Episode 23: Overcoming Fear of Rejection in Business

Transcript

Welcome to meaningful work remarkable life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unseeded lands of the cameras located here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact, and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work, and the meanings we derive from work. Oh, hello party people. We’re gonna talk about fear of rejection on Tinder. Because I’m fun like that.

So there are so many things that I could talk about, where are we going to dive in? Why don’t we dive into 2014, a October to be exact, when I sent a mass email to my list. And the subject line of my email, which was exactly the same as the title of the blog post was dear failure, comma, I suck. This mass email got so many more replies than normal. So many business owners saying, oh my god, Brooke, I thought you were writing directly to me, I thought this was this email was about me. And I’m happy to report that since 2014, which was probably I think, in my experience, the height of aspiration on the internet in 2012 2014. My God made you want to throw up a little in your mouth to look at the propaganda on the internet to look at the unashamedly aspiration that was going on. I am happy to report that 10 years later 2024 We are back into a more normal attitude towards these things. Of course, there’s still aspiration and marketing. Otherwise, you know, it doesn’t. It’s hard to sell something right? You’re either selling it from a place of fear. You’re selling it from you know, you need life insurance, because your family it’s irresponsible otherwise, or you’re selling it from aspiration. So yes, of course there’s still aspiration on the internet. And yes, of course, there are still people that are you know, making outrageous claims and making everything look picture perfect. But thankfully, there’s a hell of a lot more satire now there’s a hell of a lot more comedians, thank you very much, who are taking the piss out of this. And there is a move back towards authenticity. And really, authenticity never goes out of style. Of course, there are people like to put myself in this category, who you know, try hard to accurately represent both sides, you know, reality, the grey, the complex, the slob like nature of our of ourselves. But, you know, back in the day, there were next to no public discussions about failure in business. And whilst it’s really great, fun, and super useful and productive, to colour in the joyful details of your dream business, and to, you know, to really dive into what success looks like, and feels like and get specific, you know, get specific on this, because oftentimes, you know, what we’re dreaming about what we’ve got these little ideas about, or not little ideas, that was a bit belittling, isn’t it? These ideas that we may have as to our aspirational selves, and what we want what we desire are actually much easier and closest closer to us than we give ourselves credit for, you know, and that oftentimes what I do with clients, when we go through this exercise, it’s like, well, why couldn’t you do this? Now, you could totally do this. Now, this does not require much for you to introduce this joyful detail into your life right now into your business right now. The flip side of this, of course, is failure. And what I have also found hugely productive to do with clients is to do just that to look directly into the eyes of failure and ask yourself okay, well, let’s spell it out. In all its a Grevious. Is that the word Grevious? I don’t know. detail. What does failure actually look like? What does rejection actually look like? What is your worst case? Scenario? Yeah, what is you know, the worst thing that could happen? Let’s go into that. Let’s really look fear into the eye. Let’s examine the monsters in your mind, so that we can take some of the power away because of course the moment that you do do that the moment that you Look, you know, those fears in the face, they lose some of their grip on you it is in the denial or the avoidance that things become bigger than they actually are. It’s kind of like anxiety. I didn’t, you know, I’m happy to say I didn’t really suffer from anxiety, I didn’t have much experience of anxiety. You know, I experienced many other things, depression was my depression line go way back. But anxiety, you know, I didn’t really have much experience of and so when I started feeling it in my 30s. I was like, What the hell is this? And I remember talking to a friend about it, who was, you know, more familiar with it? And I’m like, it’s I said, it’s like this unsettled feeling. And, you know, when I kind of turn to examiner look at it and go, you know, what is this feeling that I’m feeling? This, like, there’s nothing at it, you know, there’s nothing in it. There’s no substance to it. And it does, you know, it did. I’m pleased to report I know, this isn’t true for all people that suffer from anxiety. But, you know, I’m pleased to report that when I did look it in the eye, it would dissipate, it would take some of the power away from it. So what we’re talking about today is fear of rejection. And this is a really, really, really common thing. And it’s also super important to look at as business owners, because it will directly stop you from picking up the phone, it will stop you from sending that email, it will stop you from making that LinkedIn connection, it will stop you from sending that pitch, it will stop you from writing that figure in that proposal, or sending that proposal at all. It will cause you to self sabotage, when you do get a fabulous opportunity, it will cause you to overthink things and to squander good fortune. And it will suck your joy. Yeah, fear of rejection will suck your joy. Now I’ve had a fairly intense period of launches. So far this year, I’ve had, you know, a number of kinds of things. From January, I had a series of workshops. I called it the summer series, I was promoting my flagship group programme hustle and heart in February, as well as my two masterminds leverage and audacious. And, you know, therefore, I was doing a lot of selling, I was opening a lot of sales conversations, I was doing a lot of pitching. I was having a lot of you know, activity, having a lot of conversations. And I was getting a lot of rejections because this comes with the territory, right? You have to you must know, that, you know, entering into a sales conversation so that there’s a high likelihood that we’ll end in a no or worse because, you know, God forbid people say no to you know, is a dirty word. We will avoid it at all costs. We will say everything but no. You know, I will push people to say no to me, and they still won’t say it. But of course this comes with the territory. This is just the nature of sales and to take it personally. Is to you know, is to basically sign up for misery. I gotta laugh, right? You gotta love where you’re gonna cry. Of course, you know, you can avoid this. What happens when you avoid it? Well, you sit at your desk and you twiddle your thumbs and you worry and you stink. And you create a shit tonne of stress through inactivity. Now, I’ve done that. And I tell you what I would prefer, I would prefer to be stressed through activity, I would prefer to be stressed through rejection, I would prefer to be stressed through my own efforts, then through my thoughts, because my thoughts will always give me a far harder time than my efforts. And when I go to bed at night, I want to go to bed knowing that I have done everything within my power to you know, get me where I want to go rather than, you know, lying in bed at night. Knowing that I have literally done nothing, and hating myself for it. And you know, maybe that sounds harsh. But maybe, maybe you might be not all nodding along muddling along muddling along with me right now. So we all feel this Throughout we all have this fear of rejection and fear of rejection is not a bad thing. I think we need to get over ourselves with this and reframe it to ourselves. Because what is fear of rejection mean? Fear of rejection means we care about the opinions of other people. And is that a bad thing? I would argue Absolutely not. In fact, if you don’t give a flying toss about the opinions of other people, then you probably associate path. Right? And I don’t know about you, but I would rather be intimately connected and interwoven with the emotions of other people like as if I’ve got a bloody choice.

