Masterclass 1 - Overcoming Rejection and Reducing Stress in Sales, with Larry Stybel
Our latest webinar was ‘Overcoming rejection and reducing sales stress’ and you can watch the 27-minute recording here.
Rejection is one of the most common negative emotions we experience in daily life - and it’s happened to everyone who’s ever worked in sales.
You’ve definitely experienced it if you’ve ever had a deal shot down, watched an idea get crushed, or lost a pitch to a competitor. And boy can it be painful!
Which is why we were over the moon that Larry Stybel - global expert on rejection - was our guest for this webinar.
Automated transcript
Webinar 1 - Overcoming rejection and reducing stress in sales (recording), with Larry Stybel
Alastair Cole 0:00
Welcome to the webinar everybody, we'll get started now!
I’m Alastair Cole, Co-Founder of Revenue Coach and your host for this afternoon’s session. Revenue Coach is a platform of sales technology products that creates sustainable performance in sales while also delivering rapid results. We recently created 4x higher win rates for a technology client, while reducing sales stress by 24% and tripling the levels of happiness for their sales reps.
This is the first in the new series where we explore some of the current challenges in the workplace especially for sales professionals. Todays’ topic is 'Overcoming rejection & reducing sales stress'. Rejection is one of the most common negative emotions we experience in daily life - and it’s happened to everyone who’s ever worked in sales.
I'm delighted to be joined today by Larry Seibel, who is a licensed doctoral level psychologist from Harvard and a world leading expert in rejection. Larry is also the President and Co-Founder of a global career management, leadership development firm, Stybel, Peabody Associates, Inc.; an entrepreneur in residence at a private equity firm, and has been writing regular columns in Psychology Today since 2011. Thank you very much for joining us. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Larry Stybel 1:36
Thank you, Alastair.
Alastair Cole 1:43
Now, I'm excited to hear from you about why rejection happens to us, how it affects us and - crucially, what we can do to build resilience and overcome it. And I want to just take a couple of minutes to learn about you as a human being for our audience. And I've got rapid fire questions 'Starter for 10'. The first one is, what's the worst job you've ever had?
Larry Stybel 2:12
Oh, absolutely the worst job I ever had. I was in high school. And I lived in New York City and I had an opportunity to work for the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and to be a hot dog vendor. And you think that would be a really cool job. The problem is when you're up in the grandstands the stairs are very narrow and you've got a tray of very hot, hot dogs in steaming water. And if I missed a step and fell, I would get burnt. That was the worst job I had. Okay, but it was great for a great conversation piece that was part of the New York Yankees.
Alastair Cole 3:06
Yeah, amazing. What's your ultimate sandwich?
Larry Stybel 3:13
My ultimate sandwich again, being from New York City it would be a kosher hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut.
Alastair Cole 3:23
What's the one thing you own that you should really throw out?
Larry Stybel 3:28
Right next to me is a big jar of jelly beans. And I shouldn't be throwing those out.
Alastair Cole 3:37
Okay, scary the scariest animal on the planet
Larry Stybel 3:48
In my town there's something there like dogs - I was gonna say hyenas. But then they're not - but they're running around. And they do attack people. So I'm trying to look up how to defend yourself if you get attacked by one of these animals. I bet I forgot the name of them.
Alastair Cole 4:15
Yeah, that sounds terrifying. Apples or oranges?
Larry Stybel 4:19
Apples.
Alastair Cole 4:22
Have you ever asked anybody for their autograph?
Larry Stybel 4:26
No.
Alastair Cole 4:29
What do you think happens when we die?
Larry Stybel 4:35
Nothing. Okay, we go into nothing. Nothing
Alastair Cole 4:41
What's your favourite movie?
Larry Stybel 4:46
Oh, I have too many favourite movies. But I certainly love the Star Wars saga. I keep I keep going back to those, yeah.
Alastair Cole 4:59
What's your favourite smell?
Larry Stybel 5:04
Favourite smell would be peppermint.
Alastair Cole 5:09
And last one, you've got one song to listen to for the rest of your life. What is it?
Larry Stybel 5:20
Okay. I just say ‘Stand by me’.
Alastair Cole 5:25
Okay, great. Thank you for those rapid fire answers. Really fascinating - I love the hot dogs.
