About a year and a half ago I moved from the world of
psychology and mental health into the world of recruitment, sales and corporations.
They are two very different places. When I started recruitment, I genuinely thought
I could get the edge on other consultants and competitors simply through my knowledge
of psychology and human behaviour. In all honesty, this just hasn’t been the
case. All apart from one area – the mind set in cold calling.
Cold calling is probably one of the most anxiety provoking
things a human being can do. No one likes cold callers. I hate them, people that
knock on my door, people that call me off a private number, I really hate them.
You know nothing about me, why in god’s name did you chose me out of all the
people in the world to sell your hair drier to.
This is what goes through my head each time I pick up the
phone, smile, and dial. I am the enemy, the time waster, the awkward person
phrasing a question in a way that is difficult to shut down, keeping you on the
awkward call way longer than you anticipated. I know the person down the other
end of the line doesn’t me to call them. They are high level executives making
really important decisions on an hourly basis and they definitely don’t want to
hear from me.
When I or any recruiter starts thinking like this, they have
already lost….
One of the things my mentor said to me the other day made
all the sense in the world. “You can talk yourself out of making a phone call”.
I quickly realised within my first couple of months that any successful
recruiter is going to have to constantly challenge their negative automatic
thoughts. When these anxiety provoking thoughts start to creep in I challenge
them with the following questions:
1.
Will I die by making this phone call
2.
Genuinely, what is the worst that can happen if
this call doesn’t go well
3.
I am not doing business with this company
currently, so it genuinely doesn’t matter if this call goes poorly
4.
They have no idea how I can help them, this isn’t
a cold call, this is a chance for me to explain how we can help their business
going forward
5.
They get calls like this all the time, it comes
with their territory
The worst thing a cold caller can do is not pick up the
phone. If you talk yourself out of one call due to fear, and then follow it up
with the behaviour of not picking up the phone to make a difficult call, you
are on a slippery slope. You won’t pick up the second difficult call and it
escalates to you starting to avoid mediocrely difficult calls.
All of this experience revolves around the core ideas of
CBT. How you think (cognition) and how you behave (behaviour).
To implement these psychological ideas and improve your
calls and confidence, you must see yourself as a scientist conducting an
experiment. Here’s how your experiment should go: when you go to make a
difficult call, note down all the difficult automatic negative thoughts that
come to mind, note down all the imagery and horrible things you think could
happen, note your level of anxiety and fear out of 10 (10 being the worst
anxiety and fear you ever experienced to 0, no fear at all). Then, after all
this is noted, make the call.
After the call, go back over all the difficult things
negative things that went through your mind and see if they actually materialised.
Also, now note your level of fear and anxiety. It’s probably less than the
number before the call, mostly because it didn’t end up being an anxiety
provoking experience at all, or at least less anxiety provoking. Essentially if
a funny way, making the call cures your anxiety.
If you look around
your sales office/recruitment office, you will notice that the people that are
not afraid to pick up the phone are the same people that have been there years
and years. They have experienced thousands of phone calls and carried out these
experiments over and over again, although probably not consciously, but have
unconsciously realised that in making a call, their fears and anxiety provoking
thoughts never ever materialised.
My advice is simple, check the thoughts that go through your
head. Check if they are accurate? Do the thing you are afraid of. Make the
tough calls, that’s where the biggest business is, if some client tells you to “fuck
off”; it’s not your fault, you have no idea what was going through their head
that day. The most successful recruiter if your office would have gotten the
same response. People have bad days.
Recruitment is a game for confident, hardworking, funny and
positive thinking individuals. Successful recruiters, genuinely share all four
traits. They don’t care about being rejected, they take humour from it. Being
told to “fuck off” (rarely happens, in fact, it has happened to me once in one
and a half years) makes them laugh, they put down the phone and announce “good
chat”. This is a mind-set they developed over time, the game has moulded them. They
unconsciously understand CBT. They have carried out enough experiments.