You know, I feel everything I feel other people’s emotions, I can kind of see it the moment they walk in the room. So fear of rejection is just this, you know, this very human very animalistic thing that we have, because we are social creatures, intimately interwoven and interrelated to each other. And that’s not the part that’s problematic. The part that’s problematic is the part that comes next, which is the stories that we tell about ourselves, we make it mean something, right, we have the event, we have the feeling. And then we have the story of the event. And the feeling that follows. That’s what we have control over in season one of this podcast was all about storytelling. So do go back and check it out, especially the stories we tell about ourselves. And the episode I did on restoring that was, that was fun. I love that. This is something I feel very passionately about. But you know, one of the things that we do in business and one of you know, one of the very common things I do in business coaching is helping clients discern between mountains, mile hills and speed bumps, and most of the time, we turn mole hills and speed bumps into mountains. And so one of my jobs as a business coach is to move those speed bumps out of the way as quickly as possible. Because when you are going after what you want, when you are racing forward, and when I say racing forward, this might be allegedly race, you know, it’s it’s certainly a marathon, not a sprint. When we are going after what we want, we are going to put many speed bumps in our way there’s going to be many molehills and many speed bumps and every speed bump, which is rejection, right, which is oh my god, that person didn’t get back to me, that person still didn’t get back to me, that person ignored my follow up. That person has a weird tone. In their email, that person said that thing and I interpreted it to mean that thing. Then we slow ourselves down. And what we do when we slow ourselves down with the speed bump is we lose our momentum and momentum is one of the most precious things that we’ve got meaningful. Alright, so I want to stop this episode just for two quick minutes to tell you about an awesome free resource that I have for you. It is a free video training short, sharp, filled with insights and value. It’s called The Future of premium group programmes and it’s especially for consultants, coaches, and values based experts. It covers the seven key trends right now. And how these will impact your industry is specially if you sell or want to sell premium group programmes. We also look at how to have the audacity to own your expertise and elevate it and what you need to do to step up and start playing a bigger game. We also cover why your best clients are waiting for you to charge premium fees, and how to go ahead and make it your new reality to access this awesome free video training the future premium group programmes go to hustle and hard.com.au forward slash future or click on the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the episode. So when we’ve got momentum when we are in fact on a roll, we are a roller. We’re making decisions pow pow, pow, then things are easy, like things are not not easy that they are so much easier. It is just like running down a hill right? It is almost like flying the closest thing to flying apart from putting some contraption on your back I guess. When we have these speed bumps and our fear of rejection is constantly throwing these speed bumps and these mole hills in our way. We never ever get momentum and when we get a little bit of momentum we get another speed bump and we get another speed bump we get another speed bump So the ways that we are talking about failure, you know, and there are some brilliant podcasts, I’m going to link to them in the show notes. Elizabeth days podcast about failure, being just one. There are so many failures, and so many people talking about them openly now, and they are so very relatable. I think that this is a damn fine thing, right? Because nobody, nobody gets yeses all the time. And in fact, it would be a terrible thing. If we did, it will be a terrible thing, if you know certain things kind of fell into our lap. Because, wow, I have to kind of stop myself there. I was about to say we didn’t, you know, we didn’t go through the hard work of earning them. But that’s not a belief I want to cultivate. I do not want to cultivate this belief. This, this idea that we need to work hard. We need to work hard, we need to put in the hard yards before we earn the good things. Because I don’t think that’s true. Yeah, I don’t think that’s true. And it’s certainly not a story that I wish to keep telling to myself. But failure is just and rejection is just part of living and life and there are so many mistakes that I have made so many things that have gone so God awfully wrong. And when those things go wrong, you know what I like to tell myself when I can have a little bit of perspective, somehow there’s a little chink in the armour, there’s a little dash of light. A little glimmer is that this is going to be a funny story one day, one day, I’m gonna look back on this, and I’m going to laugh. So this is this is going to lead me neatly into my story, which is the story of a few years back, I can’t remember exactly when. But I was in the middle of a hustle on hot programme launch. And it was not going well by a longshot. And I think from memory, I might have cancelled the launch. So I think from memory that I didn’t I actually just decided, you know, at the 11th hour, probably that it wasn’t going anywhere. So let’s just quietly exit stage left, which is always your prerogative, right, you can always exit stage left if it’s not working. And in fact, I wish more business owners would do that because I God damn, I hear some horror stories on the grapevine of people who’ve gone on to lose immense amounts of money on things where they should not they should have cancelled it, they should not have continued because it made no financial sense. So anyway, in this particular instance, I knew the launch wasn’t going well, things weren’t panning out the way they should have or could have been panning out. And rather than kind of lean in make changes, you know, make decisions do stuff. Instead, I got very, very busy distracting myself from my failure. And what I did is I answered a call on a Facebook group from some random, saying we’re needing some furniture, we’ve got a woman fleeing an abusive relationship with her three children, we need to furnish a new apartment for her that we’re setting her up in. Can anybody help with furniture? So I took this mission on my shoulders, and I filled my car I put a post in a local Facebook group and my community my my immediate, you know, suburbs were incredibly generous. I had a bloody spreadsheet going on. I had to because I had so many people. And I’ve furnished that apartment three times over, I had bloody queen beds, double beds, single beds, like stuff that I couldn’t actually pick up because it was too big. I had three vacuum cleaners I had, you know an immense amount of stuff donated and I filled up our lounge room we’ve got one large lounge one small lounge I filled up our smaller lounge with furniture while my partner was just shaking his head going, What on earth are you doing? And I knew as I was doing it, like I’m not that deluded. I knew as I was doing it that this was one of the strangest strangest procrastination techniques that I’ve done yet. You know, it was it was fear of rejection wrapped up in some kind of altruistic, productive procrastination avoidance technique.

