quality drops. There’s also a kind of low-grade withdrawal that’s hard to name but shows up in the pipeline numbers before anyone says anything about it. Funny, wins can be just as destructive, somehow giving us permission to skip the basics like pre-call planning and asking great questions, listening more than talking, and guiding potential customers to self-discovery, instead of pitching because our solution is just “so great you’re going to love it.”
I’ve seen reps whose Identity isn’t stable enough to absorb rejection. They start pulling back from situations that might produce it, usually without recognizing that’s what’s happening. They become deferential, or less-than. Hard qualifying questions get softened. Pricing conversations and senior decision makers get avoided. A discount gets offered before the prospect even pushes, because a “no” feels like too much to absorb right now. It doesn’t show up as a conscious decision. It just shows up, slowly, as smaller deals and longer cycles.
What You Can Do About It
Brunson’s steadiness wasn’t something he arrived at naturally. It was built through daily repetition over many years, with two parents actively working on it. The coaching implication is that the habit of maintaining a healthy I/R separation doesn’t get created from one team meeting or motivational talk. It requires individual open conversations, close in time to the loss, and to the win, when the rep is still feeling it.
Not to rush them past it. To help them locate what happened in the Role and keep the Identity out of the analysis.
Some questions worth considering in those moments: Did you follow your process? What was your mindset heading into interaction? Were you prepared? Did you avoid asking the tough questions? What did you learn that changes how you’d qualify the next one? What would you do differently and at what point in the conversation? What can you do now? How does this get you closer to your goal? How are you, and we better for it?
The losses and wins are allowed to be felt, and can be motivating and informative. One issue, quite prominent in sales is when the hurt migrates somewhere it doesn’t belong, and a rep who was developing starts protecting themselves instead.
After winning the championship and Finals MVP, Brunson said: “Even though, yes, we did win this past year, going forward, that literally means nothing. You have to prove yourself every single day.”
Rick and Sandra Brunson put “the magic is in the work” in front of him every morning until it became the thing he stood on when everything else was uncertain.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to build a sales culture where that sentence not only makes sense but motivates us to commit to our work in a much more powerful way. Where the work itself is the anchor, not the last result.
