Your reps already know what to do under pressure. This is about why their bodies will not let them.
Eighty-nine percent of B2B sellers told Gartner they were burned out. More than half were already looking for another job. And the sellers who reported the least drag on their energy hit, on average, 1.7 times the quota of the sellers who reported the most.
Gartner was blunt about the usual levers in that 2022 survey of more than 900 sellers. Compensation, recognition and culture work tend to fall short, because they are aimed at motivation, and motivation was never the thing that was missing. Malisa Nguyen would take that a step further. She thinks the problem is being diagnosed in the wrong system entirely.
Nguyen spent eighteen months carrying a number at Highspot and then Torch before a layoff pushed her full time into the practice she had been building on the side. She hit 105 percent in her first full quarter off ramp. She also spent those months watching capable, self-aware reps rewrite the same follow-up email four times.
What follows is her account of what is actually happening inside a rep during a bad quarter, and what she does about it in a room.
From the Diary of Malisa Nguyen
Malisa Nguyen is a Seattle-based speaker and mental performance coach and the founder of MTN Collective LLC.
MTN Collective delivers mental performance and resilience training to sales teams and organizations moving through reorganizations, layoffs and mergers. She worked as an account development representative at Highspot and a sales development representative at Torch between 2024 and 2025, and was promoted to senior ADR within five months. The line she repeats is that:
“inconsistency isn’t a skill problem, it’s a nervous system regulation problem.”
The Rep Rewriting the Same Email for the Fourth Time
Nguyen’s description of a bad quarter starts in the body, not the pipeline. A deal stalls or the pipeline thins, and the body reads that uncertainty as a threat. Cortisol rises. Working memory narrows. The brain, as she describes it, shifts into short-term threat avoidance instead of clear, strategic thinking.
That is the mechanism. The symptoms are more familiar to anyone who has run a forecast call: the rep rewriting the same follow-up four times, the one refreshing the CRM at nine at night just to check, the one bracing for a meeting that has not started yet.
Most sales leaders read those behaviors as a confidence gap, and send the rep to training.
What a skeptical sales director usually misses is that this isn’t a confidence or awareness gap. Most of the reps I work with are already self-aware, already high performers, already doing therapy or mindset work. The pattern persists anyway, because the nervous system has learned (often over years) to associate constant vigilance with safety. It’s not that they don’t know better; it’s that their body doesn’t yet believe it’s safe to downshift.
Left alone, she says, the pattern “costs you your wellbeing, causes burnout, and loses deals because a nervous system in threat-mode makes worse decisions under pressure, not better ones.”
She Was Certified in the Body Before She Ever Carried a Quota
Before Nguyen worked a B2B pipeline, she had trained and certified as a holistic health coach, and she founded MTN Collective in the same year. The sales roles came afterwards. The framework was not bolted onto a sales methodology. The sales methodology arrived second.
FLOW has three parts: Reset, Rewire, Repeat. She built it, she says, to close the gap between knowing what to do under pressure and actually doing it.
That gap is the entire business. The certification is what gives her the vocabulary for what a forecast call does to a body. The eighteen months on quota are what tell her which forecast call.
The Discovery Call Before the Workshop
The move most trainers skip is the one Nguyen runs first. Before a team session she runs a short discovery to understand what the team is actually navigating, so the workshop reflects their reality rather than a template. It sounds procedural. It is the difference between a room that uses the material afterwards and a room that endures ninety minutes.
Inside the session, three things happen. Reps learn real-time regulation tools they can use during a call. They learn short resets to run between meetings. And they work through pattern-interruption exercises aimed at the specific behaviors driving inconsistency.
She has names for the behaviors she sees most: the Rescuer, the Scorekeeper, the Silent Grinner, the Over-Preparer. Each one is a coping mechanism that worked once and now costs a deal, a quota, an evening.
For the rep reading this, the first diagnostic is not a quiz.
You’re tired and your body’s been telling you for weeks. The tension that doesn’t fully release, the fatigue a weekend doesn’t touch. You override it anyway, because stopping doesn’t feel like an option, it feels like a risk. And on the rare afternoon you do sit still, the guilt shows up before the rest does, like you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t be.
When the Org Chart Moves Under a Sales Team
Nguyen’s priority right now is the corporate side, and the timing is not accidental. Gartner’s change research found the average employee absorbing ten planned enterprise changes in a single year, five times the number six years earlier, while the share of employees willing to support those changes had fallen from 74 percent to 38. Gallup’s 2026 workplace report puts daily stress among employees in the United States and Canada at fifty percent, the highest rate of any region in the world.
A reorganization does not simply create uncertainty. It creates it in exactly the population that was already running on empty.
Jessica Denney, then VP of Sales at Advance Local, brought Nguyen in ahead of a company-wide reorganization. Morale was strained, the ground kept moving, and people were struggling to hold focus. Her read afterwards: “The team walked away feeling empowered and, more importantly, back in control.”
Several people asked about one-to-one coaching directly after the session, and the team kept using the tools well past the training itself. That is the pattern Nguyen watches for, and the reason a single team engagement tends to generate individual coaching interest on its own.
The Numbers on Both Sides of the Desk
Her own record is short and specific. She generated more than $1.2 million in influenced pipeline at Highspot and was promoted to senior ADR within five months. At Torch she hit 105 percent to quota in her first full quarter off ramp.
Then, in November 2025, she was laid off.
Being a top performer didn’t protect me. I hit my numbers, and I still got laid off. That was the moment something clicked that no amount of performance ever could have taught me otherwise: real job security was never something an employer was going to hand me. I’d been operating as if performance and safety were the same thing: if I did well enough and stayed indispensable enough, nothing bad could happen. It happened anyway, regardless of merit.
The client numbers are the other half of the argument. One rep delivered 22 meetings in her second month of coaching, converted six of seven qualified opportunities, and closed $33,000 in annual contract value against a $21,000 target, while going from routine twelve-hour days to being off the clock by six. Another closed $38,750 in a single month, five times quota, with thirty pipeline additions against a target of six. A third self-sourced and closed an $18,000 deal with no inherited pipeline and no hand-off.
Behind it sits a certification in holistic health and wellness coaching and years of self-directed study in mental performance and nervous system regulation.
Where Malisa Is Now
Nguyen works from Seattle. She takes one-to-one and group coaching clients, runs team training and workshops for organizations moving through change, and speaks.
She also writes. As a Citrine-certified corporate creator she publishes for a sales audience on LinkedIn, where the posts run the same diagnosis as the coaching: name the pattern, then say plainly what it costs.
Ask what the work is for and she does not describe a program. She describes an outcome: “helping people build performance and resilience that doesn’t collapse the moment one job, team, or company changes.”
The Malisa Nguyen Playbook: Five Rules for Holding Performance Under Pressure
Diagnose the body, not the pipeline. When a capable rep goes inconsistent under quota pressure, check the nervous system before booking another training.
Run discovery before the training. Ask a team what they are actually navigating before you build the session, or you will deliver a template they endure.
Reset between meetings, not quarters. A short regulation practice used inside the working day beats a weekend that was never going to touch it.
Treat the signal as data. The tension that does not release and the fatigue a weekend does not lift are information about capacity, not weakness to override.
Build the second thing early. Momentum you create before you need it is the only security a restructuring cannot revoke.
Malisa Nguyen coaches sales professionals and trains teams in mental performance at malisanguyen.com. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
