Recently, I wrote a post about why business owners and sales people (and especially financial advisors) should fall in love with no.
You should go read the post but, to summarize, I suggested that “no” isn’t as bad as we tend to make it out to be and a bunch of “no’s” are just part of the journey towards “yes”!
Shortly after writing that post, I spotted a link on Twitter about someone who has created a technique for falling in love with no. It’s pretty awesome and I think you should read it.
His name is Jia Jiang and he owns a company called hooplus.com and he blogs at a site called entresting.com. His blog is built around a concept of “Rejection Therapy” in which he is attempting to make 100 odd or even audacious requests with the “hope” of becoming immune to rejection. He writes:
I am going through 100 days of Rejection Therapy, aiming to have one rejection per day by making crazy requests. My goal is to desensitize myself from the pain of rejection and overcome my fear.
Among his requests so far, he has tried to borrow $100 from a stranger, ask a girl out to dinner, slide down a firepole at a fire station, challenge a CEO to a staring contest, have Jeff Probst sing a song to his son, make an announcement on a Southwest flight, and more. Some are weird, some are way out there, some are pretty awesome. You can see his rejection scorecard here and following along on his blog here.
I think this is awesome because Jiang has correctly identified the importance of desensitizing himself to the pain of rejection… which goes along with my assertion that we have to fall in love with “no” instead of fear it. A sales person could very well create his or her own “Rejection Therapy”. You don’t have to just become immune to the fear of “no” in a sales setting… why not become immune to the fear of rejection in any setting? Surely that will have an effect on your sales efforts, too!