You Know You Need to Make the Calls. So What's Stopping You?

Ten years of real estate sales opportunities I never got back.

Fired Over a Phone

My first sales job ended the way a lot of sales careers end. I got fired, and the reason was call reluctance.

It didn't look like fear. There was no racing heart, no sweaty palms, no dread. I would just go blank. Straight avoidance. No emotion at all. I didn't fight the phone. I simply didn't pick it up.

That's what makes this kind of reluctance so dangerous. When you don't feel anything, you can't see it. You tell yourself you're busy, or it's not the right time, or you'll get to it. Meanwhile the years go by.

What Finally Changed

The breakthrough wasn't a better script or more motivation. I already knew what to say. The problem was what I was trying to control.

I had been trying to manage what other people thought of me. Every call carried that weight. Once I stopped caring about controlling other people's opinions of me, the calls got easier to make.

Then I did the work around it. Understanding the root cause was step one. Doing the work on it was what made it stick.

What Happened Next

Why I Do This Work

Most people treat call reluctance as a skills problem. Hand someone better scripts, more accountability, another motivational talk. I know from experience that none of that touches the real issue.

Call reluctance has a root cause, and almost nobody knows where it comes from. Mine was the need to control what others thought of me. Yours might be something else entirely. That's why I use my AIDM process (Awareness, Identify, Define, Mindfulness) to find the root and address it from there.

I wish someone had done that for me in 1988.

If you know exactly what to do on the phone and still don't do it, you have a barrier worth understanding and working through. I lost ten years to mine. You don't have to.

— Wally Bressler