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This is the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. This is episode 82, The Connection Challenge. Stay tuned.
Hey there. Welcome to the Get a 6-Figure Job You Love Podcast. I’m your host, Natalie Fisher. I’m a certified career mindset coach who also happens to want to skip all the BS and get to what it really takes to create real results for you in your career. On this podcast, you will create real mindset shifts that will lead to big results and big changes in your career and your income. No fluff here. If you want to get a six-figure job you love and create real concrete results in your industry and make a real impact, you’re in the right place. Are you ready? Let’s go.
Today I’m going to layout for you a challenge that all my clients do, sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it, but this is how they get the result. And I wanted to share it with you today because this challenge leads to offers. It ultimately has to lead to offers. There is no choice. So I’m offering it today on the podcast for you, and I wanted to share some of the experiences my clients I’ve had doing this challenge. And if you’ve listened, there’s an episode called how to network your way to three job offers. And my client talks about it there. And throughout the podcast, I’ve always talked about networking as connecting, but it’s not just that, I’m going to explain the challenge and you’re going to understand exactly why it works so well, and exactly why we shy away from things like this. And this is the only reason why people are slowed down as far as getting their results quickly, as far as the lending offers fast. And the reason why people stay in a struggle for so long is because they shy away from this type of challenge.
So once you can start getting into action and moving forward with it, with these parameters that I’m going to lay out, this will change for you immediately as long as you follow the guidelines that I’m going to give you. So want to share what one of my clients said. She said, this is something I was really resisting in the beginning, but after I started with the first few conversations, they ended up going longer than planned, and I ended up getting three job offers. Second, one of my clients says, changing the goal of getting yeses changed the entire game for me. Once I realized the pressure of not needing it to go a certain way, I could just connect without expectations and the conversations that transpired were a lot more fun. And there was no pressure on me to get things right.
So this is the whole goal, that’s why I wanted to highlight to statements from my clients, because this is the whole goal that we can change the frame as to how we go into something with, so we don’t feel like we’re failing every time, we’re just making the progress that we need to make. So why it works so well is it gets you out of hiding, and even if you are taking action and then you’re feeling bad about it when it doesn’t work out, that is something we’re going to reframe here as well. When you do this challenge, everything comes up that you’ve been avoiding. It’s like everything that you need to face in order to move through into your six figure premium offer, it gets you into engaging real world conversations where people really need what you do, and you’ll get to see that first hand.
It gets you involved in conversations where opportunity now exists. Opportunity is now immediate, is now on the table. Otherwise, it’s always a no, because nothing is happening. Nothing is in motion, or maybe one thing is in motion, and then if that’s a no, then it’s like, oh, now I got to start again. And a maybe can now become a yes. So having several maybes on the table is better than having one maybe on the table, because then everything spirals from there. And you’re like, oh I got to start again. I got to start from square one. I really thought that was coming through, or it’s always a step in the right direction, whether it’s a no, whether it’s a maybe, whether it’s a yes, it’s always a step, it’s always working. There’s always something working in motion. So that’s why the challenge keeps your momentum going. It keeps you engaged when you’re approaching it from the mind frame that supports this.
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So what is this challenge? It is to connect with 30 humans in 60 days. And I’ll go through what counts exactly. So it can be an interview, or a networking conversation, as long as it’s a conversation with a real human being, then it counts. Doesn’t matter how long it is. Doesn’t matter what it was about. Just a real conversation with a real human being. So these are the things that count, an interview with a hiring manager, that’s going to be the top scored conversation. A real conversation with anybody though counts, an interview with a recruiter, that one counts less so, but it counts. Any real response from a human you get on LinkedIn from any networking platform, whether the response is positive or negative, even if they send you a message back and they say, they want to connect with you, and then they connect with you and you have a conversation with them, that counts. Getting rejected counts.
So these are all things that count, it’s just a connection with a human being. It can be over Zoom. It can be in-person. It can be over Messenger. It can be over Slack. If you have a back and forth with a human being that you’ve never met, or that is interested in higher you, then that counts. And to clarify, I’m not saying that you are going to get a rejection every time, what I’m saying is that when we tell our brain that the goal is not to get a yes, and I’m going to expand on what the actual goals of this challenge are, then your brain thinks, okay, then just by having this interaction, I’ve succeeded. Whether they say, yes, they say, no, whatever. I’ve succeeded. Yes, I’m doing it right. So this takes out all the pressure that you put on yourself of, oh, they need to like me for it to work. They need to be impressed with me. They need to approve of me. No, none of that stuff has to happen. You just have to have the interaction. That’s all. Okay.
And this is what it feels like to go out there and aim to be less than perfect. So not have all the answers, just showing up as yourself, go out and be less than a hundred percent perfect every time. So this is how the rules have been arranged so that it takes the pressure off you, it’s designed to take the pressure completely off of you. So to succeed at this challenge, you just have to talk to 30 humans in 60 days, and that means you have been successful. And where you’re not doing it, that would be pretty impossible no matter how great you are to get someone to say yes to you every single time. So the point, again, is not to have 30 humans say yes to you. Okay. It’s simply to interact with 30 humans. It’s to be able to reach out and have conversations with 30 humans over the 60 day timeframe. So that’s about one every two days, but you can spread it out however you want.
