Objections

6The Science Behind the Hurt

We shouldn't romanticize rejection. There's nothing romantic about rejection. It's horrible.

—Marlon James

The genesis of much of our behavior—good and bad, destructive and effective—begins outside of the reaches of our conscious minds. We act but are unaware of why we act unless we choose to tune in and become aware.

Awareness is the intentional and deliberate choice to monitor, evaluate, and modulate your emotions so that your emotional responses to the people and environment around you are congruent with your intentions and objectives. Awareness of why you fear objections begins with an intellectual understanding of the science behind the hurt.

I want you to imagine that you were alive 40,000 years ago. You live in a cave with a group of people in a hunter-gatherer community, in what is now France. It's a dangerous world. Neighboring tribes fight and compete for scarce resources. When you are out hunting for dinner, there is usually something hunting you. It's a brutal, survival-of-the-fittest world.

You depend on your tribe for everything. You cannot survive on your own. Should you get kicked out of the cave into the dark you would have no fire, no food, no protection, and no companionship. Essentially, a death sentence. It's a world that's hard to imagine in our tech-dominated, modern society where food, shelter, transportation, and even companionship are at our finger tips with a click or swipe on our smartphone screen.

It was here, in this ...