Entrepreneurs, Here’s How You Face Up To Your Fear Of Failure

Via the Young Entrepreneurs Council

Entrepreneurs often struggle when they start doing cold calls. They hate calling others to drum up business and they’re not good at it, either. Their approach is too timid and they give up too soon when they encounter resistance; they don’t manage objections well, says Steli Efti is the CEO of Close.io, sales software that helps SaaS companies close more deals and make more sales. Here he offers some tips on you can become fearless.

Fear Of Failure

You may be someone who is audacious, bold and an outgoing person. But when asked to sell on the phone you turn into a frightened little chicken. The cause is obvious: fear of failure. You are scared of rejection. Even though you may rationally understand that this fear did not serve a positive purpose, you may still be stuck in it.

Turning Fears Into Reality

So, how can you get unstuck? Challenge yourself to a new task: to fail with every call. For the rest of the day, call people and make them hang up on him. Your mission is to fail miserably. By emotionally internalizing what you already know mentally by making failure real will lead to the breakthrough in your behavior.

Changing Your State

“Now go get’em. Close deals. Take everything you’ve got and make it happen. What will cause the transformation isn’t new insight since you already know it is just fear holding you back, but transferring that insight from a logical, rational level into an instinctive insight.

Use These Techniques If You Feel Anxious About Cold Calling

1. Address the issue and verbalize it.
2. Instead of trying to avoid failure, aim for failure.
3. Be creative about different ways to successfully achieve failure.
4. Have fun. It will unlock the secret vault of sales power deep inside of you.
5. Once you experience what failure feels like, realize there is nothing to be afraid of.
6. Now crush it and see how you can perform once you aim for success.

A version of this article was originally published on LinkedIn. The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.