No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Imagine that you’re sitting at home when suddenly the doorbell rings. You weren’t expecting a visitor.

You begin running through a series of images in your mind of who might be at your door—salesperson, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Girl Scouts, neighbor, UPS, FedEx? You may fear the worst and imagine that it’s a criminal who wants to rob you.

With a measure of curiosity and trepidation, you open the door. But it’s not any of the things you imagined. There, standing before you, is a well-groomed young Chinese man wearing soccer cleats.

With suspicion in your voice you ask, “May I help you?”

Sporting a big grin, he responds, “Yes, I came by to ask if you would take a video of me playing soccer in your backyard.”

Pause for a moment and consider how you might react to such a strange and unexpected request. Then step into the other person’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to be the requester. Both parties, in this weird moment, would be swept up by a sea of disruptive emotions.

This, by the way, is a true story. It’s how Jia Jiang became rejection proof.¹ We’ll come back to Jia Jiang later in the chapter. First let’s consider some basic facts:

• When you became a military recruiter, you are signed up to seek out rejection.
• Seeking out rejection is not natural for humans.
• To build an effective recruiting funnel, you must interrupt strangers.
• To get what you want, you must ask for what you want.
• When you ask, people are going to tell you no.
• The only way to avoid hearing no is to never ask.
• Therefore, to be successful you must gain the discipline to ask and the skills for getting past no.
• Objections are not rejection, but they feel like rejection.
• Rejection triggers your fight-or-flight response and releases a wave of disruptive emotions: fear, insecurity, doubt, and attachment.
• These emotions happen without your consent and can derail you in recruiting conversations.
• In recruiting conversations, whoever exerts the greatest amount of emotional control has the highest probability of getting the outcome they desire.
• Therefore, to bend the probability of a win in your favor, you must rise above and control your disruptive emotions.

The Seven Disruptive Emotions

Disruptive emotions manifest themselves in destructive behaviors that fog focus, cloud situational awareness, cause irrational decision making, lead to misjudgments, and erode confidence.

These seven disruptive emotions impede your ability to get past no:

1. Fear is the root cause of most failures in recruiting. It causes you to hesitate and make excuses rather than confidently and assertively ask for what you want. Fear holds you back from prospecting, clouds objectivity, and breeds insecurity.
2. Desperation is a disruptive emotion that causes you to become needy and weak, be illogical, and make poor decisions. Desperation makes you instantly unlikable and unattractive to other people, kicking off a vicious cycle that generates even more rejection. Desperation is the mother of insecurity.
3. Insecurity drowns confidence and assertiveness. It causes you to feel alone—as if you and only you have a big sign on your back that says “reject me.” Insecurity causes you to feel as if rejection is lurking around every corner, so you become gun-shy—afraid of your own shadow.
4. Need for significance is a core human desire and weakness. As humans, we all have an insatiable need to be accepted and feel like we matter. When this need gets out of control, it can become one of our most disruptive emotions. Rejection naturally causes you to feel unaccepted and unimportant. Your egocentric need for significance treats rejection as a threat, thus triggering the fight-or-flight response and causing irrational behavior. The insatiable need for significance is the mother of attachment and eagerness.
5. Attachment causes you to become emotionally focused on winning, getting what you want, looking good in front of others, wanting everyone to agree with you, and always being right. As a result you lose perspective and objectivity. Attachment is the enemy of self-awareness and the genesis of delusion.
6. Eagerness causes you to become so focused on pleasing other people that you lose sight of your recruiting objectives. You give in and give up too soon. You waste time with applicants who will never qualify or be eligible to join the military.
7. Worry is the downside of your brain’s vigilant crusade to keep you safe and alive. Your brain naturally focuses on the negatives—what could go wrong—rather than what could go right. This, in and of itself, can trigger the fight-or-flight response and the stream of disruptive emotions that come with it—based only on your perception that something might go wrong. This leads to paralysis from analyzing every negative possibility and avoidance through procrastination.

In concert or individually, these disruptive emotions can lead to dangerous confirmation bias. This human cognitive shortcut causes you to put on rose-colored lenses and see only those things that support your delusional view of the situation (such as excuses for why you missed mission, chased an unqualified prospect, failed to get past an objection, or tanked a parental meeting).

Recruiters who cannot regulate disruptive emotions get caught up in and controlled by emotional waves, much like a rudderless ship tossed at sea in a violent storm—pushed from wave to wave, highs and lows, at whim.

Managing your disruptive emotions is a primary meta-skill of military recruiting. Getting past “no” begins with self-control. The combination of situational awareness and the ability to consistently regulate disruptive emotions is at the heart of confidently approaching prospects, asking for what you want, and mastering objections.

When you learn how to manage your disruptive emotions, you gain the power to influence the emotions of other people at that crucial inflection point when an objection is on the table.

But let’s not sweep under the rug just how difficult it is to manage disruptive emotions appropriately in the moment. As humans, we have all been that rudderless ship, helplessly rocked by out-of-control emotions. We’ve all said or done things in the moment that in retrospect we regretted. We’ve all avoided the truth. We’ve all been hit with a hard objection and then stammered and stuttered, searching for the right words in the throes of the fight-or-flight response.

We have all been there, because we are all human.

It is easy to talk about managing disruptive emotions in dispassionate clichés like “just let it roll off your back,” but it’s an entirely different thing to quell your emotions and turn around an objection when everything inside you just wants to run. Intellect, rational thinking, and process drown in the sea of disruptive emotions and subconscious human instincts.

Develop Self-Awareness

You become rejection proof when you learn to master your emotions. This begins with awareness that the emotion is happening, which allows your rational brain to take the helm, make sense of the emotion, rise above it, and choose your behavior and response.

Much of our behavior begins outside the reaches of our conscious minds. We act but are unaware of why we act, unless we choose to tune in and become aware. Awareness is the intentional and deliberate choice to monitor, evaluate, and modulate emotions so that our emotional responses to the people and environment around us are congruent with our intentions and objectives.

Remember Jia Jiang from the opening story in this chapter? Intentional awareness is how he became rejection proof.

Jiang intentionally sought out rejection by coming up with ridiculous and terrifying requests of strangers. At each step, he videoed his physical response to rejection and recounted his emotional response on a public blog. As he faced each new rejection and monitored his response, he became more aware of his emotions—how he felt before, during, and after.

Jia Jiang learned that there is a difference between experiencing emotions and being caught up in them. Awareness helped him gain control over his emotions. While buffeted by the emotional storms that were activated by the rejection he sought out, Jiang learned to make conscious, rational choices with his reactions.

Awareness begins with learning to anticipate the anxiety that comes right before asking for what you want. Once you gain this insight, practice intentionally managing your internal self-talk and physical reactions to that fear. Focus on rising above your emotions and becoming a detached, dispassionate observer.

Self-awareness is the doorway to emotional control. Awareness helps you manage your outward physiology despite the volcanic emotions that may be erupting below the surface. Like a duck on the water, you appear calm and cool and project a relaxed, confident demeanor on the outside even though you’re paddling frantically just below the surface.

Positive Visualization

Your brain is hardwired to anticipate and dwell on worst-case scenarios. When you face an emotionally unpleasant task, it is human nature to begin fabricating negative outcomes in your head. Without rational intervention, these internal narratives can lead to self-fulfilling prophesies.

For instance, Petty Officer Second Class Martinez expects to encounter resistance on a prospecting call. This negative visualization makes her feel insecure. Lacking confidence, she approaches the call with trepidation. When the prospect answers, she stumbles over her words, sounding weak. The prospect bulldozes over her. Martinez is shaken and expects she’ll get even more resistance on her next call. Now even more insecure, she attracts rejection like a magnet.

“Because the brain’s focus on threat and danger far outperforms the reward capacities of the brain, it is important to keep a deliberate eye on positive possibilities,” advises Scott Halford in his book Activate Your Brain.² Had Martinez approached the call with confidence, her demeanor alone would have reduced resistance and generated a more positive outcome.

It is for this reason that elite athletes³ and elite military recruiters employ visualization to preprogram the subconscious brain. When you visualize success, you teach your mind to act in a way that helps your achieve your desired outcome.⁴

Begin by focusing on your breathing. Slow it down. Then in your mind’s eye, go through each part of the call step by step. Focus on how it feels to be confident. Imagine what you will say, what you will ask. Visualize yourself succeeding. Repeat this process again and again until you’ve trained your mind to manage the disruptive emotions that derail you.

Manage Self-Talk

Sometimes (especially when prospecting), no matter how nice or professional you are, the person you are calling on will tell you to “go screw yourself,” scream “Don’t ever call me again,” or say “It will be a cold day in hell before I ever join the military!” They may slam the door in your face, ask you to leave the building, or respond harshly to your e-mail or text message.

Sometimes prospects are rude, short-tempered, and curt; they take shots at you that are pointed and personal. Sometimes it’s because you caught them at a bad time. Sometimes you’re just a convenient human piñata for their frustrations and self-loathing.

When you are treated this way, it’s natural to dwell on it and replay the conversation again and again in your head. You feel embarrassed, angry, and vengeful, along with a host of other disruptive emotions.

