All day, everyday I teach small business owners to stop being afraid of something. Stop being afraid of calling strangers, of public speaking, of networking, of increasing their prices, of asking for coffee dates and of course, the big one, of asking for the sale.
When I read this article about a startup entrepreneur named Jia Jiang who was crushed when he couldn’t get funding for his startup and how he turned it into a challenge to get over his FEAR of rejection, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He decided that the fear was actually worse than the asking. To desensitize himself and get over the fear, he took a challenge to get rejected 100 days in a row. He then videotaped each rejection and put it on his blog post. http://www.entresting.com/blog/100-days-of-rejection-therapy/
Jia only had 3 criteria for his challenges: 1. Ethical (no lying or marriage-undermining) 2. Legal 3. Doesn’t defy the law of physics
Some of his more interesting rejection challenges that he filmed were:
Rejection 34: Find a Job in One Day
Rejection 35: Ask a Girl Out to Dinner
Rejection 38: Challenge a CEO to a Staring Contest
Rejection 100 – Interview President Obama (which he’s still waiting for)
He became a sort of cult hero because people who felt the bitter agony of the fear of rejection were asking him to take on a rejection challenge (like asking a girl out to dinner) that they were deathly afraid of.
What could you do in your business if you were desensitized to rejection? I let my imagination run free here. If you weren’t afraid of rejection, you would:
1. Triple Your Prices Overnight Without Changing A Single Thing In Your Offer
The belief that we will starve if we ‘price ourselves out of the market’ is such a false one as I’ve seen in the past year. It’s probably the single biggest rejection that people fear.
2. Ask More People For Coffee
If you could double the number of coffee dates you have with people you can potentially help, do you think that might increase the number of clients you get?
3. Public Speak More And To Bigger Crowds
If you could get over the fear of rejection on masse where the fear of ‘what if they ask me something I don’t know’, ‘what if there’s a jerk in the audience who embarrasses me’, ‘what if I freeze up and don’t remember what I know’, then you’ll be raking in hundreds of more clients.
4. Make a Million Dollars Without Neglecting Your Family
If you got over just the ASSUMPTION of massive success equaling the rejection of your loved ones, where do you think your business could go?
5. Be Your True Silly Self
If you were not afraid of rejection or humiliation from your business peers and clients, would you be sillier and let out your fun side more? Would you be rolling more with laughter or wear red lipstick or thigh high boots? The sad truth is that you would be even more successful in business if you did.
What’s going to be your rejection challenge for this week?
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Related articles

• How to Make Yourself Rejection-Proof (inc.com)
• 5 Tips to Reduce the Fear of Public Speaking (psychologytoday.com)