Obviously, you're here to inform us and educate us about rejection. And I was I was thinking about getting ready for today. And there's just so many different ways I've been rejected, like being ghosted by people - not everybody who's saying they're coming to the webinar, turning up. Being turned down for a pitch process, overlooked for promotion - there's so many different things. And they, when I think back to them, I kind of, yeah, it feels very painful, really painful. So can you can you tell us a little bit about why it's so painful? How does it happen? Why does it affect us physically and emotionally? And why is it so painful? Larry?
Larry Stybel 6:13
Well, yeah, let's, you know, I'm a psychologist, but let me give you a very basic lesson on neurology.
So if everybody would just put your fingers to to your spine, and then have your spine, run up your spine, towards your head, and then there's a point where your spine appears to disappear inside your cranium. When you have reached that point, just raise your hand.
And, okay, so that point is, is the back of your brain, and it's where the limbic system is located. And within the limbic system, there are, there you have, you have something the size of a walnut, it's called the amygdala. And you have an amygdala on the left side of your brain, and you have the amygdala on the right side of your brain. And the amygdala is, although it's small, it is a very powerful and important part of your brain and all mammals’ brains. Number one is, it's constantly alert to danger - it never sleeps.
The second thing that about the amygdala is anything that has really been very negative. It stores in its memory bank, so that when something similar happens it it immediately erupts. Finally, the amygdala thinks in in binary terms, when I mean binary, I'm thinking about 01 Winner loser, yes, no survive, die, this that. And when you when you get rejected, it stimulates your amygdala. And your amygdala begins chirping. The chirp sometimes turns into rumination. According to one survey, 99% of the respondents have said that they they ruminate from time to time. And the 1% probably didn't read the question correctly.
We all ruminate. And the rumination is coming from your amygdala. And it's saying you failed. You got rejected. They didn't like you. They didn't like your product, you will fail. Another very subtle version of amygdala speaking in binary terms is the answer is it says you could get fired. You could lose your job. You You could be thrown out of your apartment because of non payment and ended up living on the street and desperate. That could happen. Now. When I say it might happen, it could happen. You live in what Alastair what part of London Do you live in?
Alastair Cole 9:33
I'm in East London.
Larry Stybel 9:35
Okay, so a plane taking off from Heathrow Airport could lose direction could land on in your building in East London and kill you within the next five minutes. Isn't that correct?
Alastair Cole 9:56
Yeah, technically yeah. Yeah, I can see one outside the window, so yeah.
Larry Stybel 10:00
You've said technically correct. So your your amygdala is the one who was saying this could happen, this might happen, what you your response was with your cerebral cortex, you said technically correct. Because the cerebral cortex, however, can think in terms of probabilities. And so when I raised the question, yeah, could/might it happen? The answer has to be ‘Yes’. Because you can't say good never happened. your cerebral cortex that, technically yes. What that meant was, the probability of that happening is so low, I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.
And so that's the kind of dialogue that's going on with rejection - your amygdala is flaring up and saying, danger, danger, you might get fired, you might not be able to support your children, you might be a loser, and your cerebral cortex fires back. Technically, you're correct. Thank you for the warning. But what's the probability that this loss is going to be the end of my career.
I said before, your amygdala never sleeps, but your cerebral cortex requires seven to nine hours of sleep. So if you are in a stressful situation, or you're in a family situation, where over the next three hours, you're getting six or less hours of sleep, your cerebral cortex is disabled, and may not be able to come back as quickly or as effectively as no as usually possible. So part of the your, your reaction to rejection that will have to do with your how good your sleep is.
Alastair Cole 11:52
So if we, if I'm better slept, am I able to handle rejection better? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so I get the plane, you know, the plane landing in my house example. In the workplace? You know, is rejection at work less potent than rejection of survival? Or can rejection in the workplace feel just as painful or just as damaging as outside the workplace?
Larry Stybel 12:26
I think it depends on the kind of industry that you're in. For salespeople it depends on what they're selling. If I'm selling fuller brushes, and each brush costs $29, being rejected by somebody on my brushes makes doesn't make a big deal. If I'm selling a complicated technology system, to a Fortune 500 company, that is $3 million in billings that could be $100,000 of revenue for me and put me over my target. Rejection is going to be a big deal for me.
