The Obstacle of Rejection
So there you have it. As humans, we are hardwired to fear rejection and avoid conflict. This natural fear is an important guide that helps us maintain harmony in our relationships with others.
But in the rejection-dense environment of professional selling, the fear of rejection acts less like a guide and more like an obstacle. It is a debilitating force that can hold you back from success in conflict-rich situations like prospecting, closing, negotiating, and approaching customers with price increases.
Sales is among the most difficult professions on the planet because to be successful, you must actively seek out rejection. Your job requires you to become a rejection magnet. When you hit the obstacle of rejection, you cannot turn around and go back. You cannot freeze and do nothing. You must find a way to get past it – around, over, under, or through it.
This is why the biggest challenge for sales and service professionals is learning to become immune to the fear of rejection so that when fight or flight kicks in, you quickly regain composure and choose your behavior.
Remember our soldiers. In firefights, soldiers effectively rise above their natural fight-or-flight response and race headlong into dangerous situations that would cause most people to freeze or run, potentially getting other people killed. This is because the military prepares soldiers to fight before sending them into war zones.
Before sending them into combat, the military ran them through endless live-fire drills and mock combat situations. This training conditioned them to control their emotions and become immune to fear in battle. They learned battle rhythm, operational frameworks, and how to respond effectively in firefights. They drilled and drilled until these responses were rote.
For military recruiters, the light bulb comes on when I draw the parallel between how they learned to be immune to the obstacle of fear on the battlefield and how they can apply the same methodology for becoming immune to the fear of rejection. We'll explore this further in the next chapter.
Exercise 3.1 Braver Than You Think
Recall a time when you overcame fear and found success. It could be proposing to someone you love, asking for a raise, facing your fear of horses, or anytime you had to muster up courage to get something done.
Describe the challenge you were facing and why it filled you with dread:
Explain what you did to overcome your fear and meet the challenge head on:
Describe how you felt after rising to the challenge and what made the experience worthwhile:
4 Developing Emotional Self-Control
Imagine that you're sitting at home when suddenly the doorbell rings. You weren't expecting a visitor.
You begin running through a series of images in your mind. Who might be at your door? A door-to-door salesperson, religious group, police, neighbor, politician, delivery, someone who wants to harm you?
With a measure of curiosity and trepidation, you open the door. But it's not any of the things you expected. There, standing before you, is a young, well-groomed Chinese man wearing soccer cleats. With suspicion in your voice you ask, “May I help you?”
Sporting a big grin, he responds, “Yes, I came by to ask if you would take a video of me playing soccer in your backyard.”
Imagine what your reaction might be to such a strange request. Then step into the soccer player's cleats and consider how you might feel standing on a stranger's steps making that same request. Both parties, in this weird moment, would be swept away by a sea of disruptive emotions.
This, by the way, is a true story of how Jia Jiang, an expert in rejection and emotional intelligence, became rejection proof.1 Jiang built immunity to the fear of rejection by intentionally seeking it out.
Each day, he would make these same types of ridiculous requests of total strangers. At times, it was terrifying. He made video recordings of his physical response to rejection and recounted his emotional responses on a public blog. As he faced each new rejection and monitored his response, he became more aware of his emotions and how to control them.
Jiang learned that there is a difference between experiencing emotions and being caught up in them. This self-awareness opened the door to emotional discipline.
Awareness is the act of rising above your emotions and becoming a detached, dispassionate observer. It begins with learning to understand and anticipate the anxiety that comes with price increase conversations.
Through practice, Jia Jiang learned how to control his outward physiology despite the fear he felt. Like a duck, he projected relaxed, confident demeanor above the waterline, even though he was paddling frantically just below the surface.
Developing Obstacle Immunity
An obstacle is defined as something that obstructs or hinders progress – a seemingly insurmountable or difficult problem, or challenge that's in your way. And if we are being honest, that is how most price increase initiatives feel.
I've taken great pains to help you understand why price increases are so unpalatable, with two objectives:
1 I want you to know the underlying reasons why you feel the way you do so that you understand that there is nothing wrong with you. The fear of rejection is natural and human.
2 I want you to become aware of what you really fear, and with this awareness, open the door to helping you develop emotional discipline in the face of rejection.
The most effective way to learn how to conquer obstacles is to encounter them repeatedly until, instead of looking insurmountable, they seem easy. To become more effective with price increase conversations, you must first do the hard work of getting past your fears. I can explain the process, but I cannot do it or understand it for you.
You must make the decision, like I eventually did, that you are tired of wasting time and energy on worry, stress, and anxiety over your fears. It's up to you to decide that you no longer want to feel intimidated, insecure, and inferior when presenting or asking for price increases. You must decide to change.
Becoming Rejection Proof
Jia Jiang had hit rock-bottom. He needed investors to get his business off of the ground but he was terrified of asking for money. His dream of becoming an entrepreneur had been torpedoed by his deep fear of rejection.
Embarrassed, depressed, and desperate, he had an epiphany. His only hope for achieving his dream was to face rejection head-on. This is where Jiang's improbable journey through 100 days of rejection and eventual obstacle immunity began.
Jiang chronicles how he systematically exposed himself to all levels of rejection in his book Rejection Proof. By asking for money, custom doughnuts, temporary jobs, “burger refills” at a hamburger joint, and the chance to play soccer in a stranger's backyard – among dozens of other requests – he got nose-to-nose with emotional obstacles that would make the average human squirm.
Through this progressive exposure to rejection, a mindset shift occurred. As he became immune to his greatest obstacle, he developed an emotional callus that made it harder for rejection to pierce his thickening skin.
Emotional discipline in the face of potential rejection is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger you become. Which is exactly why avoiding price increase conversations makes you weaker.
Data from research studies indicate that when your