You project your emotions on your prospects and make up a story in your head about what they said, did, or thought after they hung up the phone, pressed send in response to your e-mail, or kicked you out of their door. You see your prospects laughing at you or fuming because you annoyed them.

Meanwhile, the prospect doesn’t even remember you. They moved on the moment you hung up the phone and haven’t given you another thought. You were just a blip—a momentary and meaningless interruption in their day.

It is difficult to regain your focus and keep moving when a prospect is rude to you. It hurts. It’s all you can think about. You fantasize about calling back and telling them to F@*K OFF! Anger invades your thoughts, keeps you stewing, and derails your recruiting day.

According to Amanda Chan, citing the research of psychologist Guy Winch, “Many times the rejection does 50 percent of the damage and we do the other 50 percent of the damage.”⁵ The greatest injury from rejection is self-inflicted. Just when our self-esteem is hurting most, we go and make it worse.

There is an endless and ongoing stream of chatter inside your head, shaping your emotions and outward actions. The conversation you are having with yourself will either build your attitude, strengthen your belief system, and generate a winning mind-set or trigger disruptive emotions that destroy you.

Unlike emotions, which are activated without your consent, self-talk is completely within your control. You make the choice to think positively or negatively. To pick yourself up or tear yourself down. To see a glass half-full or half-empty. To be aware or delusional.

Sit quietly and listen to the conversation in your head—the words you are using, the questions you are asking. Then resolve to change those words so they support the image of who you want to be, how you want to act, and how you want to feel. Make an intentional decision to remain tuned in to your inner voice. When it goes negative, stop and change the conversation.

One way to do this is to develop a bounce-back routine. Find something that gets you pumped up and helps you get your confidence back after you’ve been rejected. This could be an inspirational quote, an affirmation, a friend you call, music you listen to, or exercise. Develop a routine that snaps you out of your funk quickly.

Over the years I’ve developed a simple routine that gets me back on track when a prospect hits me with hard rejection. Behind my desk is an old index card taped to the wall. The paper has yellowed, and the words have faded just a bit because I’ve carried that card around with me for 25 years. On the card are four letters:

• N-E-X-T

Change Your Physiology

Studies on human behavior from virtually every corner of the academic world have proven time and again that we can change how we feel by adjusting our physical posture. In other words, internal emotions may be shaped by your outward physiology.

When you anticipate being rejected, you tend to slump your shoulders, lower your chin, and look at the floor—physical signals of insecurity and emotional weakness. This change in physical posture makes you appear less confident to others and feel less confident on the inside.

A change in physical posture not only elicits a change in emotions,⁶ but it also triggers a neurophysiological response.⁷ We know, for example, that the hormones cortisol and testosterone play a significant role in creating the feeling of confidence.

Research by Amy Cuddy of Harvard University demonstrates that “power posing,” physically standing in a posture of confidence, even when you don’t feel confident, impacts testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, influencing confidence.⁸

Moms, teachers, coaches, and drill instructors have always known this basic truth. They’ve been giving us this same advice for years. Keep your chin up. Stand at attention. Straighten your shoulders. Sit up straight and you’ll feel better.

When you put your shoulders up and chin up, you look and feel confident. In uniform, you feel more confident. Use assertive and assumptive words, phrases, and voice tone, and you will be more powerful and credible—and more likely to get a “yes” when you ask for what you want.

Stay Fit

As soon as you let your guard down, your emotions begin to run amok at your expense—especially when you are tired, hungry, and physically exhausted.

Regulating and managing disruptive emotions is draining. Moving past the emotional hurdle of rejection requires a tremendous amount of mental energy, but your mental energy is limited by your physical resilience.

Military recruiters spend an inordinate amount of time driving, sitting, and staring at screens. Sitting all day while staring at a screen impacts your mental capacity and slows both your mental and physical responses in emotionally charged situations.

Staying fit improves self-esteem, creative thinking, mental clarity, confidence, and optimism. It makes you more nimble and adaptive and helps you gain the discipline to maintain emotional self-control. When you remain physically fit, you also become emotionally fit. An avalanche of scientific research proves that physical resilience leads to mental and emotional resilience.

In the fast-paced, stressful world of military recruiting, it can be difficult to eat well. Eating poorly is like putting low-grade gasoline in a high-performance race car. To gain the mental toughness and resiliency to control your emotions, you need to fill up with high-test fuel.

Filling up early is the key—starting with breakfast. It’s easy to skip meals when you are in a hurry, but allowing yourself to get hungry is a big, big mistake. You lose intellectual acuity and emotional control when you are hungry.

