Go for No: Mastering the Courage to Ask with Andrea Waltz

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how to go for no, mastering the courage to ask. To drop these vibe bombs, I have brought Andrea Waltz in the EO Fire Studios. Andrea is the co-author of the bestseller, Go for No. A speaker and rejection expert, she inspires audiences to embrace failure, reprogram their mindset, and achieve extraordinary success through courageous asking. And today, Far Nation, we'll talk about why so many people are terrified of rejection, how to embrace no, how to stand out in a busy world and how to know if we're making progress and oh, so much more.

0:43And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Andrea and our sponsors. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10 % of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. If you wanna see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify.

1:21Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash on fire. Andrea, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What is up? I am so glad to be here. And well, I think most people would disagree with this. And that is that if you want to be really successful, you can't just be willing to fail. You've got to want to fail. Like you have to want to fail. If your head hits the pillow at night and you didn't fail at all, you never heard the word no, then you're not doing it right. Fire Nation, I love saying that all the magic happens outside of your comfort zone.

2:12Not some of the magic, all of the magic. So get uncomfortable, fail, struggle. And today's show is all about going for no, mastering the courage to ask. Andrea, so many people are terrified of rejection, but you believe it can lead to massive success. Tell us more. All you have to do is look at all of the people that become super successful, John, and all you need to do is look back at their story and what you always find when you peel away that outer layer of the glitz and the glamour and all the stuff that we see on the surface, all of the accolades and the fabulousness that is happening to them now, what you find is somebody who failed a lot, somebody who heard no a lot.

3:00They literally failed their way to success. So can success or can failure lead to success? Absolutely. It is a prerequisite. You can't have one without the other. If you want to succeed more, if you want to succeed faster, you've got to be willing and wanting to fail faster as well. And so the entire premise of Go4No is built on that model, on that general philosophy, and all successful people do it. Now, the problem is that we're all biologically wired to not want to fail, to not want to be rejected. And so what it really comes down to is having to fight our biology. And that means not only to change your thinking, but also to kind of hack around the physiology.

3:47You have to, when you get the butterflies, when you get the sick stomach, you've got to recognize it and then you've got to move on. How do we start? How do we get started embracing no? It all starts with your mindset, of course, like everything I think these days, right? Instead of thinking of no as the end, instead of interpreting it as what did I do wrong? This, I must have failed. This is not going well. This person doesn't like me. You've got to interpret it in a different way. And of course, when you get a no, your brain very quickly asks this question. It's the question that your brain is always asking.

4:29And that is, what does this mean? What does this mean? What does this mean for us? Does this mean it's over? Does this mean it's done? And as soon as your brain asks that question, you go to work answering it. And the answer that you usually give your brain is, yep, this is over. This didn't go the way we wanted. So instead, you've got to change your brain's interpretation, your thought process, and change it so that when you get that no, instead of thinking, I did something wrong, it's the end, you've got to see it as, oh, no, I didn't do anything wrong. This is part of the process. This is part of that failure that I have to experience.

5:08And then immediately move to the next step, which is, all right, so what do we do with it? What's next? How do I learn from this? Where's the data? How many, is this the 57th no I've gotten to this offer? Okay. That's telling me something. Maybe it's time that I change it up. Or is this the second no you've got to the offer and you have to say, well, it's way too early to make any decisions. I've got to keep going. I've got to keep doing it. And eventually this is going to help me find the evidence for whether I'm on the right track or the wrong track. So you've got to see the noses having value.

5:47Each and every no has tremendous value. But if you just interpret it as I'm on the wrong track, I did something wrong, and then you don't apply it, you don't look for the value, then it's just a big waste. Then it's just failure for failure's sake and you're not getting anything out of it. And by the way, sometimes, and I mean, sometimes the 54th no means you just haven't found the right person yet because you've heard so many stories of authors who got rejected up to hundreds of times for some of the biggest books that have ever been written. Same things with movies and other projects. I mean, it's crazy when you hear these failure stories, these stories of just massive rejection, and the person finally broke through because they did stick with it.

6:28So give us a real world example. Maybe you, Andrea, or maybe one of your clients embracing no, and then that turned into success. Give us that real world story. You brought up authors. So with our book, Go for No, we struggled for a couple of years and struggled getting the word out about the book. And this goes back like pre-Amazon. So this is in the dinosaur age where Amazon doesn't even exist yet. And we got a lucky break. We ended up with a book agent and the book agent showed our book all around to the biggest New York City publishers and finally came back to us and said, I have probably the biggest publisher in New York who has said, yes, they're going to publish your book, you guys.

