Not getting sales? Why going for 'no' can lead to 'yes' | Success Redefined

Imagine being eight years old, picking up the phone, and cold-calling George Lucas because you were absolutely certain he'd invite you to Hollywood to make movies with him. Now imagine that being the moment that accidentally set you on a path to building one of the most counterintuitive — and quietly revolutionary — philosophies in business: that the road to more yes starts with going for no.

My guest today is Andrea Waltz – the co-creator of Go for No!, a bestselling business book and mindset approach about overcoming the fear of rejection and taking courageous action.

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https://goforno.com//quiz

Take the free Go for No! Quiz and find out how willing you really are to hear ‘No’ in pursuit of bigger goals.

~~~

MS BELLA ST JOHN

✨ AI Literacy and Mindset Strategist | Professional Artist

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~~~ Success Redefined ~~~

PS:  No animals were harmed in the creation of this video.  Made with recycled data. 🌼 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Success redefined with Miss Bella St. John. Imagine being eight years old, just eight, and picking up the phone and calling cold calling George Lucas because you were absolutely certain that he would invite you to Hollywood to make movies with him. Now imagine that being the moment that accidentally set you on a path to becoming one of the most counterintuitive and quietly revolutionary philosophies in business, that the road to more yes starts with going for no. My guest today is Andrea Waltz, the co-creator of Go for No, a best-selling business book and mindset approach about overcoming the fear of rejection and taking courageous action. If you'd like to connect with her or reach out to me, all of the details and links are in the show notes and description. Now let's go join the conversation. Okay. And so for you, what was success when you were growing up? What did you think that your life was going to look like and be like when you were growing up?

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Yeah, I guess I I assumed it would be like everybody else's. Um, I mean, I didn't have actually I should, I should rephrase that. When I was eight years old, I did have a dream to be a movie producer and director, um, which which got squashed rather quickly after I did make a cold call to George Lucas, who's the creator of Star Wars. I I really thought in my eight-year-old brain that he would swoop me up and um take me to Hollywood so I could help make movies with him, which is so weird. But um after that dream kind of died and I quickly realized that that wasn't gonna work out. You know, I didn't have a lot of um, I didn't have a lot of plans, honestly. Like when I was a kid, I wasn't one of these kids that, like, I know what I'm gonna do. I didn't, I wasn't entrepreneurial in any way, shape, or form. I mean, I've been an entrepreneur now with my own business for 30 years, but I didn't have any of those thoughts. And so, yeah, honestly, I was kind of a drifter.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

And so, what was success modeled for you with your, you know, did you have entrepreneurial family? Did you, what were your friends with their parents? What did you think that success itself would be like, even if it wasn't defined to a particular career?

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Right. So um, well, I grew up in kind of a chaotic, uh, a chaotic childhood. I think all of us have like all of us have our stories, right? All of us have our things. Mine's just mine. So I don't think I'm any more different or spectacular than than the next person, to be honest. Um, it was it was a little crazy, a little traumatic. And so that was kind of um my my stepfather was a um, gosh, what was he? A narcissist and a lunatic and a crazy person who was always coming up with these schemes, could never hold down a job, always had to like, always had to do crazy things. And so we were constantly getting evicted and moving from house to house and never had any money. I mean, it was just very chaotic. My father, on the other hand, um, my mom and dad had divorced, was very stable. He's a um worked in the Air Force, and so very, very stable. And so I guess to me, what I learned more than having, I think, a model for success, I looked at my dad like, oh, this is a stable normal person. I really saw honestly what I didn't want to be. Like I saw this example of this person who was so who had lived in such chaos and created such angst for me and my mother that I really saw what I didn't want. And so I kind of used that as the example of what I didn't want to be.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah. And I can really relate to that. The first, if you like, the first real job that I had was, well, the title was office manager, really. I knew it, I never even worked in an office, let alone managed one. And and but the person who owned the company, yeah, bucket loads of money, but he treated people differently. And he pitted his children against each other as to who would take over the reins when he decided to retire. And yeah, and for me, again, this dichotomy of well, I I love the fact that he's been really successful, and but then it's like, yeah, but he's a third generation, so he didn't build it from the ground up. He but he built on it. But then what I don't like is the way that he's then he's interacting with people, and so I think it's really interesting how how we tend to look at the people around us and go, okay, I do want a bit of that, I don't want a bit of that, almost like almost like a buffet. I'll take a little bit of that over there, and a little bit of that over here, and a little bit of that. And also when you and I were connecting before the show, and you had you were, you know, you were connecting with regard to go for no, which we'll get on to in a second. I think I shared with you as well that uh what I was one of the very first books that I wrote back in the 1990s, dating myself again. And and one of the chapters in that, the title of the chapter was No Can Be a Complete Sentence. And I think that's really interesting. And particularly when we're talking about the subject of success redefined. I think being able to say no and knowing where no fits in is really important. So can you share some of your thoughts with regard to that?