Nothing impacts your ability to deal confidently with objections more than sleep. Sleep deprivation has a profound impact on your cognitive ability and degrades your emotional intelligence. You become susceptible to breaks in emotional discipline.

Humans need between seven and nine hours of sleep every night for optimal performance. These days, though, it has become a badge of honor to live on little sleep. Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, opines that “we are in the midst of a sleep deprivation crisis. Only by renewing our relationship with sleep can we take back control of our lives.”

All sorts of bad things happen to you when you are not getting enough sleep. Over the long term, you become more susceptible to immune deficiencies, obesity, heart disease, and mood disorders, and your life expectancy is reduced. “Living with the mindset ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ may get you there quite a bit faster!” says Joe De Sena in his book Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life.

Obstacle Immunity

“So, wait a minute. Let me get this right. You would rather go into battle and be shot at by people who are trying to kill you than pick up the phone and make a prospecting call to a teenager.” I looked out on the faces and saw the truth there.

The noncommissioned officers, all of whom were wearing combat patches, nodded and laughed as they acknowledged the uncomfortable truth. I was laughing too but stunned by their response. It was the moment I decided to write this book.

As I dived deeper into military recruiting, I learned that most military recruiters who struggle to make mission aren’t failing because they lack knowledge, talent, passion, and experience or because they are lazy. They fail because of a daunting emotional obstacle. They fear rejection and therefore don’t ask for what they want assumptively, assertively, and confidently.

On the other hand, for me, making prospecting calls to teenagers is easy—far easier than cold-calling businesses as I’ve done my entire career. In my view, I’m doing them a favor—giving them a job, college tuition, and amazing benefits. I’ve got a bag full of money that I’m going to give to somebody. “Who wants it?” That’s my mind-set. But then again, I’ve made thousands of prospecting calls over the past 25 years.

It seemed completely irrational that these brave men and women, who had endured the hyperemotional environment of an active battlefield where death is around every corner, would be afraid of getting rejected by teenagers. On the surface, it made no logical sense that they’d rather face bullets than potential rejection.

When I even consider running into a hail of bullets, it elicits fear. Going into battle versus interrupting a stranger? I’ll gladly face the rejection. After all, I can’t think of anyone who’s gotten PTSD from prospecting.

The soldiers in my classroom, though, could only see rejection. Cold-calling prospects in an environment that they could not control and did not understand created what felt like an insurmountable obstacle. And there is a good reason why they felt this way.

The military prepares you before sending you into war zones. You learn to manage your 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.

Before sending you into combat, the military puts you through endless live-fire drills and mock combat situations. This training conditions you to control your emotions in battle. You learn battle rhythm, operational frameworks, and ways to respond. You learn “ledges” (we’ll discuss this further in an upcoming chapter) for getting in control of runaway emotions. You drill and drill until these responses are rote and you become immune to fear in battle.

For my combat veterans, who freely admitted that they avoid prospecting at all costs, the light bulb came on when I drew the parallel between how they learned to be immune to the obstacle of fear on the battlefield and how they could apply the same methodology for becoming immune to the fear of rejection when prospecting. It’s simply a shift in perspective.

An obstacle is defined as something that obstructs or hinders progress—a difficulty, problem, or challenge that’s in your way.⁹

During World War II, Lawrence Holt, who owned a merchant shipping line in Britain, made an observation that launched a movement. His ships were being targeted and torpedoed by German U-boats. Strangely, the survivors of these attacks were more likely to be old sailors, not younger, more physically fit men.

This phenomenon led Holt to turn to Kurt Hahn, a German educator who had criticized Hitler and been imprisoned by the Nazis for it before the war. Holt engaged Hahn to help him understand why the younger, stronger, more physically fit members of his crews died at an alarmingly higher rate following attacks.

What Holt and Hahn eventually concluded was the difference between the two groups came down to emotional resilience, self-reliance, and inner strength. Even though the younger men possessed superior physical strength and agility, the emotional resilience of the older, more experienced sailors helped them to endure grueling obstacles and survive.

Holt is famous for saying, “I would rather entrust the lowering of a lifeboat in mid-Atlantic to a sail-trained octogenarian than to a young sea technician who is completely trained in the modern way but has never been sprayed by salt water.”

The findings led Hahn to found Outward Bound,¹⁰ an organization that has been helping people ever since to develop mental strength, confidence, tenacity, perseverance, resilience, and obstacle immunity by immersing them in harsh conditions.

Remember Jia Jiang? He had hit rock-bottom. His dream of becoming an entrepreneur had been torpedoed by his deep fear of and aversion to rejection. Embarrassed, depressed, and feeling alone, he had an epiphany. His only hope for achieving his dream was to face rejection head-on. This is when Jiang’s improbable journey through 100 days of rejection began.

