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Cold Calling Fear Rather Not Have It

Written by: Christine Sutherland

Article Overview: No, it’s not wishful thinking. With modern change techniques, you can now dump that particular pain from your repertoire!

Cold Calling Fear Rather Not Have It

Fears and Other Things That Stop Us

There is nothing wrong with having self-doubt. Self-doubt can be highly appropriate if we’re weighing up our skill to perform a certain task, or wondering if we can do something in a better way than what we have in the past, or if we’re considering some feedback we’ve been given and wishing to determine whether we did indeed make a mistake of judgement or behave in a less than glorious way! If we lost our ability to doubt ourselves, to make judgements on our thoughts or actions, we’d find it difficult to function as a competent adult!

So that type of self-doubt is not a problem. What certainly is a problem, because it paralyses us and detracts from our quality of life, is the negative emotion or even pain that might accompany even appropriate self-doubt.

This other side of self-doubt, the shamed, humiliated, inferior, inadequate, stupid, dumb, hopeless, helpless, hapless feelings, those are a problem because they prevent us thinking logically and they prevent us from making good choices. And it’s not just our problem, is it? When we’re like that we’re not fun to be around. We bring others down, especially the people who are close to us.

Degrees of confidence and self-doubt are part of our identity or self-image and it’s important to realise that most of our self-image is beyond our conscious control, a huge mass of unconscious, conditioned programming that completely and utterly runs our lives for us. Conditioned programming that for most adults, developed many years ago.

What We Learned Growing Up

“Finish what’s on your plate or you won’t get your pudding!” “You can’t leave the table till you finish your plate!” “Finish your plate – there are children starving in Africa!” “Your mother cooked that and you’ll eat it!”

Who hasn’t grown up hearing that stuff at least a million times! No wonder it’s almost impossible for a grown adult to push away a plate with food on it, without guilt.

Or maybe when you were a kid, you heard the old “children ought to be seen and not heard” routine a million times. If you were “brought up to be humble” no doubt your parents used overkill big time and you’ll have a whole swag of stuff running around in your head about authority and undeservedness. How could we expect to be told “shut up” or “what would you know?” a million times and still be a confident speaker!?

And then as we were going about our lives, just kids figuring out how the world worked and learning and testing new knowledge, skills and abilities, we made some mistakes or had some accidents that caused us to link certain activities or things with certain feelings of fear or anxiety, or certain feelings of pleasure, or whatever.

There are thousands and thousands of these pieces of programming inside our heads and these run automatically. Collectively, this is the auto pilot that runs our lives when we’re not looking. Like any auto pilot, it follows a set of rules, or programming, that respond to feedback in order to stay on its designated track. If the programming contains an error, the auto pilot won’t recognise that, it will just keep right on flying, right into a mountain or into a storm – because it doesn’t think for itself.

And you might say, “Well my unconscious mind doesn’t have to think for itself, that’s what my conscious mind is for.” Unfortunately this is only a little bit true. It’s true that conscious feedback can impact on unconscious processing – to a degree. But it’s also true that the conscious mind doesn’t have a hope of even knowing all of our unconscious processing, let alone impacting on it. Even if it did know, the fact is that the speed of unconscious processing is nearly 300,000 times faster than conscious processing.

This is why “free will” really has little to do with the choices we make and the behaviour we engage in.

Do You Think You Feel, Decide or Act Using Your Own Free Will? Think Again!

How does this work? What is it that causes us to engage in the same thoughts and behaviours over and over again? Are we actually making such decisions from our own free will? Do we sabotage ourselves deliberately? What is going on!?

All of us engage in repetitive habits that have built up over a lifetime, and anyone who’s ever tried to deliberately change a habit will know what a hard job that is to try to do it by willpower. Talk about frustrating!

However when we understand some simple facts of neurology, we can breathe a sigh of relief to know that it was never about willpower – it was about unconscious conditioning!

What do I mean by “unconscious conditioning”? Have you heard of Pavlov and his dogs? Pavlov was a behavioural scientist very interested in how animals (including humans) learned to behave in automatic ways. He ran a famous experiment on dogs where every time the dogs were fed, a tuning tine would be rung. He soon discovered that if the tuning tine were rung, even with no food, the dogs would still increase their salivation rates. They had learned to associate the sound with food, and their brains had linked a stimulus (the sound) with the response (salivation). These dogs didn’t think to themselves “Oh, the last time I heard that tuning tine, food came, so I’d better start salivating.” No. The dogs’ brains did it for them, and it happened automatically, just like it does for us humans.