So how you want to approach the conversations and how this connection challenge will help you do that is the most important part, is by knowing that your goal is not to get a yes, your goal is to connect, that’s why it’s called a connection challenge. Your goal is to learn and use the info as guidance. So it’s like that conversation is just preparing you for the next one. Your goal is to be curious, inquisitive, ask questions that interest you, move you forward towards your premium offer and your ideal career situation. It’s to move you forward, it’s not… And no matter what you do, as long as you have an interaction with another human, that moves you forward. It doesn’t have to be a yes. And a no definitely counts as well. A no is worth points.
So why it works? Because when you take the pressure off your nervous system to produce the yes, your nervous system can relax. It can sink into who you are. It can discover yourself, the joy, the passion, the curiosity that’s already inside you to pursue what you want to do. So this is called dropping the perfectionism. And I work with hundreds of students, and I know that this is a major issue. It’s like, you think, because this is how we’ve been conditioned in school the whole time we’ve been growing up, it’s like, do your best, get the best grade you can get, always get the yes, always get the A, always get the A+. And if we’re not, then we’re told that we’re not doing it right. That we’re wrong. That we’re bad. That we’re a failure.
And that completely stunts your growth when it comes to something like this, because you have to go out there and get mismatches, you might talk to someone and it just might not be a match for you to
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work with them, or you might talk to someone you might really want to work with them and they might not feel that same way. And that doesn’t mean anything about you. Or you might go until you find the person who’s like, yes, you’re the person we’re looking for. That is always going to happen. And the most successful people get rejected the most times. And this is just how it works, but we are not conditioned to understand that this is the process and this is necessary, and this is totally okay, and is totally safe. It’s totally safe to be rejected. You’re not going to die from a rejection, it’s totally safe.
And one of my teachers, or the people that I follow, Gaby Bernstein, she says, “Rejection is safe guidance,” which I love. It’s like, it’s just redirecting you to the direction you need to go. And then she asks, if rejection is safe guidance, then what are you afraid of? Literally if we walk that path down to the end, okay, we’re rejected, there is nothing to be afraid of, because now we’re just moving further down the path in our right direction. It’s not going to be there where we thought it might be. So what doesn’t count? What doesn’t count is sending your resume through a website or an automated system where you don’t know if a human has seen it, you don’t get a response from a human. You don’t know. It basically just went into the abyss and you have no idea what happened. That does not count as part of the connection challenge.
So if you say I’ve sent a hundred resumes, I’m going to ask how many people have seen the resumes? How many people have you spoken to? I don’t care how many resumes you’ve actually sent. It doesn’t matter. And a lot of people wrongly think that those are rejections, and an auto rejection, that doesn’t count either. If you get an automated system email that says, I’m sorry, we’ve reviewed your information and you’re not a right fit for this. And it looks like it’s come from an auto bot, that does not count. That is the opposite of connection. Okay. That doesn’t count. Same as if you fill out a long application online, it takes you a long time, those annoying ones where you have to fill out everything that was on your resume and you have to fill it out in an application again, and then you submit it and it says, maybe it even says, you submitted your application, we’ll be getting in touch with you shortly. That does not count. Okay.
Any of the non responses you do not get as part of doing the connection challenge. So you’re going to get some people who just don’t respond. Some people who don’t check their LinkedIn, or they don’t check, or they just ignore you, they do not count. If nobody has seen it, if we can’t verify that a human has seen it, and that means they’ve responded to it, that’s the verification that we get, it does not count. Okay. So it has to be connecting with real humans. And here’s why it’s necessary no matter what. And what happens when you get started is the biggest thing is that you’re going to see is you are going to get out your own way here, because the way that your career is going to evolve is by taking this type of action. Okay. And it’s uncomfortable action, courageous action, scary action for a lot of people.
And that’s why this is the missing piece, because it’s not about your lack of ability, your lack of brilliance, your lack of value, your lack of results that you can drive, that you can prove that you can drive. It’s not lack of education or experience. It’s none of those things, because we know that a lot of people have all those things and they’re still struggling, and this is the missing piece, it’s their inability, or their unwillingness to take this action, this type of uncomfortable action. And it’s not that you’re not compelling, or charming, or magnetic. You can be all those things, we already know that about you. It’s the trying to be perfect, the trying to get yes every time. The trying to get everything right. And even if you tell me, but I’m not really doing that, we’ll know by the amount of action that you’re taking.
So meaning trying to get the perfect result every time as if you’re afraid. And a lot of people they will say, I’m afraid to reach out to people. I don’t want to bother people. I don’t want to risk getting a no, I can’t blow this opportunity, this is such a big opportunity. If I blow this, I don’t want to. And then they avoid. And then what ends up happening is that they end up not showing up to that opportunity from their best selves, because the feeling of pressure stops that. When you’re feeling pressure, when your
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nervous system is feeling scared and it needs to retreat, it can’t show up in the best position that it could. It’s not actually showing your true self. That stops you from taking the imperfect action. So you think if you go on an interview, you have to get the offer. This is what we think, we think that’s our goal. Or we think we aren’t putting our emotional eggs in one basket, but really we are.