Alastair Cole 13:12
Totally. And then, you know, that's then in the territory of, you know, not getting a promotion or getting fired or whatever. So I get that with a big ticket. I saw your article on Psychology Today about reframing rejection. And is that is that one of the the things that you would recommend - about how we can handle those rejections in work? And if not, what we're how do we build resilience? How can we build resilience as a seller?
Larry Stybel 13:39
Let me suggest a technique for talking to your amygdala that will help build resilience. So first, I have to tell you a story.
There was a psychologist who gave a talk. And a few days later, he gets a letter in the mail. It says, “You dirty rotten so and so, I'm going to come over and kill you and your family”. He looks at the zip code of the letter and it's the next zip code to his home. He goes to the police and he says, “I just got this threatening letter - what are you going to do?”.
And the police said “Nothing. We don't know who signed the letter. 99.99% of the people who write these crazy letters never actually follow through. So there's nothing we can do.”.
Well, that doesn't satisfy him, so he he feels very stressed. He doesn't believe in guns, so he buys a baseball bat. And that night, his wife and his children go upstairs to sleep. And he sits down on the couch with a baseball bat between his legs waiting for the intruder to come in and look course the intruder doesn't come in. Next night he does the same thing. He's he stands he stays up all night with a baseball bat between his legs. Third night, same thing. Now meantime he hasn't slept in three days. His brain is very foggy. The fourth night he says the following things.. “Alastair you are in a stressful situation, but you've been in more stressful situations in your life and you have survived. Alastair the police have said 99% of the times the people write these letters never do anything. So you have you only have a 1% chance of getting killed tonight. Alastair two years from now, you this is going to be a joke that you're going to be telling at a party. Go to bed. Yeah.”
And he went to bed. Next morning, he was very interested in why he was talking to himself in this way, and why it was so effective. And so he called this term ‘self distancing’. And he began doing research on self distancing, and how to how to talk to yourself when you're rejected, how to talk to yourself when you're under stress. And he's published several articles on his research. And if anybody would like copies of the research, I'll be glad to send copies of the research but it goes something like this…
Your amygdala is chirping Alastair, you could be fired Alastair, you could miss your quota Alastair you, you could be thrown out of your house, your wife will leave you, you will lose the respect of your peers. That's the amygdala talking. Again, it's talking in binary terms. Could/might.
Self distancing is a technique where you start talking to yourself as though you were in the third there's someone else in your brain, third person, I call it the ‘Little Professor’ - somebody who knows you very well, but who's impartial and so addressing you in the third person, again talking about the past, the present, the future. So past Alastair: you lost the sale, you may not make this month's quota. You know you're gonna get some shit from your boss. You fear you might get fired. Alastair, you have been in more difficult, more threatening situations in the past. Remember, this time and this time and this time and you survived? What's the probability that your boss will fire you? Because you you missed your quota for this month? Is it zero? Is it 50%? Is it 90%? Alastair a year from now, you have you now have six months for the remainder of the year to find another customer and get points, what's the probability you'll be able to do that?
Alastair Cole 18:37
It makes sense Larry, like the way you described. I was almost as if I was having a rational conversation with my amygdala, right? In a very structured way. Yeah, in a structured way. And you know, those things will make sense to me. But in that moment, you think that that pitch that you might lose or that deal you can't close - it feels like that is the be all and end all. And it's the most important thing. Is there a reason why that thing that you're kind of working on right now or it feels like it's the whole world?
Larry Stybel 19:15
It's, you know, because your commitment, you you put a lot of yourself into this. I'd like to in the cite in the Psychology Today piece that we wrote and again, anybody who wants a copy of the piece, just send me an email, we'll be glad to give it to you. JK Rowling’s manuscript for Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers. Can you imagine that? Harry Potter was rejected 12 times before a publishing house and actually this was not a very well known publishing house finally accepted it. Now the Harry Potter franchise is valued at somewhere around $7.7 billion, when you look at all the film rights and all that stuff, but she was rejected 12 times.
