HOW I OVERCAME MY FEAR OF REJECTION | Kevin Ray Ward

To this first episode of Kevin at 11. So for years I did a, I did a daily stream on YouTube called Kevin A7 and I was living in California. 7am Worked great. Pacific time for everybody else. I'm in Utah, I'm on mountain time, so 11am seem better. Mountain time, 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern. And so that's where we're at. We've had some technical difficulties getting, setting up with streaming software and the way I was planning to do it has not been able to work. So I'm trying to get this. And there we go. So I got some people live. Do I have some people joining me live here? Because I can't tell and I've gotta figure this out. So let's just put it this way. This is my first time to do this in about two years to go live and I am trying to figure it out. So this may be kind of a boarded attempt, but we're gonna see how it works. Got some people live. Hey, it's Kevin Ward, founder of yes Masters Real Estate Success training, the author of the number one best selling book Book of Yes. And soon to come out more yes, More Success, the sequel. This book is going to be amazing. It's gonna be awesome. We're just finishing, I've got two chapters that are unfinished on it and then we're gonna be ready to rock and roll here. I'm trying to get to where I can see my chat. Let me see why I can't see my chat and it's not letting me see it. Okay, let's try this again. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna rock and roll here. One way or another, this is gonna work. Okay, I'm getting people joining me now and it's not, this is not set up the way I wanted to be set up. But the show must go on, right? So we're gonna go on with it. So I, one of the biggest things that I deal with in coaching real estate agents is a sphere of rejection. And for me it was absolutely the, that was probably the single toughest thing that I had to deal with as a real estate agent was I had to deal with fear of rejection. It's like, how do I overcome the fear of rejection? So today I'm going to talk about how I overcame my fear of rejection as a new real estate agent. And I'm going to tell you this. I don't think for most people it's like you're going to always be like, I don't really enjoy rejection. I don't enjoy it at all. But what I'm going to talk to you today is about how to reframe it and how to do some things that make the conversations. When you're engaging in a conversation and you're wanting something, and primarily in this, in the real estate context, we're prospecting, right? We're prospecting, we're following up on a lead. And wherever the lead came from, wherever the prospect came from, I am now in this conversation of like, how do I deal with my fear of making the phone call? And what if they're, you know, what if they're rude? What if they throw an objection on, can't handle? What if they say no to me? And all that. So all this stuff goes in our head. And so here are the four things that I did that helped me. So number one is I did it anyway. Okay, so here's the first way you overcome the fear of rejection is you just face the fear and take action in spite of your fear. You're not ever going to get to a point where you're so confident and so bulletproof and so tough that you don't feel like, oh, no, I don't want people to hang up on me. I don't want them to say no to me. So there's going to always be that sense of, like, uncertainty about how the conversations are going to go. But when you take action anyway, what you find out is like, oh, that wasn't so bad. And the pain of rejection, if you're going to feel it that way, it's like, ah, they were rude, they hung up. Can last for as long as you let it last. And you get to decide. You get to decide. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna just sit here and feel, sorry, rejection pit. I'm going to just go like, okay, that just happened. Is it going to affect my life in the future? No, not going to affect my life in the future. Did it hurt me? Nope, didn't hurt me. Was it comfortable? No, it wasn't comfortable. But the reality was if I didn't talk to that person, if I didn't take the action and call them, there was zero chance of getting a yes. And the reason I'm prospecting, the reason I'm calling, the reason I'm doing my lead follow up is because I want a yes. The only way to get to a yes is to actually engage somebody in a conversation. So your chances. It was Wayne Gretzky said you miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. Okay, so here's what I figured out. My chances of getting a listing appointment and getting a listing went up dramatically if I actually talked to a seller, if I actually talked to somebody. So if I'm. If I'm uncomfortable doing it and I feel this fear, I'm like, okay, well, I got to do it anyway. And on the other side of the fear, I'm like, oh, it wasn't so bad. Tell us. Do it again. Oh, that one was. That was a nasty note. Okay. Did it hurt me? Nope. I'm still good. I'm still selling my license. They haven't started posting billboards about me. Cold. Calling people or calling people and, you know, whatever. So here's a book that helped me big time. Now, this is not a new book. This book's been around forever. It's called the Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz. Great book. And when I read the book first time in 2002, and I know it's 2002 because I. I write in here the date I wrote when I read each chapter. My first time I read it was in 2002. So there's a chapter in it talking about how to overcome fear and overcoming fear of anything. Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of whatever. And here's what he says. Action conquers fear. Do the thing that you fear, and the death of fear is certain. Do the thing that you fear, and the death of fear is certain. So if I do it and just lean into it and do it anyway, even though I'm afraid, even though I'm uncomfortable, even though I may not feel ready, do it anyway. And this comes through all of the books on success, the psychology of success is whenever you make a decision, you're going to need to do something. Do it. Do it immediately, whether you feel ready or not. Do it. Because the only way you're going to get ready to do it is by actually doing it. There's never going to come a moment where it's like, okay, I am absolutely 100% confident and comfortable doing something I've never done before. It's never going to happen. You're not going to rehearse jumping out of an airplane, going skydiving enough that when you first get up there and you're looking out of an open plane door at 10,000ft, you're never going to look down there and go, like, oh, let's go. I'm ready. I'm totally comfortable with this. This is totally cool. You're going to be nervous. There's going to be a sense of fear. Because your fear is an emotion that's saying, you know, this could be dangerous. And of course the reality is there's a rejection. And when it comes to prospecting or lead follow up for business, there's not really any. There's no danger. Right. So it's like, why am I, what am I afraid of? I mean, fear was designed as an emotion to, to let you know when there's a saber tooth tiger standing outside of your cave entrance that there was danger, there was something to actually be afraid of. But here it's like, oh, okay, so I'm just going to take that fear and I'm just going to kind of turn it down and just go like, okay, I'm good. Okay. So number one is take action in spite of the fear. Number two, the second key. Here's what. And this was the one. This is the most powerful one for me. Okay. This is my favorite. Yeah, it's probably my favorite one. It's the most powerful. And that is. I reframed the concept of rejection and said, it's not rejection, it's just an experiment. It's impossible for me to get rejected. It's impossible for me to fail in this conversation because it's just an experiment. And I call it the Edison approach. So if you're taking notes on this, number one, face your fear, do it anyway. Number two is reframe it from a, a, a chance of rejection to just an experiment. And I call it the Edison approach because this is how Thomas Edison became one of the greatest inventors of all time. And that is, he took a vision of like, this is what I want, what do I want? And he wanted to invent and create a light bulb that was sustainable, that could burn for long periods of time, which became the incandescent light bulb. And the story is that he tried over 10,000 different ways to make the light bulb work and they all failed. And he was asked one time and they were being interviewed and they said, don't you ever get tired of failure? You've had over 10,000 failures. Don't you ever get tired of failures? He said, I've not failed. I've only discovered 10,000 ways that didn't work. It was just an experiment. I'm not failing, I'm just experimenting. I'm just testing it out. And so I did this even when I was dating. After my last divorce, I was in the dating game and I just was like, I would be nervous about asking a girl that. And I'm like, wait a second, I'm not. There's no possibility of rejection here. If I don't ask this lady out, including the lady that is not my wife. I was, I was nervous, right? And I was like, this is not. There's no possibility of rejection because if I don't ask her out, my odds of getting to take her out are zero. So I gotta ask. It's just an experiment. If she says no, it's just an experiment. I didn't fail, I wasn't rejected. It was just like, she's not the one, right? So I just approached it and said, you know what? All this is an experiment. So what if every time that you call an expired listing or a for sale by owner, you followed up on somebody or somebody that came to an open house or whatever, and you ask them, hey, do you have a fabulous real estate agent that you're working with? Let me out. Let me be your go to agent, right? Asking for is. There's like, oh, no, what if they reject me? They're not going to reject you. Even if they say no to you, it's not rejection. It's just an experiment. That's it. So I just reframed it from the possibility of rejection to just, it's just an experiment. It's just I'm finding out if this is. There's somebody I'm supposed to work with or not. And if they say no, all that tells me is they're not my guy, that's not my guy, that's not my gal, that's not my couple, that's not my clients. So it's just an experiment. That's all. The worst thing that can happen is they say no. Is that rejection? Not unless you take it personally. Don't take it personally. It wasn't personal. They're just saying they already have an agent or you're they, for whatever reason, they don't, you know, they're not ready or they just don't want to work with you. Okay, cool. Perfectly fine. I accept that. Let's go number three. Here's the third thing I did to overcome my fear of rejection. And as I made it, I made it fun, okay? And I was. I forgot. I forgot to bring my prop in here. But I had a prop and I forgot it. So here'll be what I did. I built my real estate business prospecting for salvationers and expireds. Which meant I was facing no's all day, every day. But ever. 