Tag: Call reluctance

Call Reluctance — A Live Demonstration by Jedediah Thomas

This HPS Community Forum will be a little different.

Many people experience some form of reluctance when it comes to making sales calls.  If that’s true for you, we invite you to join us.

Forum member Jedediah Thomas has offered to work with volunteers during the meeting using an approach he has been developing to help people move past those kinds of mental blocks.

If you choose to participate in this way, you’ll experience the process firsthand.  If not, you’re welcome to observe and decide for yourself what you think.

The conversation will take place live in our Skool community.  Anyone who wants to participate in the demonstration will need to have their camera turned on.

The following is from Jedediah:

Hi Everyone, Jedediah here.

For the last 3.5 years I’ve worked as a mindset coach, helping dozens of people overcome deep set mental blocks and emotional triggers.

I can potentially do the same for you.

If you volunteer to work with me in this session, you’ll have the opportunity to work with me one-on-one, in front of the group, on a real challenge you’re experiencing around call reluctance.

I won’t be using any hypnosis or energy work, just talking and asking questions.

We’ll be working on very surface level stuff like the actions of calling, so no need to dig up childhood wounds.

An example of something we might address: “When I think about calling this prospect, I worry what they’ll think of me or I feel like they’ll reject me.”

You don’t have to volunteer to attend, but if you are considering volunteering please RSVP so we can manage our time.

It may be that there’s only enough time to get to one shift per person, which may not fully resolve the call reluctance issue, but it may give you a leg up and will at least show you what this work can do.

If you’re not sure about volunteering until you see it in action, that’s fine too, just go ahead and RSVP as being a potential volunteer. If you plan on attending without volunteering no RSVP is needed.  

As far as preparation, be clear on what thoughts and emotions you’re running into when you start thinking about calling prospects. And please have your camera on so I can see your body language.

Also, I recommend you block off the rest of the day and not make big decisions or drive or anything because any shifts done can potentially cause fatigue or disorientation in some cases, lasting until a good night’s sleep.

Feel free to reply back ahead of time if you have any questions about the process, so you can be sure whether you want to volunteer or not.

Looking forward to potentially working together

Jedediah

Date:  Friday 28 August 2026
Time:  10 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Where:  Skool
Link:  https://www.skool.com/live/lzj8PMqFYVz

If you’re not already a member of our HPS Skool Community, you’ll need to create a free account there before joining us.  To create an account and join our community, go to https://www.skool.com/sales-training-9609/about and then click on the button that says JOIN GROUP. 

Phone Phobia

The following is from a student of High Probability Selling (HPS) who calls himself Francesco the Salesman, and is published here with permission. I have done some minor editing.

Right now my BIGGEST challenge is to get into the damn phone.

I have the fear of God when it comes to using the phone.

It is AMAZING how much I can procrastinate to get into the phone!

I find EVERYTHING to do before getting on the dreaded phone.

It is funny and strange, because I have no problem at all in meeting people COLD in person, nor girls, I can even be in front of an audience of 200 people completely comfortable and with the calm of a Zen monk!

But when it gets to the phone, I start sweating cold, panic and procrastinate like there is no tomorrow.

I know that, in the end, all comes down to de-sensitization through exposure and repetition, but damn is hard to get into it to begin with.

I feel reluctance to the phone itself, besides the cold calling.

Actually I think that more than the actual cold calls, it is the phone that is my problem.

I usually try to avoid making phone calls all together.

If I can do it in person, text or email, I will usually lean over those options first and avoid or procrastinate on making a phone call.

And when I do make a phone call I sometimes get quite nervous and do not like that feeling much.

It is like a phone phobia.

It is quite limiting as you can imagine.

I remember reading something in the book “The psychology of sales call reluctance” that mentioned that usually call reluctance stems from an early childhood trauma for which one with my “first love” girl in high school immediately comes to my mind.

She was a very attractive girl (amazing legs) back in high school and the first girl I got DEEPLY excited for ever in my life (I switched from an all guys school to a mixed one) in both sexually and romantically interest and illusion.

Unfortunately she was EXTREMELY mean and nasty with me (in general too though) and she caused me quite a severe pain, especially on my first very few calling attempts to her.

Even my father teases my phone phobia saying that “Anna (the little vixen) really screwed you up to use the phone forever!”

So my problem is not as much in warming up to calling but to BEGIN calling in the first place.

In reflecting for a solution, I concluded that again a process of de-sensitization through repetition would be the best course of action, for which I was planning on setting a goal of making a certain number of phone calls every day (say 10) as a habit building exercise starting small and then ramping up the number of calls as I got more confident.

That is the idea I am currently playing with and reflecting upon.

My number one priority in my life right now is to get this “being able to make phone calls comfortably and confidently every time I want” thing down and solved, because it is a tremendous peril and HUGE limit both financially and socially and I just HAVE to get this dumb thing solved.

Francesco the Salesman

The text above is copied from emails received in late October 2018.