Jiang chronicles how he systematically exposed himself to all levels of rejection in his inspiring book Rejection Proof. By asking for money, custom doughnuts, temporary jobs, “burger refills” at a hamburger joint, and the chance to play soccer in a stranger’s backyard—among dozens of other strange requests—he got nose-to-nose with emotional obstacles that would make the average human squirm.

At first, he challenged himself with relatively easy asks, then made progressively bigger, more complex requests. It was this progressive exposure to potential, perceived, and actual rejection that helped him become immune to his greatest obstacle—the fear of asking for what he wanted.

Joe De Sena’s Spartan Races are designed for the very same purpose—to build obstacle immunity. Participants are pitted against challenging and painful tests of will. Through adversity and suffering, participants learn how to change their mental state and gain control of fear.¹¹

Self-control in the face of obstacles is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. You build your “self-control muscle” by putting yourself in position to experience the perceived obstacle and the accompanying emotions again and again.

Once you begin intentionally facing fears and emotionally uncomfortable situations, you learn to disrupt and neutralize the anxiety that comes right before the obstacle. You’ll begin shifting your internal self-talk and outward physical reaction to control that fear. Soon overcoming once “insurmountable” obstacles becomes routine.

It’s clear as you read Jiang’s story that much of his success was created through a mind-set shift that occurred as he gained obstacle immunity. He developed an emotional callus that made it harder for rejection to pierce his thickened skin. As he committed to his rejection challenges and persevered through the fear, he became rejection proof.

Adversity Is Your Most Powerful Teacher

Data from research studies indicate that when your self-esteem and confidence are low, rejection feels more painful and becomes an even greater obstacle.¹² Sadly, in this emotional state you become even more susceptible to rejection.

Most people would agree that my previous statement is a blinding flash of the obvious and a self-evident truth. The problem is that it’s not so obvious when you are the person suffering from low self-esteem. When insecurity consumes you, it is very, very difficult to see the negative impacts. You may know rationally that you just need to get back on the horse, but emotionally it feels impossible to face the obstacle again.

As a corollary, people with higher self-esteem are much more resilient in the face of rejection. As Jiang progressed through his 100 days of rejection, he began getting improbable yeses. These wins boosted his self-esteem and his confidence, leading to more wins.

This is where the magic happened. His confidence made it harder for people to say “no,” which in turn improved his probability of getting a yes. His newly found self-awareness gave him greater emotional control, which further improved his probability of getting a win.

Outward Bound, Spartan Races, military training, and Jia Jiang all deploy a similar formula for developing obstacle immunity. Participants are pushed through a gauntlet of progressively more difficult and fear-inducing challenges until everything else seems easy in comparison. It is here that emotional resilience is born.

Leveraging Adversity

To become rejection proof, you must be ready and open to learning and gaining resilience through the crucible of adversity and pain.

• You must choose to intentionally face your fear—obstacle immunity is a choice.
• You must actively seek out rejection by asking for what you want.
• You must push through a state of cognitive dissonance in which you cope with the emotional pain of perceived, potential, and real rejection while fighting the desire to go back to your old state of comfort and delusion.

After you push through dissonance and pain, on the other side you’ll gain a sense of mastery and confidence. This leads to higher self-esteem and improved performance.

Obstacle immunity means having the mental toughness and attention control to reach peak performance while maintaining a positive mind-set, no matter when adversity presents itself. In other words, no matter what your prospect says, objections cease to faze you. You bounce back quickly, deploy turn-around frameworks effortlessly, and move on to the next call when things don’t go your way.

Remember my prom story from earlier in the book? After going through the pain and indignity of getting dumped by my prom date, I vowed that it wouldn’t happen again. The easy decision would have been to skip the prom my senior year. No request, no rejection—easy. But I wanted to go to my senior prom, and I knew who I wanted to go with. That was enough motivation to find the courage to do it again.

This time, though, I took no chances. Rather than waiting until the last minute, I started the process of building my case with my target date early in the fall. I worked every angle I could to be in the same places at the same time she was. I even joined the same school clubs. I also got to know her friends and used them to prime her decision by planting the seeds about going to the prom with me.

I worked for months, step-by-step, to bend the probability of a win in my favor. By the time I asked her in January, I was certain she would say yes (her friends told me so). With this knowledge came confidence. There was no hesitation, no debate, and no objection. My yes number was 100 percent.

That year my date was the prom queen. She is still the love of my life, my best friend, and my wife. That date was the most important and life-changing sale I ever closed.

Things that challenge you change you. Adversity is, and always will be, your greatest teacher.