Whatever, that’s

cold. And it was comical. It was kind of comical in a tragic comedy kind of way. At the time. I knew how ridiculous it was while I was doing it, but it didn’t stop me from doing it. You know, it was absolutely something to focus on and pay attention on because I could control that right I could control this and I could feel good about this. At the same time as I was avoiding the overwhelming rejection, that was a launch that wasn’t going as planned. So look, there’s a funny story for you. I told you that. Failures normally come with funny stories. If we can laugh, you know, because it’s better to laugh than cry, right? So, please know, please know that there is absolutely no shame in this. This is exceedingly common. I hear this. So often, every single day, I have conversations that are variations of fear of rejection, we all have this fear of rejection. And this is not a bad thing. This just means that we care about other people, it means we care about the opinions of our peers. And that is not a bad thing. Where it goes amiss is the stories that we create from those feelings. Yeah. And we are not privy Of course, we’re not privy to the full story, we only have a fraction of the story, we can never know what’s going on with the other person, the other organisation, you know, the other influences in that other person or organisations life we don’t, there is so much that we don’t know we only know a tiny, tiny little piece of the puzzle. So I want to strongly strongly encourage you to look your fears in the face. Go straight into the worst case scenario. When you’re feeling anxious when you’re feeling stressed when you’re feeling overwhelmed when you’re feeling rejected or hurt. You know when you’re feeling all the negative emotions that you don’t want to feel rather than avoid it and fill up your lounge room with other people’s furniture for other people’s apartments. Look directly in the eye just by turning and looking at your fears. You will have their intensity and their power over you real quick before you go if this episode has gotten you thinking gotten you excited or has you changing the way that you do business or life would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review. Your Podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values based business owners just like you to find this show which is a fantastic gift to me.