Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (33 page)

Most people aren’t as successful as they might be, simply because their fear is keeping them from taking action.

Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of mistakes, fear of the boss’s temper, fear, fear, fear… it doesn’t matter what scares you: if you’re afraid, you don’t take the risks necessary to make you successful.

Fear is normal and useful. It’s a signal that you need to be careful and think things through. More important, it can create the energy and excitement you need to push yourself to the next level. Here’s how it’s done:

The more you do confront and deal with something that scares you, the less frightening it becomes. For example, psychologists who treat debilitating phobias (such as claustrophobia) expose their patients to what’s frightening them, gradually and with increasing frequency.

The same principle applies in the workplace when you
must
do something that frightens you. For instance, many beginning salespeople who must cold-call to develop opportunities begin with a fear that they’ll be rejected.

Over time, however, the salespeople who become good at cold
calling overcome that fear because they’ve experienced the rejection and realize that it’s no big deal.

Another common workplace situation is a fear of saying no when asked to take on projects, even when those projects are unreasonable. As I explained in “Secret 6. How to Handle Unreasonable Requests,” saying no gets easier the more you do it.

The wonderful thing about increasing your familiarity with a fear is that it’s automatic. As long as you don’t allow fear to paralyze you, you end up dealing with it one way or another, thereby making it less daunting.

It’s a physiological fact that your brain can’t differentiate between emotions that emerge from your imagination and emotions that are produced by events in the outside world.
Emotions are what you’re doing, not what’s being done to you.

Therefore, if you repeatedly imagine something that you fear, while at the same time visualizing yourself as calm, confident, and collected while dealing with that fear, you’re training your mind to act the same way when real-world events take place.

For example, suppose you’re afraid of speaking in public. If you vividly imagine yourself giving a speech that’s articulate and interesting, feeling the emotion that comes from the imagined applause, that confidence will reappear when you’re actually at the lectern.

The frame of a picture creates a boundary that puts the picture into context and tells you what’s important in it. For example, a frame that cuts out all but one person in a group photo changes it from a group photo into a portrait.

The same thing is true with emotions—the “frame” you build around them determines how you experience those emotions.

For example, imagine being trapped, helpless, in a tiny metal box, with only your head, shoulders, and arms sticking out, falling over a cliff. Imagine the feeling of falling faster and faster, and the hard, cold ground coming up at you, faster and faster. Pretty scary, eh?

It’s called a roller coaster. The “reframe” involves understanding that you got on the ride of your own free will, you almost undoubtedly aren’t going to hit the ground, and, most important, you’re having fun!

Or take the common fear of public speaking. Most performing artists feel similar “butterflies” before a performance, but they turn their nervousness into energy just before going onstage. After all, you’re nervous only if you care about your results.

Finally, far from being debilitating, fear is an enabling emotion. As I mentioned previously, fear is a signal that you must take action. It may sound trite, but there’s real truth to the old saying: “Feel the fear, then do it anyway.”

This applies to a vast range of business situations. For example, if a salesperson is afraid to ask for the business, it is a sign that the conversation is getting to the point at which it will be necessary to ask. That’s useful information.

Similarly, if you feel afraid of losing an oxymoronic “secure job,” it’s a sign that the job to which you’re clinging is no longer serving your needs.

I went through that myself when I left the corporate world to become a professional writer. I was terrified but I knew what I wanted. I laid the groundwork and then did what I had to do—quit. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this book!

Every significant business endeavor involves other people, and that means a risk of rejection, because when you put yourself out there, you’re setting yourself up to get turned down.

Because of this, the fear of rejection prevents many people from taking action that could greatly improve their circumstances. This chapter explains not just how to take the sting out of rejection, but how to use it as a means to your larger goals.

Rejection
is an emotionally loaded term that people unwisely use when they fail to achieve a goal that involves another person. Nobody feels “rejected” when they set a goal to, say, run a four-minute mile, but then end up running it in five minutes.

The concept of rejection implies that there’s something personal about the failure, but that’s just an illusion. What’s actually happened is that a goal wasn’t achieved because the two people involved had different rules about life. This is an impersonal fact.

For example, suppose you make a cold call and the other person swears at you and hangs up. Suppose the call starts out good but you
say something the other person thinks is stupid and he or she hangs up on you.

While those outcomes aren’t ideal, they’re only “rejection” because you’ve decided to feel bad about them.

Stuff happens. Often other people are involved. Sometimes you might have done something differently and gotten a different outcome. But in every case, the “rejection” happened because you accidentally violated the other person’s rules. In other words, the sense of being rejected is just a weird trick that your emotions are playing on you.

Every time I’ve pointed out the simple reality in Step 1, somebody has come back with something like, “But I still feel rejected.” Usually in a whiny voice.

People
do
feel rejected, and it’s always for the same reason: they’ve invested their time and energy into creating a negative mental picture of what it means if they don’t achieve a particular goal with a particular person.

So think about it: why do you feel rejected? What’s so important about this event that you’re treating it as something that threatens your opinion of yourself and indeed your own identity?

If you step back from the situation, you’ll find that the sting of rejection comes from your rules about other people.

You feel “rejected” (i.e., bad) because you’re treating your rules as if they’re incredibly important, while discounting the fact that
the other person has rules too, which you can’t possibly understand completely.

To remove the sting of rejection, question those beliefs and, ideally, replace them with better beliefs that inspire confidence rather than fear. Examples:

Sometimes success is just a numbers game. As has been pointed out innumerable times, Reggie Jackson, one of the greatest hitters of all time, also holds the Major League Baseball record for being struck out.

When I wanted to publish my first business book, I sent the proposal to dozens of editors and got plenty of “rejection” letters. Rather than feeling discouraged, I started each day by laying out the letters on the floor and walking on them as if they were stepping-stones.

As I did this, I’d say to myself, “The more rejections I get, the better the deal I’ll get.” Sure enough, the book got picked up by Random House, and its eventual publication launched my professional writing career.

My mother, who had a very successful career in sales, stuck Post-its in her car and on her bathroom mirror with slogans like “REJECTION = MONEY.” She had realized that there is no easy path to long-term success.

Looking at rejection as part of success forces you to focus away from the “rejection” and on the issues that are under your control.

For example, if you’re not getting the investors you need, review
your business plan with an expert or find a better role model to imitate. If your cold calls are consistently falling flat, work on your script. Rather than feeling rejected, try different approaches.