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 no's, I would get a yes and they would say yes. We'd set an appointment, go meet them, take the listing, sell it, make money. And so the no's were still uncomfortable. They were like, I hate this. So what do I do? How do I get over this idea of the pain of them saying no? So I got a roll of toilet paper. I don't have my roll of toilet paper in here. And a Sharpie marker. Okay, so prospecting. And anytime I would get a no, I would, I would just take that person's name, call them. They said, no, we're not interested, and hung up. Okay, cool. So I would take my roll of toilet paper and I'd take a square of the toilet paper and I'm using, I'm going to use a post it note, which you can't use a post it note for what I'm going to teach you right now. But I would take it or a square of toilet paper and I would just write their name on it. Bob. Okay. And I would write their name on it with a Sharpie marker. And I would just take that square toilet paper and I just set it over the side of my desk in the corner and I would just sit there and every time I got a no, I would take a square of toilet paper, tear it off, write their name on it, set over there. And then when I got down with my hour of prospecting and I would prospect three hours a day and I would, I would start at 8:30 or 9:00am so let's just say I started at 9:00am Prospect from 9 to 9:50 and then 9:50 I would take a 10 minute break and then prospect from 10 to 10:50 and so forth. And every time I take a break, then you go, you know I love coffee. So I'd go get some more coffee and go to the restroom and then come back and prospect more. So what I would do is I added this to it is I would, when I went to the restroom, I would take my little stack of squares of all the no's that I'd gotten in that hour and I would take them and I would, I know this is a little gross, but it was, it was great for me is I would just take the squares of toilet paper and I would drop them in the toilet, I would pee on them and then I would flush them down the toilet and I would just as I did it, I just remember, I go like later. And that was how I did it. So I would. And what it did is it made, it made the nose not as painful because like, okay, you're gonna tell me no, I'm just gonna flush you right now. And it just, it helped me disconnect myself emotionally from this pain of feeling rejected. Because the reality was I wasn't being rejected, right? It was just an experiment. That's it. Just an experiment. And I just got comfortable doing experiments. And then the fourth thing, the fourth thing was I quantified it, okay? And that is I quantified the value of every person that told me no. Now, I'm not going to call it rejection anymore because it's not rejection. It's just an experiment. So every person that told me no, every no that I got was just somebody I wasn't going to get to work with. But if I got enough no's, I knew I was going to get a yes. If I went through and if I had to go. Let's just, so let's just play this out. Let's just say that your average sell price in your market is $350,000. Okay? So $350,000, 3% of that is roughly $10,000, right? So let's just say your average commission checks $10,000. So the question is, how many no's do I have to take to get one yes? And that one yes is a listing that I sell. That one yes is worth $10,000 to me. So how many no's do I have to take? And how much is each of those no's worth for me if I'm willing to take enough of them? And here's what I calculated. I actually was tracking my numbers back then. I was tracking it. So I knew exactly how many no's I had to take to get a yes. In other words, how many quality conversations do I, do I have to have before I got a listing? And then if I could calculate that, then I would be able to quantify how much a no was worth. So let's just say that your average commission checks ten thousand dollars. And let's say you have to talk to one hundred people, you have to take one no's to get one yes. So every one hundred and one conversations that I have, I'm going to get a ten thousand dollar paycheck. So I just took my calculator and I just said, okay, what is $10,000 divided by 100? Okay, $10,000 divided 100. And what is it? Okay? And the answer is 100 bucks. Okay, $100 times 100 no's is $10,000. So what I figured out was every no was worth for me. And when I first did this. The very first time I did this, my average sales price was 121,000. This was back in 1999 when I started quantifying this. Every no was worth $26 for me. So when I was prospecting, I just. Like every no I. Every no I get, I just made 26 bucks. I just got to take enough of them that I get to the next yes. And so every no that I got was leading me to the yes. And I took a $20 bill. I remember doing this. Took a $20 bill and I pasted it on the