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Yeah, so the um in relationship to to know and what I teach, you know, GoF No is kind of it's very counterintuitive. I think a lot of people hear it and they think it means that you should hear no, um, that that you want to say no to more people, right? Which is it's actually a really important skill. And I think a lot of us are bad at it. I know I'm not a great, I'm not very good at telling people no, because I know that rejection hurts, right? And you don't want to let somebody down and I am a pathological people pleaser. So there's that whole side of rejection. The side that we really teach is we teach people that if you want to get more yeses in your business and in your life, you actually have to be willing to hear no more often. You've got to embrace no. You've got to be willing to get rejected in order to get to that success. And so, Bella, to your, you know, your question about um, what is success to mean, success to find? And as I said, I was a drifter. You know, I didn't know any of this when I was young. The very, I think the very first time I had the epiphany of how to get anywhere in life, how to quote, be a success, to your question, was I was in a bookstore and I saw a book, and this was back in the 90s too. So we're we're like we're obviously the same generation dating ourselves. And I saw this book, and the title was um The Aladdin Factor. And it was basically how to get anything that you want. And I was like, I was a college student, I didn't know how to get anything I wanted. I didn't even know what I wanted, but I knew that I didn't know how to get it. I knew how confused I was, but I thought that's really cool. Like, I want to know how do you get what you want? Well, the Aladdin factor is all based on the idea that you, if you want wishes, you know, you find the magic lamp, you rub the magic lamp, and the genie comes out and gives you your wishes. And the whole point of this book was that the that you get what you want by asking. And that asking is going to require that you can get good at asking, you can get better at asking, you can ask the right people, you can ask them at the right time. So there's all these different ways and strategies that you could ask and get a yes. But also a big part of the book talked about how when you ask, you're gonna get no a lot. And so uh that's kind of the direction that we've taken go for no is that asking, you're gonna get that no. And I am crazy passionate about this work, um, which is one of the reasons why I'm on your podcast, is my goal is to share it with as many people as possible. So that's kind of the that's kind of a little bit about what go for no means.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

And I love that as well, because I'm very, I'm very passionate about Yoda. Do or do not, there is no try. And that very much speaks to what you're talking about here, is if you're trying for there was a PBS special years ago with Delling Dr. Wayne Dyer. And he said, Yeah, let me let me show you what trying is. And he said, I'm trying to pick up this thing. I'm trying to pick what am I really doing? Not picking it up. So I think that also speaks to what you're talking about as well. If you're trying for something, you don't even get to a point where it's a yes or a no. It's a, oh, I'm trying to this, or I'm trying to that. And so talk to me a little as well about how, because a lot of people uh have this whole perfectionism thing, and I can't go out and make a pitch yet, or I can't launch my website yet, or I can't this. But that really speaks into your go-for no with it's it's a numbers game in in some instances from that perspective. Yeah. So talk to us about the trap of it wanting to be perfect before you launch.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yeah, and nobody knows this better, I think, than entrepreneurs, because you learn very quickly that if you're going to wait until it's perfect, you're going to wait forever because you just like constantly. And if I was just discussing this with my husband because we're working on a big project, and he's he felt really bad, he made some mistake and he felt really bad. And I told him, I said, you know what? Let's catch as many mistakes as we can control. Because I'm telling you, we're gonna have mist more mistakes in this that we don't even see. And so it's okay that you that you caught this mistake. He's like, maybe we should let it go. And I said, no, let's let's let's fix this. You