Some years ago when I was
overcoming my fear of cold calling residential home owners and other markets, I
told my former professor, Neil Smelser, then at
UC Berkeley, about my struggles. His response:
“I am fascinated by
your interest in "cold-calling" or what might be called self-defeating inhibitions. I assume
you are aware of the public opinion survey results that show a large proportion
of people (a majority, I don't know?) say that their biggest problem in life is speaking in public. I can't give you a reference, but it's consistent
with the magnitude of the issue you are tackling.”
In a series of journal articles and books, Roy Baumeister inquired
about the reasons for self-defeating behavior (the term self defeating
inhibitions is original with Smelser as far as I know). His conclusions: there
is no self-defeating urge as some have thought. Rather, self-defeating behavior is either a result of
trade-offs (enjoying drugs now at the expense of the future), backfiring
strategies (eating a snack to reduce stress only to feel more stressed), or the psychological strategy to escape the
self - where various self-defeating strategies are rather directed to
relieve the burden of selfhood
This idea of self defeating inhibitions and their causes throws a
fascinating light on the general problem of self repression, self sabotage and
any sort of self induced barrier that narrows one choices in life. Or better
yet, reduces you to a feckless and mostly irresolute agent, no matter what you
are promulgating. If one is seeking some
kind of success in any endeavor, to consciously or unconsciously bring yourself
down, or put your worst foot forward in performance is a recipe for staying in
the shadows.
Usually self defeating inhibitions describe people who make
terrible public speakers or actors held back by stage fright or nervous ninnies
trying to make a good impression in a job interview. But lately I have come to
see it also as a kind of failure in initiative taking. Either because of low
self confidence or negative projection of your self as an inadequate performer
in the eyes of your audience, you don’t
take yourself or your ideas seriously and as a result end up hiding out rather than
‘going for it’.
To self coach yourself out
of this predicament, 3 exercises have been prescribed
by Bill Knaus, a
writer at Psychology Today. These are for overcoming shyness and social anxiety
which in this context are closely allied to self defeating inhibitions. The one exercise he suggest (the others are
available at the link above) that I particularly liked he calls the ‘stepping
out of character’ exercise.
Go to a mall on a busy day; take off your watch. Ask twenty people
for the time of day. This is good exercise for addressing fear of stranger
rejection. A small percentage will ignore you but you can easily survive a
stranger passing on your request for the time.
“You may find that you start
nervous. You give yourself excuses to delay. Nevertheless, you push yourself to
do the exercise. You log the results of each encounter. You later look at your
findings. Here is what you are likely to find. Most will give you the time of
day. Some will walk past you as though you didn’t exist. A few may engage you
in a brief and pleasant conversation: http://bit.ly/Swt1nE
In my work with cold callers,
the evolution frequently reported is from extreme discomfort when calling
strangers without an introduction to a mild sense of unease when picking up the
phone to call a new prospect. For some, this change occurs quickly within a
week or two. For others, the butterflies never entirely vanish, but they become
more tolerable.
The fancy term for this in
psychology is “progressive desensitization”. And it is good to be reminded that
this happens, especially if you are still stuck behind your defenses. As Susan Jeffers said: “FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANYWAY.”
See her book with this same title.
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