Phone-A-Phobia

I admit I'm not an incredibly outgoing person. Some might even go as far as to call me introverted. So, when the prospect of having to speak with people on the telephone came up, I felt a certain retraction in parts of my… well, I won’t go there.

Suffice it to say that I have since conquered my fear of the phone and in fact am left with quite an empty feeling if I go even one day without making a call. What did I do to get there? Simple – I forced myself to pick up the phone.

For those of you who may be wrestling with this right now, your fear of the phone is your ego trying to protect itself from getting bruised – bruised from fumbling the lines and not knowing what to say, from speaking to inconsiderate and even rude people, from failing to not get the “yes” the you had so hoped for. But realize that it is not these actions themselves that do the bruising but rather it’s your ego’s perception of them that creates the hurt and the anxiety. And your ego has gotten so good at this that it locks you up even before you’ve picked up the phone.

So what we must do is shed the ego and rework our perception of things, see things for what they really are. The fumbled lines – a simple lack of experience and mastery that can only be gained through practice and repetition. The rude person on the other end – a total stranger whose opinion of you is completely irrelevant; a person who is reacting not to you but to their ego’s perception of you. The failed attempt at getting the “yes” – the only true failure is in not trying.

There are two roads we can take here: the difficult one and the easy one. The difficult road obviously is picking up that phone and facing your fears. On this road you’ll encounter lots of obstacles, especially early on. You’ll trip and fall many times along the way but you must be resolute and stay the course for it will surely make you stronger. The easy road is giving in to your fears and not making the calls. There’s no challenge here and because of that you will experience no growth. You nurture your weakness on this road and you deny your strength. Do you see then that this road though much easier than the first is infinitely more dangerous?

I’ve been at that crossroads before so I understand what you’re going through. All you have to do is pick up the phone and start dialing (or auto-dialing) and trust in your decision to take the hard road because that is the road which leads to success.