The only easy day was yesterday.

—US Navy SEALs

There is no sugarcoating it. Prospecting means facing certain rejection. This is why so many recruiters don’t do it and instead spend their time and energy seeking silver bullets, secret formulas, and shortcuts; or hanging out on social media; or ignoring prospecting altogether until they dig themselves deep into a hole; or wasting time with applicants who are disqualified.

The truth is prospecting is the hardest, most mentally exhausting part of your recruiting day. There will always be something more fun you would rather do, and it will never get easier. But the one thing that separates ultra-high performers from other recruiters is they look rejection in the face and do it anyway.

Here’s the deal. If you want sustained success in your recruiting tour, if you want to consistently make mission, then you’ve got to interrupt strangers—lots of them. The real reason that prospecting is so hard, no matter how you choose to do it, is that you are interrupting strangers. This, by the way, is why so many recruiters protest so loudly and will do almost anything to avoid making an outbound call.

It is difficult and awkward to interrupt someone’s day. You can’t control their response and that unknown leaves you feeling vulnerable and causes fear.

Your prospect’s initial reaction to being interrupted—usually a brush-off or reflex response in a not-so-friendly tone of voice—feels like rejection. Sometimes it is rejection. They attack you, disrespect you, call you a baby killer, and put you down just for doing your job. This is the core reason mediocre recruiters spend most of their time finding excuses not to prospect rather than just doing it.

What they fail to understand is that interrupting and talking to people is the fundamental building block of robust recruiting funnels. If you don’t interrupt strangers relentlessly, your funnel will be anemic, and you will fail.

There Is No Easy Button in Military Recruiting

“Lose weight effortlessly,” the announcer says over an image of models admiring their ripped abs. “With this revolutionary breakthrough pill you’ll never have to worry about your weight again. Eat what you want. Forget about exercise. Just take this pill and you’ll have the body of your dreams.”

If these commercials didn’t work, the companies that run them would quit. But they do work. In his book Spartan Up: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance, Joe De Sena explains that “easy is the greatest marketing hook of all time.”

So companies promise, again and again, that you can lose weight, flip houses, or get rich with no pain, no sacrifice, and no effort. Their phones ring off the hook, even though most people know intuitively that these promises are overhyped and not true. It’s just human nature to seek the easy way out.

It is disappointing to observe how many recruiters have this same attitude—always looking for easy. They whine and complain endlessly about the job, leads, prospects, parents, MEPS, educators, their territory, the bureaucracy, their leaders, taking time away from their family, and on and on. They have somehow deluded themselves into believing that they are entitled to easy.

Here is a brutal truth: Military recruiting is not easy. It won’t become easy. It will never be easy. Whether you volunteered or were voluntold, you have mission and a job to do, and it is and will be the hardest, most challenging period of your military career.

Military recruiting is not a nine-to-five job. There are no days off. No vacations. No lunch breaks. No rest. It’s a single-day deployment times 365 for however long your tour lasts. Ultra-high-performing military recruiters are always on, always recruiting, unstoppable—whatever it takes to make mission. Recruiting is tough, grueling, and sometimes heartbreaking work. The pressure is unrelenting.

Unlike other tours, in recruiting you have one number, and there is no place to hide. You must deliver results or suffer the consequences. In military recruiting, it’s not about who you have enlisted—it is about who you enlist today. The threat of facing discipline because you have a bad month, quarter, or year is always hanging over your head.

Along with this unrelenting stress, military recruiters face endless rejection. You receive more rejection in a day than the average service member gets in an entire year. The fact is, most people wouldn’t last a minute in your shoes. They are so afraid of rejection that they’d rather charge a bunker than make a single prospecting call.

Yet most people don’t understand you or your role. They don’t understand the stress. They don’t understand that to achieve your goals you’re working seven days a week, and on many of these days twelve to sixteen hours. On this duty you never take a knee.

In recruiting there will always be something to complain about. That’s just how it is. Nothing is perfect. There will be obstacles, challenges, rude administrators, indecisive and unqualified prospects, out-of-touch parents, demanding leaders, constant changes to mission and what constitutes an acceptable applicant, and of course MEPS.

There will always be rejection. There will be people who protest against you, hate you even though you protect them, offend you with their words and actions, and never understand your purpose. There will always be changes to mission—usually asking you to give more.

Adopting a fanatical military recruiting mind-set is the difference between making your recruiting tour a rewarding, successful experience or just doing time and waiting for the bitter end. You can sit around and complain and whine, but trust me, you are only hurting yourself, your unit, your family, and ultimately, your country.

Get Better

Developing a fanatical military recruiting mind-set begins with coming to grips with and accepting that military recruiting is hard, grueling, rejection-dense work. There is no sugarcoating it. You have a tough job to do and most of the time it sucks.

So instead of whining about the things that are outside of your control, focus your energy on the only three things you can control:

• 1. Your actions
• 2. Your reactions
• 3. Your mind-set

The first step toward building an endless pipeline of new prospects and crushing mission is acknowledging the truth and stepping back from your emotional need to find Easy Street. In military recruiting, easy is the mother of mediocrity, and in your life, mediocrity is like a broke uncle. Once he moves into your house, it’s nearly impossible to get him to leave.

Author and speaker Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn’t wish that things were easier; you should, instead, wish that you were better. That’s the promise I make to you. When you adopt the techniques in this book, you will get better.

You will become a more efficient recruiter. You will learn how to deliver mission in less time, so that you have more time for your family, friends, and enjoying life.

You will become a more effective recruiter. Prospects enlist with you—then the military. You will learn how to engage prospects in conversations, move them into your funnel as qualified applicants, get them to the floor, and generate more enlistments who ship. You’ll gain powerful skills and techniques, deliver better results, and ultimately become the ultra-high-performing recruiter your leaders trust, praise, and award.

I will not lie or pander to you, though. I am not going to promise to make recruiting easier, take away the sting of rejection, or turn prospecting into something that you will learn to love. The techniques I teach you will not eliminate rejection, make recruiting painless, or remove the emotional pain of dealing with disrespectful teenagers, their helicopter parents, or rude educators.

Only you can make the decision to do the hard work, pick up the phone, approach strangers, and get past your own mental hang-ups. The choice to act, the choice to adopt a new Fanatical Military Recruiting mind-set, is yours and yours alone.

It’s time to stop wishing it was easier and start working to make yourself better.