Fear makes your list shorter

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #29

A guy told me on a call that his outreach wasn't generating appointments.

Then he corrected himself before I could get a word in.

"Actually, I don't even do outreach."

He's got thirty-some years in his field, a phone full of people who would take his call today, and most of them would be glad to hear from him. He's got a good offer, priced fairly. And an empty pipeline.

He wasn't proud of it.

I could hear it in his voice. He'd been ruminating over this for a while.

So I asked him what was getting in the way. He gave me the answer everybody gives.

Time. He was busy. Client work.

Huh?

I don't know about you, but I know a lame excuse when I see one. Even when I give one to myself...and I'm mighty good at it.

Here's what that has to do with you and doing hard things, like getting our outreach done.

You've got your excuses, too. Maybe a whole notebook full for easy reference should you need one.

And there's also a story to accompany your notebook of excuses.

That you're undisciplined. That you're not good at sales. That maybe you simply don't want it badly enough, or you'd have done it by now.

That story costs you money. But the money isn't the worst of it.

The worst of it is that you believe the story.

You're not lazy. I'm sure you're working your tail off.

You're in the wrong emotional state.

I teach a concept in the Consulting Launchpad called the Emotional Whirlwind™. It's the first lesson in Module 2, and I tell students it's the most important idea in the program.

Picture two funnel clouds, joined together, sort of like Claude's really bad image here...

Shame at the very bottom. Love and joy at the top. Everything else stacked in between.

Down low you've got despair, guilt, inadequacy, anxiety, fear. Move up and you hit overwhelm, frustration, doubt, boredom. This is the primal zone.

This is where your flight or flight states live. It's where you get tunnel vision and your options become very slim.

Barbara Fredrickson has spent her career studying positive emotions. Her central finding is that negative emotions narrow what she calls your thought-action repertoire. Positive ones broaden it.

Plain version: fear shortens your list of moves.

Not your willingness to use them. The list itself.

You've felt this in your body. Somebody stands there waiting while you try to remember a name you've known for twenty years, and it's gone. Just gone. Then they walk away and it comes back to you in the parking lot.

The name never left. Your access to it did.

So when you sat down that Tuesday to write to somebody who could genuinely use your help, and you couldn't find the words worth sending... you were blinded by your emotional state.

And you concluded you were bad at outreach.

Think about what that does over a couple of years. You do pipeline work almost exclusively when you're worried about pipeline. Which means you do your most important work from the worst possible emotional state. Every time. Then you judge your ability by whatever you managed to produce down there in the negative area, the primal part of the emotional whirlwind.

It's possible that most consultants would trade an appendage for the network you've already got. You're not short on people. You're short on access to your own good ideas at the moment you need them.

So keep climbing up the whirlwind where you reach interest, hope, gratitude, pride, serenity, and on up to joy. This is the prosperity zone.

That's the zone where you can see the blessings and options the creator has for you, ready for you to choose. There are no limits here!

Here's the part that changed how I think about all of this.

Everybody's living somewhere in their emotional whirlwind. Right now. You are, too, as you're reading this.

I teach it so consultants can be sure they know their zone before they do any pipeline building or client facing work.

And you can use this concept to figure out where a client is, too. A prospect at overwhelm buys differently than one at serenity, and if you can't tell them apart you'll say the wrong thing to both.

So here's what I do now. Three things...

First, I locate myself in my whirlwind before I work. Not "how am I doing." That question doesn't help. The best question is where am I in the emotional whirlwind right now, and I make myself pick an actual word. Frustrated. Anxious. Bored. Interested. It takes four seconds and it helps me decide what work I do next.

Second, I don't do pipeline work from the primal part of the whirlwind. If I'm down there, I go do something else and come back. Delivery work, a walk, the dogs, a stack of email that doesn't matter. The work isn't the problem. The altitude is. Doing marketing and sales work from anxiety is like swinging a golf club while somebody yells at you. You can do it. You won't like the result, and then you'll blame your swing.

Third, I take the smallest step up that's available. This is the one people get wrong. You can't reach from despair all the way up to joy. Nobody can. If you do, it's probably illegal, and it's how you end up feeling worse and reaching for something to numb it.

But you can get from frustration to interest, and interest is the first rung on the good side of that map. Curiosity is cheap. Ask one honest question about somebody's business and mean it. That's enough to move you up an emotional level or two.

Do that, and the message that felt like you were chiseling it out of the frozen tundra on Tuesday takes eleven minutes on Thursday. Same person (you). Same list. Same offer.

Different altitude. Different attitude. Different results.

Do this and your outreach problem stops being a character flaw and becomes a location. Locations can be changed. Character flaws are a life sentence, which is exactly why that story was so expensive.

And that's the part I'd want you to keep. Prosperity isn't a number you finally hit. It's the altitude you live at in your emotional whirlwind while you're building.

Plenty of people hit the number from the bottom half of that map and never once enjoyed a day of it.

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
– Marie Curie

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #28
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #27

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🔎 15 Things I Know At 60 That I Wish I Knew At 30
🔎 The “Design My Hybrid Trust-Building Event” Prompt

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...