Coaching Practice: Dealing with Rejection

Click here to download the free ebook — Why Coaches Struggle

Click here to learn more about The Authority Program for Established Coaches.

Below is a transcription of this podcast:

I don’t like being rejected. We’re wired to feel rejection in a way that is parallel to having something threaten our survival. And when we combine the fear of rejection with our desire to have a thriving business then things can get really messy.

Years ago — in my business — I couldn’t figure out why things were okay but had seemingly plateaued.

I was talking with my coach one day, and it was like he hit me in the head with a frying pan. He pointed out that I had designed my entire system — how I got clients, how I did basically anything — to avoid getting a “no”.

Think about how limiting that is. Think about just how few of our opportunities are a “sure thing”. I was shocked to learn just how unwilling I was to take a risk. And this explained why my coaching business was stuck in a rut.

Because I was dealing with fear, the temptation was there to do more meditation or find ways to make myself emotionally tougher.

“Better call the shaman! I think there’s an old wound from my time in the womb that’s holding me back!”

But that was just another way to spin my wheels. You wanna know how you take the sting out of getting a “no”?

You create lots of other opportunities. You don’t need to sit in your therapist’s office and do a bunch of shadow work to overcome the time you were left out of a duck-duck-goose game back in preschool. You can simply learn how to create more opportunities so that the one in front of you isn’t so precious.

I knew I’d made amazing progress when I was sitting down to dinner with my family one night and we were giving thanks. As I reviewed my day, I remembered that I had gotten two rejections. But as I sat there, I felt zero charge around it because I had learned the skills and done the work to create a lot more opportunities.

Bottom line: The game isn’t to learn how to avoid “no”. And it’s not even about how to brace ourselves for the emotional punch of getting a “no” — it’s to create more opportunities so that “no” doesn’t matter.

If you’re a coach in my Authority Group for Coaches (and coach-types) you’ll learn that our fear of rejection is just an indicator that it’s time to create more opportunities. Instead of getting bogged down in our fears, we learn how to steer directly into them and get shit done.

Click here to download an eBook where I talk about some of the behaviors that kept my coaching practice stuck in The Struggle.

Tripp

PS Click here if you’d like to learn more about the Authority Group for Coaches (and coach-types).