gotta fall in love with failure, you've got to really start to love failure, and in in many ways, you've got to love um rejection, but it's very, very difficult to be a perfectionist and also be successful because failure and success are so intertwined and they are opposite sides of the same coin. And if you again, if you want more of one, you're gonna get more of the other. And so you learn very quickly that you do the best you can. Uh, I'm sure you've heard the saying, done is better than perfect. And perfect Steve Jobs, I said, uh, I believe it was who said professionals ship. So you've got to put things out there, you've got to get stuff out there. And if you're as somebody once said too, if you're not embarrassed when you look back at the stuff that you created and the stuff that you did when you first started, then you waited too long. And I'm definitely embarrassed at a lot of the stuff that I did way back when. Yeah. Looking at marketing materials and looking that even sometimes today, I look at stuff that I wrote three years ago or how I phrased something, and I'm like, is this? Like, I like this, I would never do this now. So it's really funny. You've got to let go of that perfectionism and embrace the thing, embrace what you're doing and be willing to fail along the way, but not just even be willing. You gotta want to. You really have to want to so that when your head hits the pillow that night, you say, you know what? I didn't hear no. So I didn't step out of my comfort zone. I didn't put myself out there. I I had no negative feedback. I had, I, I, I didn't mess up at all. Everything was like, quote, perfect. And that means you're not doing enough.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

And I think as well, even if somebody has a visceral response to the word failure, substitute it with feedback. Yeah. Consider these these are just feedback loops. Like I was having a conversation with a client, this was only a couple of weeks ago. And we were talking, she was wanting to perfect a lot of things with a new website that she's putting out for an extension for her business. And I said, it's really good as it is. I said, are there areas we could tweak? Yes. But I said, you're coming up to a there was an event, and I said, you can get some great feedback. And she said, well, what if they tell me that they don't like it? And I said, well, I doubt they're going to say they don't like it. But if you ask them some tailored and very prescriptive questions, you can get some very prescriptive, really great feedback. Like, did you find this easy to use? Was there anything on the website that you had to get extra strength glasses to be able to see? Yeah. And take that as feedback. And then that's just a learning and development process loop. And that's the way we learn with everything. Even if you look at children, that's the way children learn. They make a mistake and they go, oh, okay. And so you know, do it differently next time. But it's also the way as well that I'm a great believer in if you have an interest in something and you're going, oh, do I want to, don't I want to? Give it a shot. You don't have to invest your entire life into it. But you can also with that, it with taking on your go-for-no perspective, go, okay, well, do I actually like the failures, the feedback loops, and can I learn and grow from those? Or am I going, yeah, no, this, this, no, just no. And so you take that on board and then you go, okay, but at least I gave it a shot.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Yeah. That's really good advice as well, because a lot of times I think that what we do, and I know I'm guilty of this, is you tweak something and you change something, and maybe you go down a path and you're creating stuff and doing stuff that you don't even know necessarily your audience wants. You you may be you may be fixing a problem that actually doesn't exist. And so when you put it out there and you get that feedback, then you can figure out, okay, what do I need to work on? Instead of putting all this time and effort and energy in a direction, down a path, doing something that it turns out people are like, no, I don't really care about that. I care about this over here. And you could have been working on that.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Exactly, exactly. So from your perspective, what are the sorts of clients that you work with? And what are the, what are the, what are they seeing as a result of that particular journey?