wall. And then I was like, I'm in a real estate office. There's lots of agents here. Some of them are broke. They're going to take my $20 bill, so I better not do this. So I took my $20 bill, put it in the copy machine and blew it up. Made it bigger. And then I took. And so I had a photocopy of a $20 bill, and then I wrote on it, every no equals 20 bucks. Okay, that was actually 26 bucks, but I just, I did it right. It's at least $20 bill. So every time I get a no, it's worth 20 bucks. Now, if in today's market, if your average Commission check is $10,000 and it takes you 100 no's to get to one yes, every no is worth a hundred dollars. You're making $100 per no. Now think about that for a minute. Would you be willing to take a no? Even a nasty no, Even somebody slamming the phone down on you, telling you I can't believe you're calling and blah, blah, blah, and you know, we're not interested, or you know, take a flying leap, or you guys are all the same and you just, you just money grubbing, whatever, okay, Whatever they say. Would you be willing to take that two seconds of pain for a hundred dollar bill? Two seconds of pain, one hundred dollar bill. That's it. That's all you gotta do. And I'm like, no problem. I'm not making 100 bucks an hour. I'm making 100 bucks a no. But you got to take enough of them to get to the yeses. So you guys see how powerful this is. So here's kind of how this works. And I'm just gonna tell you in the, in my new book, the book More Yes, More Success. You can go to moreyesbook.com. i got a special presale offer going on it where you can get the book for below retail. You can pre order a Copy and you'll get like $500 of bonuses, including an entire listing presentation course on how to do a gold medal listing presentation and everything. You also get all of my book, all of the scripts. So it's not just the. It's not just in my book of Yes, I had a bunch of scripts, but here's the actual book of yes scripts, the Vortex edition. So this has got dozens and dozens of scripts, including text message scripts, video scripts, all kinds of stuff that are not in the book of yes, because this was published several years ago, this is updated. And so there's your life. These are the best scripts real estate agents are using today. They're making beaucous of money. So when you pre order your copy of More Yes, More Success, go to moreyesbook.com get that. And you're going to also get free download of this, plus a bunch of other stuff and then plus a training course, free training course on my listing presentation mastery course. So it actually trains you on the listing presentation, how to deliver it, what to say, how to say, the psychology of why it works. Absolutely incredible. And you can click on that and you can get that right now for a very, very crazy discounted price. The retail on this book will be $27.95 when it goes online at the end of November when it's published. And you can get it today for 17 bucks, shipping and handling included, plus $400 or $500 bonuses. There's some other things that you can get as well, including a ticket to my upcoming event, Agent Mastery Live, that you can get for a massive discount if you're interested in checking that out. But here's. Let's go back now to this frame of how do I overcome my fear of rejection? So there's three steps to doing this. So I gave you those three. There's four tactics, those four strategies of how I overcame my fear of rejection. So number one, just do it. Do it anyway. Just Lean into the fear. Do it anyway, and the fear will go away. Okay, number two is reframe it from rejection to an experiment. It's just an experiment. You can't. I can't fail. You can't reject me. I'm just experimenting. That's it. And then number three was make it fun. And that's where I did toilet paper square, wrote their name on toilet paper square and then flushed it. Then number four is quantify it. That calculate how much a no is worth to you in cold, hard cash. If you're willing to take enough no's to get to the yes. Okay, so here's what has to change. Number one is change your story. You've got to change what you're standing around. Oh, I hate rejection. Oh, this is going to be painful. Don't do that. Say ah. Every conversation I have takes me to the next yes. Every conversation I have takes me to the next yes. In fact, one of my declarations was, you are my next appointment. You are my next appointment. You are my next appointment. You are my next appointment. Every time I dial the phone, you are my next appointment. You are my next appointment. You're my next appointment. That I was always expecting. Yes. And my story was, they need me. I'm the best decision they will ever make and they're my next appointment. People say yes to me all the time. So I went in with this story that this is the path to get me what I want. So number one, change your story. Number two is supercharge your skills. Now here's another piece of this as the better you get, the less no, the fewer no's you're going to get. The better you get, the fewer nos you're going to get. So when you get better at leading people to a decision, get better at making people, getting people to say yes to you, the less nos you're going to get. How do you do that? Skill practice, repetition, training. This is how you develop the skills. Just like learning to play