7:18And we were so excited. And of course, we're having visions of our book in stacks at the airport bookstore, and we're all excited. And we're waiting for the offer now. This is a couple of weeks later, and we're waiting for the offer to get faxed over to our office, and it doesn't come. So we call the agent back, and we're like, hey, what's happening with the offer? And he said, hang on, let me call them and find out what's going on. And he called back and he said, you know, bad news, you guys, I'm so sorry this is happening. But at the very last minute, they just pulled the plug. They decided that your book would never sell over 5000 copies.

7:56And that's like a break even for them. And they're just not in the break even business. And so we realized in that moment that if it was going to be successful, it was going to be up to us that we weren't going to get any help from being in the airport bookstore or help from a publisher for that matter. So we said, okay, well, we'll do it ourselves. And with the audio book and the translations and everything right now, we estimate that we have just hit the one million copy mark with our book. Totally self-published, never been in bookstores besides Amazon. And that was just one really big no. Another good story, though, and this is something that I encourage people to do, And that is my friend Ray Higdon, who I know has been on EOF before.

8:42He made a decision and his decision was if he was going to be successful, he was going to fail more exactly as we prescribe. And so he set out to get 20 no's a day and he didn't care how he did it. He was just going to go. He was going to ask as many people as he could, as fast as he could, if they were open to taking a look at what his business was. And he did it. He said, I got 20 no's a day. And sometimes it was really hard. But sometimes it was pretty easy because he also, at the same time, he didn't prejudge anybody. He was just like, I'm going to talk to as many people as I can. I'm just going to just go out there and I'm not going to think about it.

9:20I'm not going to prejudge anybody or make any decisions for them. And a couple of months into this, he was doing it and he ended up becoming the number one income earner in his company and had huge success in that company as their top leader and then ended up building his own organization, his own company, ended up on the Inc. 5000 list, all because he was just willing to set a goal for the number of no's that he could collect as fast as possible. And so I encourage people listening to this to do a micro challenge. And it doesn't have to be anything crazy. I know 20 no's a day that it sounds easy.

10:01It's actually not. It's pretty darn hard. Most people could never pull that off. But what if you just said like, I'm going to get one. I'm going to before my head hits that pillow, I'm going to get one no. And to something, to some kind of ask, to a partnership, to my idea, to a sale, whatever, whatever your thing is, right? I'm telling you, if you just do that, your life will change. You don't have to, do anything else but that. That's how simple this is. Fire Nation, sometimes simplicity is the best path. Don't overcomplicate things. And we have so much more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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13:46Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash fire. Zip Intro, post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. Andrea, we're back and this world is a busy and crazy place. Is there too much competition to stand out? It's a great question. And I mean, there is a ton of competition, right? And I think that's the thing that keeps a lot of people from getting started is how do I break through? Everybody's doing this thing that I want to do. How do you rise above the noise? And that's the thing about being bold and being willing to go for no, is that it's the great equalizer. We call it the great equalizer, which means that you may not have connections.

14:27You may not be the most talented in the world. In fact, when Richard and I wrote Go for No, we had zero connections. We didn't graduate from an Ivy League school. In fact, like as far away from Ivy League as you can possibly get. I'm saying Long Beach State is great, but not exactly like getting any national awards. and yet we knew that if we would just stick with it and after we got that big no from that publisher we just said all right we're gonna get this get the word out about this book as fast as we can and so we just started sending it to influencers and we would get rejected all the time I remember we had one really big I won't name them a really big cosmetics company send us a letter back Now, you have to imagine how much someone must dislike somebody to actually send you a letter back and send us a letter.

15:25And they were like, hey, we got a copy of your book. Yeah, we're not going to be showing this to our salespeople anytime soon, like at all. And so just please don't ever contact us again. The funny part is years later, their salespeople ended up completely reading Go For No. I know full well because the salespeople told me that that's the kind of thing that happens. And so you may not have what you perceive the competition has, but go for no is the great equalizer in that you can hustle your way there, right? You, you can come up with the people that you want to talk to. There's one of my favorite books, and I'm sure you've read this, John Lee, isn't it's called the third door.

16:08Oh yeah. Yeah. by Alex Benayan. I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Yeah. We've had him actually on the show multiple times to talk about that book because it's so good. It's phenomenal. And basically it is a go for no strategy. It's all about, hey, if you can't get in, if you can't walk through the normal door, which most of us just can't, right? We're not Bill Gates. We're not Beyonce. We're just not walking in doors. People are not opening doors for us. Then you've got to be creative. You've got to find a workaround. And so that's what when I think about competition, I think, OK, where's that third door?