SPEAKER_00 14:27

So we work with um mostly we're we're we're we have been, I should say, speakers on this topic. So we speak at sales meetings, conferences, things like that. And over the last few years, I finally started integrating a coaching, which was something I had never done. I actually said, like I never wanted to be a coach around this topic, but I realized that people were kind of interested in going deeper and being kind of having that individual communication. So one of the things I see is probably the number one thing I see with people that I work with on a one-on-one basis, but this goes for our audiences. And I mean, I've I've seen this for 20 years, kind of goes to the perfectionism thing. But that's I think that because people are afraid of rejection, what happens is they don't share their offer or talk to or get out to enough people. They they maybe get a couple no's and then they say, okay, well, that that didn't work. And it's like, well, wait a way, wait a minute. You you're you don't have enough data. Or the people that I work with who are really in sales, it could be an insurance agent or somebody who's a digital marketer or somebody who's an entrepreneur of some kind, maybe they have their own coaching business. I've coached those people as well. And kind of the same thing. Like they'll get a couple no's to some kind of offer and assume that nobody wants it. Or they'll come up with a particular message and they'll say, like, okay, this is this is the messaging, this is what I'm going to go out with. And then they test it on 10 people, and maybe it kind of falls flat and they don't get the response. So then they change the message again. So go for no in part. You said it yourself, a little bit of a numbers game. And it is to the extent that you could spend a lot of time perfecting the quality of your presentation, the quality of your materials, the quality of your messaging. But if you're not getting out there and increasing the quantity and getting it in in front of enough eyes to get that feedback that we were talking about, then you're always going to be changing and tweaking things with really no data. So you've got to have that's the number one thing I would say that I have found with people who learn go for know is to increase the number of people you're talking to to get that data, to figure out if those no's are good no's, or what, you know, how can you be better? That's that's the first thing. And the other thing too is just um the other thing with go for know is just switching the mindset of that knee-jerk reaction of, oh, I don't want to do this or ask for this, I'll just get a no. Or, oh, if I ask this person to be on my podcast, they're too successful, they'll just tell me no. All of those assumptions that we bring in and we give ourselves the no. We say no to ourselves, no, no, no, all day long, right? And so that's another big one that I that I have seen and and helped people deal with.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, I I love that. And one thing that my clients hear quite quite a lot when we're talking about a similar sort of subject is it doesn't matter if you have built the world's greatest mousetrap, unless people know that you've built the world's greatest mousetrap, know how to find you, know how to connect with you, etc. It it doesn't matter if nobody knows. And so I think that's a really important element of the the go for a no as well, is that you can have this most extraordinary thing, whatever it is, product, service, whatever. But unless you've put it out there, and put it out there in sufficient, well we'll say quantity, but a sufficient number of times, a sufficient number of places. People don't know you exist. And often you know people will take that as, oh, they didn't like what I did. Well, how often did you go out? Oh, I spoke to one chamber of commerce meeting. How many people were there? Oh, it was just an offshoot one. There were 12. So there's 12 people apart from you and your family who I this I'm recounting an actual conversation. There's 12 people apart from you and your family who know that you've built this thing. No, I haven't told my family. Okay, yeah. So yeah, that's a perfect. This is years ago, otherwise I would put them in touch with you, darling. Because they'd be a perfect candidate for a go for a no. Right. So for us to to wrap up, because we're talking about success redefined when somebody is looking to redefine their level of success within their organization, their company, or even if they're a solopreneur and they're finding that they're ex they're experiencing some of what we've talked about on this podcast, what is your number one suggestion for them to redefine how they're looking at success and what practical step they can take?

SPEAKER_00 19:34

So a two two-part answer to that. The first part is, you know, when you asked me like kind of what what was my definition of success when I was young, you know, what did I what did I see? And and it I really was kind of lost. I really didn't have a definition. And I think what I've learned now um over all of these years is that it starts with defining what you want. And that was that was something big that I was missing because I I never had anyone in my life who really pressed me, like, what do you want to do? And it was kind of just like go to school and then get a job. You know, that was kind of the attitude. And um, except for my dabbling in in trying to be a film director when I was young. Um, so I didn't really know what I wanted. And at the times that I struggle now defining success is when I feel when I'm getting lost again. And I have to sit back and be like, wait a minute, what do wait, what do I want? What do I want my business to look like? What do I want my time to look like? What do I want my day-to-day to actually look like? That helps define it quite a bit is knowing what I want. And then the second piece to that, I think it really goes back to this idea of celebrating attempts. And listen, I mean, no one wants to fail. So I am not suggesting that you fail just to fail. Like, no, nobody wants to fail. Everybody wants to be a success. Nobody wants to do something to cause them or their families uh real serious harm. So you've got to be, I understand to be careful with that, but also to celebrate when you do make attempts, to celebrate the risks you take, celebrate the no's that you get. That's a big part of what we teach as well, especially the sales teams. Like you're as a sales leader, if you tell somebody to collect two or three no's and they do it, you've got to celebrate that and reward that activity, right? So I think it's really two parts is figuring out what you want and then rewarding yourself for those failures so that you keep trying.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Super. All right, we need to wrap it there. Deling Andre, I'll put all of your details in the show notes. So I really do suggest that you reach out to this wonderful individual, particularly if you want a speaker for your sales teams. I think you know that really, really resonates with me as to how you can possibly get some wonderful best use case out of the work that she's doing, both she and her husband. So until next time, I'm Bella St. John, and this is Success Redefined. And thank you, Andrew, so much for being here. Bye. Thanks, Bella.