We humans have many, many stimulus-response associations. When we hear a special song, we feel a special way. When we see someone’s hand reaching toward us in handshake, we find our own hand rising by itself. When we smell onions sizzling on a barbecue, our mouths water even though we’re not hungry. When we attempt to leave a half-full plate on the table, we get the same guilty feeling we got as a kid with the old “kids starving in Africa” routine from Mum or Dad. We stand up to talk in front of a group and maybe our stomach turns to water, or we pick up that phone to make a call and are so overcome that we just don’t want to dial that number. Certain sights, sounds, touches, smells and tastes, cause us to feel or behave in very predictable ways.

Now you might be thinking, “I can be aware of that and stop it.” As I explained, the trouble with that theory is that there’s too much to be aware of. Your unconscious mind is running several million responses at any given time. Your conscious mind can track only about 7 of them over the same period. That’s a pretty big gap!

When you realise how the brain and body work together this strange problem becomes quite easy to understand. Simply put, it is not our conscious mind which runs our life at all. We are operating under a total misconception if we think that we are "in control". We are not. Our unconscious mind makes decisions even before the conscious mind realises that a decision can be made. So the trouble with trying to control our responses is that the unconscious mind has responded before we even consciously become aware that we have responded.

Our unconscious mind responds automatically and rapidly (less than 0.02 seconds) to what’s going on around us. How do we “stop” something that’s already happened!? Our conscious mind is just the bystander, observing it all happening! Certainly, there’s feedback from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind and conscious “inhibition” can prevent some unacceptable behaviour, sometimes. But the unconscious mind is an awesome force to be reckoned with, and we are completely powerless to impact on things like heart rate or perspiration, for example, at a time of crisis.

This is exactly why it is not your fault if you get nervous in front of groups, or hate to make cold calls, or have a problem with paperwork. There is literally nothing you can consciously do about it. You are like the "ex" smoker who becomes aware that she is standing at the smokes counter taking change from the packet of cigarettes she doesn't even remember asking for. Sooner or later, the unconscious mind will have its way!

Now that we properly appreciate and understand the true nature of the problem, we can stop wasting our time trying to apply willpower and actually do something different. “If you want a different result, use a different strategy!”

Fortunately there are now things that can be done about this serious problem. Using techniques from NLP and neuro-somatics, we are now able to extinguish (eliminate) all conditioned responses around this programming so that we revert to our original, healthy “default” programming. This is the key to permanent change. In fact it’s a key to a lot of things.

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  What Cold Calling Business Lead Management Can Do For Your Business

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Re: How to develop sales contacts? - Everyone has the right idea here. Depending on your business, there are different techniques that you could use. For consultants and sales heavy businesses, there are three tactics that I have found especially useful in my business: 1. Attend Networking Events 2. Cold Calling 3. Referral Program 4. Affiliate Program (most successful) The affiliate program was successful for me, as I hooked up with a franchise consultant, and he gave multiple unit businesses that needed my credit card processing services. I highly suggest you hook up with a sales partner, and give him a cut of the monthly revenue.
Re: Direct Mail Postcards - Post cards would be really expensive to send from Japan...but one way to advertise that is not expensive from overseas is by Cold Calling using cheap VoIP equipment. I know Japan has a really good internet connection, so as long as you are willing to stay up late, it might be an option. I cold call from Thailand far, far away from any city using a CDMA wireless internet connection and have had pretty good results. I find tho, that cold calling works best for business 2 business (b2b), rather than b2c products. --matt
Re: Cold Calling - As long as people are out of jobs, you'll probably have a lot of people who say they want to work for straight commission, but if they don't get paid fairly quickly, they usually move on. We've run into that and went through about 500 people (whose resumes looked really good) until we found about 3 good resellers. People just don't want to work for anything. Or they do a good job getting the business but don't do the follow up necessary to make the sale......so they move on thinking they need money NOW. Our business requires all cold calling as well. It's really tough for people to perfect that but there are a lot of good books out there. On is Cold Calling Techniques, by Stephan Schiffman
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Other Great Books... - Feel The Fear And Do It AnyWay - Susan Jeffers How To Stop Worrying And Do It Anyway - Dale Carnegie ('What's the worst that could happen - the worst?' Then prepare yourself for that and reality is such a relief!).


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