16:42How else can you go around and get your message heard and do something creative, go for no creatively so that you can be out there? and it does require you to be bold and it does require you to take risks. And yes, there will be failure and it will be painful and embarrassing, but until you are willing and want to experience that, I believe that success will elude you when you are willing to do that kind of stuff. That's when the breakthroughs happen. Now, big wins in life are key for many, many reasons. Let's talk about specifically where these big wins can come from. So big wins come from going after big things.

17:27And we have a saying, and I think Zig Ziglar said this, actually, I want to give him credit. I think it was him. He said, easy yeses lead to little successes. So if you want to go after something big, if you want a big win, in other words, what you're doing here is you're playing to win instead of playing not to lose. And I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle is they're holding on so tightly. They just, it's like, yeah, I want to win, but I really don't want to lose. But that is my main concern. So play to win and make a list of those big fish out there, those big people or organizations or ideas that you're going after.

18:09and instead of always just going after the low-hanging easy yeses the low-hanging fruit go after a big no and one of the fun things that we created is uh we created this 21-day go for no challenge actually we did a workbook back during the um pandemic so we had something that we needed to produce back then when we were sitting around and we came up with this workbook and every day in this 21 day challenge, you're encouraged to get one, what we would call big fish or big no. So it's something fun you can do. Sometimes it's too hard to do every day. So if you are doing what I challenged you to do earlier, which is set a goal for the number of no's you're going to get each day.

18:57So maybe that's one, maybe that's five, something like that. once a week, go after something big, go after a big no. This is the type of no where if you got the yes, it could be a game changer, right? It could save you a ton of time, or it could be the one person with all the connections. I remember I was working with a, we were doing a keynote for organization and I went on a ride along with one of their salespeople and he was telling me that he had cultivated a relationship with this woman who had access to a huge group of his absolute ideal prospects. I mean she just had she was like the keyhole that they have the key to the door of all of the people that could like completely 10x his business and I said well what happened he goes well you know we met we had a great conversation and I made my ask and she wrote me back and he showed me the answer and she said no and I said well wait a minute when was this and he goes oh it was about a year ago I said a year ago what you have to go back to her like this is this is a really big no opportunity so let's do third door thinking here like what think about like okay why um what do you know about her what do you know about the organization but um maybe there was a reason maybe you could just go back and and just simply ask if the timing had changed and if not the timing what else could she what advice could she give you based on you know, her knowledge and her having access to all these people.

20:47I mean, anything. So the, the idea that these big no's are out there and we don't execute on them just because I think it's, there's this idea of, well, I don't want this person to think I'm being pushy. I don't want them to think I'm being aggressive or anything. Well, listen, if you feel that way, if you really feel that way, then say it up front. Just be very transparent and say, hey, I don't want to come across as pushy or aggressive. If I'm overstepping, please let me know. But you know what? It's been a year since we talked. And I know at that time, this wasn't the right offer for you. But here's what's new.

21:28Here's what's changed. Here's what I'm thinking. Can we maybe revisit this? Do you have a time to talk? Right? You have nothing to lose. And so I told him, and I actually have to follow up with them. I told them, I'm like, you need to go back to her because that's a big no that you're not executing on. I love all of this and Fire Nation. That's why we're talking about go for no, mastering the courage to ask. And today we talked about stopping being terrified of rejection, embracing no, standing out from your competition, big wins in life and where they come from. Andrea, if Fire Nation is really connecting with what you're saying and they want to learn more, what is your call to action for our listeners today?

22:08First thing I would encourage people to do is come to our website at go4know.com and take the no quotient quiz. It's a really fun, easy quiz, and you will learn what your no quotient is. Now we know what IQ is, intelligence quotient, right? And we've all heard about EQ, your emotional intelligence, your emotional quotient, I guess you'd call it. Well, this is your no quotient. It measures how willing you are to embrace rejection, your mindset around failure and success, all of the things we've talked about today. So I encourage people to take the free quiz. You'll get a result and I will go in detail actually on your result based on whether it's high, moderate or low.

22:50Really fun, great place to start. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Adubs and JLD today. So keep up the heat. and for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Andrea in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. By the way, also our episode from September 21st, 2014 will pop up, which over 10 years ago, really interesting to listen to what we were talking about back then. And I wanna say thank you, Andrea, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

23:27Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Andrea for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you ready to rock your very own podcast? Check out our free podcasting course where I will teach you how to create and launch your podcast for, you guessed it, free, freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire.

24:06Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10 % of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash on fire.

24:31Thank you.