In high school, I rarely got turned down for a date. I wasn’t good looking; didn’t have a flashy, fast car (had to borrow my dad’s station wagon); and didn’t have a lot of money. My secret was simple. I didn’t ask. I was afraid of rejection. Worse I was afraid of being laughed at and becoming part of a big joke among the girls at school like, “Do you know who asked me out?”

It was really all about my own self image which was poor at that time when it came to dating. I didn’t have a sister to guide me. I am the oldest of five brothers. There was no good reason to believe I would be rejected. The fear was all in my head and my imagination. I never considered the girl might say “yes”.

The result of my fear of rejection was a poor social life for most of high school until the second half of my senior year when I found courage. In college at WVU, I made the decision to not repeat my mistakes. I still feared rejection. The bigger fear was having a poor social life.

I began asking for dates and got rejected but didn’t die. It didn’t hurt like I expected. I continued to ask and began to hear more “Yes.” The dates didn’t always work out. Sometimes rejection didn’t come until the second or third date.

I had a social life. I made friends. Putting myself out there, building relationships, was fun. I learned valuable lessons like it is better to try and fail than to never have tried at all. When we try, even if we fail, we get valuable feedback about what didn’t work we can use to make changes in the future.

Surveys show the number one thing keeping people from success is fear of failure. So they don’t try new things. Because of fear of failure, people set low goals or have no goals.

Very few people have written goals. Writing down our goals clarifies them and puts them into our powerful subconscious mind. It makes it difficult to lie to ourselves and forces us to face reality. Written goals are more likely to be accomplished.

Fear keeps us from setting goals and writing them down, because then we would have to face our failures. Fear keeps us from taking a risk or trying something new. We don’t score on 100% of the shots we don’t take. We worry about what people will think. The reality is people think more about themselves than us. They don’t have to live with our regrets.

When in sales with a new product, I knew which customers I could go to who would try it. These were also the successful companies. I knew which companies would be the last to change due to their management and culture.

One company I worked with was so failure-averse that if an engineer tried something new and failed they were ridiculed and got branded as a failure. There was no upside to trying something new. There was always a downside. If an engineer had a problem doing what they always did, it was OK. If they had a problem when trying something new, they might never be promoted. Their organization was stuck in old ways of thinking and never progressed until one VP out of necessity forced a culture change.

The company quit punishing failure and began rewarding innovation. They encouraged truth and transparency. Reporting near misses was rewarded. A near miss is when an action could have resulted in an accident or injury and by luck no one was hurt.

My company at the time was part of an alliance with them. They tracked project cost, and if the alliance team (all companies involved) reduced costs for a quarter, the company shared their savings with all involved as long as there were no accidents or injuries. The money had to go to the employees of the companies, not the corporate treasury. This company succeeded in driving out fear and creating an environment where companies and individuals were rewarded for working together, and being innovative and safe. Everyone won, and their project was wildly successful.

Great leaders understand fear is not their friend. Fearful employees aren’t innovative. On our high school soccer team last year, early in the season we weren’t taking many shots; as a result we didn’t score many goals. Coach Joe recognized what was happening. He not only encouraged our boys to shoot, he gave them permission to fail. Joe knew success was a numbers game. Better to take 10 shots and miss with eight but score two goals than to take two shots and not score at all or maybe score once. The result was our team took more shots, had more failures and scored a lot more goals. Our team scored 31 goals in the last seven games of the season. This included the state tournament, where we won the state championship.

My dating rejection experience prepared me for corporate sales. Sales is a numbers game. We can do things to enhance success, but ultimately we will hear a lot of “No” for each “Yes.” Disney knows most people passing through the gift shop after riding an attraction won’t buy. Many will! Most fears aren’t based on logic or fact. Most of the time fear is;

False

Evidence

Appearing

Real

The internet isn’t full of truth. If we allow emotions to overcome logic or fact, we can be a victim.

In sales, we know people make decisions based on emotion and justify them with logic. This is probably true in romance and other areas of our lives.

How can we overcome fear? We can start by forcing ourselves to think first. Does this fear make sense? Is what I believe true? What is the best thing that can happen? What is the worst thing that can happen? Then we must act by doing what we fear.

Greg Kozera, gkozera@shalecrescentusa.com, is the director of marketing for Shale Crescent USA. He is a professional engineer with a master’s in environmental engineering and more than 40 years of experience in the energy industry. Greg is a leadership expert, high school soccer coach, professional speaker and author of four books and many published articles.