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3 Awareness and the Origin of Fear

The noncommissioned officers – military recruiters – laugh nervously in acknowledgment of the uncomfortable truth: They would rather take live fire in combat than approach 18-year-old recruits with an offer to join the US Army.

This is a common finding in our Fanatical Military Recruiting training programs where we confront the real reasons why military recruiters struggle to make Mission (quota). It is not because they lack talent or passion, not because they lack training, and not because they lack experience. It is rarely any of the reasons people think.

Military recruiters fail most often because they are afraid of rejection. For them, speaking to teenagers and their parents is a daunting emotional obstacle. The soldiers (most of whom are combat veterans) fear these conversations. So much so that they would rather face bullets and death than the potential for rejection.

If this seems completely irrational, then you are not alone. On the surface, it makes no logical sense that brave soldiers who have endured the hyper-emotional environment of an active battlefield, where death is around every corner, would be afraid of getting rejected by teenagers. That is – until you consider that the two things humans fear the most are death and rejection, and it is not uncommon for people to fear rejection more than death.

The Origin of Fear

Imagine for a moment that it is 40,000 years ago. You live in a cave with a group of people in a hunter-gatherer community, in what is now France.

It's a dangerous world. Neighboring tribes fight and compete for scarce resources. When you are out hunting for dinner, there is usually something hunting you. It's a brutal, survival-of-the-fittest environment, and you are part of the food chain.

You depend on your tribe for everything. You cannot survive on your own. Being rejected by your tribe and banished from the cave is a death sentence. Alone in the dark, you would have no fire, no food, no protection, no companionship, and no chance for survival.

It's a world that's hard to imagine in our tech-dominated, modern society, where food, shelter, transportation, and even companionship are at our fingertips with a click or swipe on our smartphone screen. But it was here, in this ruthless and unforgiving place, that humans developed our modern-day fear of rejection.

The sensitivity to being rejected served as an early warning system that the threat of being banished from the tribe was imminent, should one's behavior not change. It was a simple, but powerful, emotional survival mechanism that helped to keep us in the good graces of other humans whom we needed.

People who developed a healthy fear of rejection functioned more effectively in groups. Those who avoided conflict were more likely to survive and remain in the gene pool. Thus, the fear of rejection became a competitive, evolutionary advantage. It was vital to our survival.

Over the course of human history, banishment was often considered worse than death. The stories in ancient literature depicted it as such. Though today banishment is far from a death sentence, the fear of rejection continues to guide how we behave around others and conform to group norms.

It truly is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it helps you become socially adept so that you can coexist with other human beings and build strong, mutually beneficial relationships. On the other, it triggers a wave of disruptive emotions that impede your ability to confidently approach customers with price increases.

The Curse of Fight or Flight

The human brain, the most complex biological structure on Earth, is capable of incredible things. Yet, despite its almost infinite complexity, your brain is always focused on one very simple responsibility – to protect you from threats.

Harvard professor and psychologist Dr. Walter Cannon first coined the term fight-or-flight response to describe the human body's neurophysiological reaction to threats. Your brain and body react to protect you from two types of threats:

 Physical. Threats to your physical safety or the safety of someone close to you. For example, someone shooting at you on a battlefield or a rattlesnake on the trail where you are hiking.

 Social. Threats to your social standing: rejection, banishment from the group, looking bad in front of other people, nonacceptance, diminishment, and ostracism. For example, your tribe banishing you from the cave or a customer rejecting your price increase.

Engaging customers in price increase conversations is intentionally putting yourself in the position to face the social threats of conflict and rejection. It means courageously facing down evolution and the natural human instinct that is screaming at you to STOP.

In these situations, fight or flight – the uncomfortable biological response to threats – begins to kick in. What is important to understand is that the fight-or-flight response circumvents rational thought.

As you prepare to tell your customer about the price increase, your sympathetic nervous system releases hormones into your bloodstream, including adrenaline, testosterone, and cortisol, to prepare you either to stand your ground and fight or to run. Your heart rate accelerates, stomach tightens, skin flushes, pupils dilate, and you lose peripheral vision.

The neurophysiological response to the threat of conflict and rejection makes it challenging to maintain confidence and composure. Attention control is difficult; it's hard to think. Your IQ even drops when you are preoccupied with rejection – a big problem when you need 100 percent of your intellectual acuity to get your customer to buy into and accept the price increase.

Fight or flight can in one circumstance save you from certain death, but in another, unleash a wave of disruptive emotions that knocks you to the ground as you enter price increase conversations.

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: