The Psychology of Avoidance: What I learned from doing daily cold calls for a month

It didn’t start well. My commitment to going from?cold plunges?in February to cold calls in March was floundering. I couldn’t get my Google Voice set up properly, I kept “running out of time,” and who on earth was I supposed to reach out to? I had very good reasons (read subconscious excuses) for why the first few days were a fail.

Once I broke through my “technology glitches,” then it was the revenge of the answering machines. For over a week, I just got voicemail after voicemail. This is going great!?Why?am I doing this again?

And then it happened. I finally got a hold of someone named Bryan. Except that as soon as Bryan picked up the phone, he very quickly?hung up on me. Wow — cold calling is the best! In fact, the distinct feeling after being hung up on was, “I just did something wrong.” Ick.

I’ve been avoiding picking up the phone in my business for years. Not to say I won’t talk to someone, but when it comes specifically to my?sales?process, I’ve been surreptitiously hiding behind my keyboard trying to answer questions from potential clients in email threads in order to avoid getting hung up on by the thousand and one other Bryans to whom I’m just a faceless bother. After all, don’t people prefer getting their questions answered over email or LinkedIn? And besides, it seemed to be working — business has been good.

I knew last month when I?started cold plunging?that if I was going to continue to work on embracing discomfort by doing 30-day challenges, I was going to inevitably have to move from a physical challenge to an emotional challenge. Like the emotion of getting flatly rejected. So I decided, with the same level of dread I had before?my first cold plunge, to dive in.

The next few days, I shook off the dust from Bryan and eventually got into conversations with a few people. It wasn’t all Skittles and unicorns — there were some?awkward moments?as I tried to rekindle contacts I hadn’t spoken with for years — but I started to glimpse the power of just picking up the phone. More specifically, I started to glimpse the power of how it changed?me.

The Negative Reinforcement Trap

For all the many (many!) instances where I turned to the comfort of an email exchange instead of a phone call, I slowly and unintentionally trained my brain to believe that the solution to the pique of anxiety I felt at the idea of picking up the phone was simply to type out a response instead. And like magic, it almost always worked — that whiff of anxiety was gone like a puff of smoke.?That’s because, with negative reinforcement, it?does?work…at least in the short term.?But what?is?negative reinforcement?

Negative reinforcement is when you’re feeling a difficult emotion (anxiety, awkwardness, embarrassment, etc.), and then?avoid?the situation that you believe is causing the anxiety, at which point the anxiety goes away. In other words, negative reinforcement is about?removing?negative emotions by?avoiding?difficult situations. Your emotions go from negative to neutral and your brain says, “Phew! That worked.”

That’s why it’s so insidious — because avoidance actually works. But the emotional Trojan horse that brings relief comes with a hidden surprise —?the relief is only temporary and the more you do it the bigger the fear and anxiety become.

So it simultaneously works?and?it causes a bigger problem.

The bigger problem is that it slowly trains your brain to?avoid?the situation that it believes is causing the anxiety in the first place — which over over time, makes you more and more anxious about the thing that at first you were only mildly afraid of. In other words,?the more you avoid, the more the anxiety grows.?Hence, why I kept avoiding sales calls?more and more?over time. It was as if calling became some oversized emotional Gruffalo — with “terrible teeth in its terrible jaws.” Meanwhile, my brain was happy as a comfortable clam — just so long as my sales follow-up happened at the stroke of a key, not the dial of a number. Which brings us back to my daily cold calls.

How To Stop Avoiding The Thing You’re Scared Of

Once I actually just started calling and?getting into conversations?with people, the emotional Gruffalo simply slunk away. To say I was shocked at how much better the experience of calling was?for them?would be an understatement. In hindsight, it was obviously better to answer their questions in a dynamic, in-person way, where they could understand at a much deeper level what my course was about, what the experience of coaching would be like, or how I could help their company.

But each time before my daily cold call challenge, it always started the same — rising anxiety, followed by an urge to procrastinate, followed by me just dialing the number while my heart beat thumped louder. Then as the phone rang and eventually someone picked up, it often took a few minutes to relax into the conversation as I bumbled through my first few sentences of why I was calling. But inevitably, my nervous system would re-regulate, calm down, and focus on being helpful, which is the reason I called in the first place. Confidence came from?doing,?not thinking.?It’s hard to outthink fear. I had to act?despite?my fear and?in the moment of doing,?the fear melted away.

This is the deep challenge of anxiety. We want to feel confident?before?we act.?But we only feel confident?after?we act.?The anxiety?itself?serves up the solution — that if we avoid, we’ll feel much better.?This is true in the short term and a tragic lie in the long term. The more we avoid, the scarier it gets.?The more we act, the more confident we become.

The Confidence Switch

For me, there was something of a turning point on?Day 21?(starting at minute 4:05). It took a while, but eventually I started having (dare I say it) a little bit of fun. What seemed like a big awful thing to avoid became the obvious go-to choice. It’s not to say I’m suddenly some kind of fearless cold caller — that may still take some time. But what?has?happened is that every time someone reaches out about my course, my coaching, or my speaking, my?default?suggestion is that we hop on a call. This may seem like a small difference, but to my brain, it makes?all?the difference. I’m retraining my nervous system to embrace what it was formerly avoiding — to walk into the discomfort even when I don’t feel like it — and the more I do it, the more confident I feel.

Think of one thing you avoid — one area in which you’d like to have more confidence. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it does matter that you avoid it. Every time you do, you feed that insatiable anxiety monster, which keeps telling you that your safest bet is to keep avoiding.

We all do this. It’s just human nature.

But human nature comes with a switch. You can override that avoidance response and — in the very moment of feeling anxious — act instead. It’s acting?in the face of fear?that will slowly build up your confidence. Try doing something that you normally avoid for 30 days and see how your confidence grows.

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek,” said Joseph Campbell.

I’m afraid there’s no other way.

For me, the calls that used to feel like a big deal have started to feel, well, normal.

And once something feels normal, what is there to be afraid of?

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Also published on the?Brain by Design blog?and?in The Startup?on May 2, 2023.