The family of Anne Frank, they were rejected 15 times for the Diary of Anne Frank. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's book was rejected 38 times. That's part of being an author, part of being an actor. Part of being a salesperson is rejection. And don't look at it as this. Is it an anomaly? It's part of what you bought into when you went made a career in sales?
Alastair Cole 20:41
Yeah. Okay, so, so love that. And it made me think of something else. So a lot of a lot of people suggest and we've talked about in the past: activity going to try and get rejected, so chase the ‘No’s - do you buy into that approach that by being more rejected, more often, you kind of get a thick skin. Is that true? Is that something we should be doing?
Larry Stybel 21:10
I do think that there is something in cognitive behaviour therapy, where you actively try to precipitate the things that you fear. And it does build up resistance. So it's called ‘Exposure response prevention’. And as you actually look to get rejected, and then experience it and say, “Okay, I survived”. I think one of the best ways to be more effective in dating other people is to get rejected. And the more you get rejected, the better you're going to be. Yeah. So I would say yes.
Alastair Cole 21:58
Well, that's good, because we've been kind of practising it ourselves and pushing it. One of the questions that we've had in from people was, was there an exercise that you could recommend that you could do every day to build your rejection muscle?
Larry Stybel 22:12
Well, I would I, again, I think the self distancing technique would be a very important thing to do. I also want to go back to the to the article, because it does talk about a very specific thing that you could do, I mentioned, somebody named Joseph Sugarman died. He had homes in Las Vegas and Maui, he owned a Ferrari, he owned a small plane, he made a lot of money. On the other hand, he invested in anti-ageing potions and a $1,500 mousetrap. And so he had both successes and rejections. Towards the end of his life, he said, “If you go out and do something, and you're successful, hey, you won. But if you go out and do something, and you failed, you, you learn something, that means you haven't lost.”.
And the idea is that if you're rejected, have you learned something from it? Let me talk about myself. My core thing that my company sells is executive level, outplacement, or career management - we’re hired by human resources. So I have spent years and years cultivating human resources and trying to sell into human resources. I mean, I've been President of the Human Resources Association, I write for HR people, I sell into HR people, and you know what, I usually get rejected.
And it's been extremely frustrating that the group that I'm most interested in partnering with is the group that's most likely to reject me. And then I stopped and said, “Okay, what am I learning?" Maybe what I'm learning is that HR are not my kind of people, that I'm not the right person.”. On the other hand, I find I relate very well to CEOs. They like what I have to say - an HR doesn't. So I started not trying to network with a with HR people anymore. I'm networking with CEOs, much more effective. Okay. So, failure to me was a learning experience.
Alastair Cole 24:39
Yeah, yeah. But that's fascinating. I think we're at the end of our time now. Larry, I'm absolutely going to go and research ‘Exposure response prevention’. It was good to hear the stuff about the amygdala and ‘self distancing’, and the ‘Little professor’ - real take aways.
Larry Stybel 24:59
Let me suggest one more thing before we leave. And that is just go on to youtube.com. And then Google Steve Jobs commencement. Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Yale University that's been downloaded by, like 38 million times. It's the best commencement speech I've ever heard. And in that talk, he talks about two rejections that were very critical and painful for him. One is he dropped out of college, he never completed his degree. And then second, he was fired as president of Apple. And again, he using the framework we've been talking about, it was initially extremely painful. But then he looked back on it and said, this was actually a very good learning opportunity. And I would not have been as successful as I've become, had it not been for those rejections.
Alastair Cole 26:05
Yeah, I've seen some of it, and it's very good. So if anybody wants the links for that, or any of the articles that we've talked about, that Larry has written, or they can reach out to me or Kiran or Larry on LinkedIn.
Or if you want to know a bit more about any of the Revenue Coach products - to build sustainable performance in sales - you can hook us up on LinkedIn.
I’d just like to say thank you very much Larry - you've kicked off a new series for us, which is really exciting. And, and I'm glad that we had, you know, a good number of people tune in. We'll be sharing the recording later for those that couldn't make it. We'll close out there.
Thank you very much, Larry. Thank you.
Larry Stybel 26:55
Thanks for having me.
Alastair Cole 27:00
Yeah, absolute pleasure. Have a great weekend, and we'll pick up online everybody - bye!