basketball. How do you learn, how do you learn to get great at basketball? Practice getting out there, taking the shots, practicing shooting free throws, shooting layups, doing it, and then getting into a game situation and playing and playing. And every time you miss a shot, guess what? Your brain is going to go, okay, that didn't work. So we now adjust. And the more you do it, the more you practice, the better you're going to get. Okay, so number one, you change your story. Number two, supercharge your skills. And then number three, and finally is you have to master a system. And mastering a system means I got to write strategies, I got to write scripts and all of that, but learn how to do it in a way that I'm doing it consistently every day. Every day I'm doing my lead generation, every day I'm doing the lead follow up. Every day I have the same process that I follow. And as I get better with that system, I master that system. Then your results get better. You get more consistent, more predictable. So your income gets more predictable and all that kind of stuff. But it's this front end thing that stops us. This front end thing that kind of deals like, oh, this is going to be painful, making this phone call. And then we have all these stories, like expireds. They don't want to talk to us. For sale by owners. They think they can do it themselves. They're a pain in the ass. They're, you know, difficult to work with. They don't trust you, they don't like you, all this kind of stuff. The problem with those stories is they may be true, but they don't help you, they don't serve you. So what do you do? Change your story. Create a story that gives me what I want. People say yes to me. That's my story. People need me. That's my story. Am the best decision they could ever make. That's my story. And when you believe that story, that certainty and that belief goes into the conversation, okay, I love helping people get the results that they want. That's a powerful story. I love helping people get the results that they want. And I'm the best decision they could ever make. They need a realtor. They need me. They want to sell their house, they need me. And that story gives you the courage, it gives you the certainty to get into those conversations that will lead people to say yes. And you combine that with skills with systems of doing it consistently, having a great schedule that keeps you on track so you're not getting distracted or you're not getting it pushed off till the end of never, right where it never happens. And you just get into the game of doing it over and over again. And when you change your story, all of a sudden rejection is no longer rejection. It's just a path to the next yes. A no is the path to the next yes. A no is just the next step. Stepping stone to the next yeah, to the no is the next stepping stone to the next yes. And you just keep going and you just keep going and just keep going. So if this video has been helpful before, all, you're here live. Give it a thumbs up. Okay. If you want to post anything in the comments, you have questions. I'm going to be doing this every day. So I made a commitment after doing this years ago. I did it for like three years. I did a live stream every day for real estate agents. And I've just decided I'm going to do it again. So I'm just now starting. This is my episode number one of Kevin, and that's Kevin at 11. So 11am Mountain time every day. I'll be coming on live Monday through Friday. And I mean, there'll be some Days like next week, I've got an event called Agent Mastery Live. So those three days I will not be able to do the live streams at the end of October. But if you're interested in joining me live for three days of immersive epic training, you can go to yes masters.com aml we'll put the post, we'll post the links in the, in the description, the video and if you want to get a pre if you want to pre order your copy of the book, more yes, more success for an incredibly ridiculously great price and get $500 or $400 and something dollars worth of free bonuses that you get immediately because the book is not yet published. The book will come out hopefully before Thanksgiving and we'll be mailing you your own copy. I'll be hand autographing all the people that pre ordered a book I'm going to do. I'm going to autograph them all so they'll be shipped here to my home. The first set of books and then I'll be signing them all. We send them out. So we send it out to you. You can go to moreyesbook.com and pre order that. And then there's some other cool things there that you can check out as well. So post in the comments any questions you have, any feedback, anything. Your rejection stories would be great. There's other things that you want to have a conversation about. Please feel free to put those in the comments because I'll be reviewing the comments. I'll answer any questions you've got in the comments and then my future episodes of Kevin at 11 will be directed to helping answer the questions that you guys have for me. So thanks for joining me today. Make sure you give it a thumbs up. Thank you. I see the thumbs up coming up there. Again, post any comments or questions that you've got and I will see you tomorrow for another episode of Kevin at 11. Go out there. There is no rejection. It's just an experiment. Three, two, one, off you go.