A short motivational talk (YouTube video) by Kevin Ray Ward on overcoming fear of rejection and taking action despite discomfort. Emphasizes that action defeats fear—call/prospect even when afraid—and cites David J. Schwartz’s The Magic of Thinking Big (chapter: action conquers fear).
Chapters
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 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 conversation is 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. It can last for as long as you let it last. And you get to decide. You get to decide. I'm not going to just sit here and feel sorry for myself in this 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 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. So let's 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 on my license. 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, David Schwartz. 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. 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. So it's like, why am I, what am I afraid of? I mean, fear was designed as an emotion to let you know when there's a saber tooth tiger standing outside of your cave entrance. 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.