So people will say to me, oh no, no, but I’m not, I have other things going on. But emotionally, they’re spending a lot of time thinking about the one opportunity, and thinking it has to go perfectly. And this has to go well. And those are the thoughts that really put the most pressure on you and keep you from doing your best, actually keep you from naturally showing up as the person who would be showing up if you were already hired, if you were already accepted, if you were already doing what you wanted to be doing, and that’s the person that they need to see, not the scared version who’s afraid they won’t be accepted.
And we’re primed to think that this is how we should operate because of the belief that failing is bad, that we’ve been conditioned to have. So it means that getting a no means we suck, we’re not good enough. We should be disappointed. But really the truth is it means nothing about us. This challenge is meant to show you that a no is not any big deal whatsoever. It feels bad to get anything but a yes, but that’s only because we’ve been conditioned that way. So even if we don’t even want the job, sometimes I’ll be coaching a client and they’ll be disappointed over a job that they didn’t even want. And I’ll be like, why are you so disappointed? This was not what you wanted? And they’re like, yeah, that’s true. Why am I so disappointed? It’s just a habit, it’s just a deep rooted belief that we’re supposed to be disappointed if we don’t succeed on the first try, or even succeed at something we didn’t even want. It’s really bizarre.
So yeah, we’re taught to do our best and nothing other than our best is good enough. But sometimes your best won’t result in an offer in this situation. You can show up as your very best, be very proud of yourself, deliver epic value in the interview, and they still might not hire you. And that doesn’t mean anything about you and it’s not a problem, it’s not within your control. So when you set up the game this way, you basically set yourself up to fail because it’s not within your control, it can’t be up to somebody else, whether or not you succeed or not, it has to always be up to you. So if you’re proud of yourself, how you showed up, that’s your only job, is to show up and be like, and in my program I have a list of how you can look at it, the evaluation from your own perspective, because you really need to just evaluate yourself based on what you think. And you get stronger at this, and then you need to just go do that over and over. So this is what this challenge is about.
So this is meant for you to reframe it the way that you look at a no. To get a no is a celebration, it is an accomplishment in itself, because a lot of people are afraid to get no’s. And a lot of people get a couple no’s and then they want to come back and sit in the safe cave where they don’t want to go out and get any more no’s, because they’re afraid, they don’t like that feeling. And getting an A+ every time is completely not in your control like I said, so if it’s not in your control then how could you grade yourself on that? Because it depends on someone else’s agreement. Therefore, it’s impossible for you to guarantee yourself an A+ score every time here.
So that’s why in school, things worked differently and they do not apply here. And when we bring that mentality from school, and I had to de-condition it too, even though I don’t have a college degree in elementary school, from the very beginning, it’s like, oh, you didn’t get that right, you got it wrong. That was bad. You have taught your nervous system to associate rejection, associate getting something wrong with a bad thing, with a threat, with a bad feeling. And now your brain will learn that rejection isn’t, it’s guidance, it’s safe guidance, and there’s nothing to fear. So it’s just about rewiring your brain.
And once you do that, imagine yourself just feeling safe and seen and comfortable. And this is what attracts people when we get hired, when people say yes to us, when they’re like, you know what? I
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didn’t really have a position open, but this conversation has inspired me so much that I’m going to see if I can find a spot for you, because I really want to work with you, and I think you’d be great at this, this and this, that happens when we are comfortable with ourselves, when you’re comfortable with your imperfections, when you’re comfortable with not a hundred percent saying the right thing every time, when you’re comfortable with being a little offbeat, when you’re comfortable with letting your own sense of humor out, that type of stuff happens when you let yourself be, instead of trying to be perfect, trying to get the answers right, trying to avoid getting a no all the time.
So to recap, rejection is clarity. Rejection is safe guidance. Your goal is not to get a yes. Your goal is simply to connect through a conversation. Your goal is to be curious, to be inquisitive, to learn, to use every conversation as learning. And I had one client, he took this challenge and he really went above and beyond. He did a lot more than the challenge guidelines indicate. He was doing 12 interviews a week. And he was to the point where he was just in learning mode. And at the end of it, he got two or three competing job offers. And I was like, you basically got your PhD in interviewing, that’s what this was doing for you. And he was so confident, he’s like, okay, he’s like he had all these tools. And he basically used everything that we talked about in semi program I have a different tools for how you can approach the interviews in different situations.
And he basically taught himself through this process, which was exactly the point of the process. And the way that he approached it was, this is just learning for the next one. This is just learning for the next one until I get the role. Right. And therefore there is no failing. There is no fearing. It is just the process. So this is what I really want to instill and really want to teach people, because as long as you get stuck, as long as you keep thinking, it’s going to be hard and take a long time him. It’s only because your lack of willingness to take this kind of action.
So it doesn’t take nine months to get a job, it doesn’t. One of my clients, I was coaching him and he’s like, well, it’s taken me eight months, and we had been coaching together for two months. And I was like, but what were you doing in the eight months before we started working together? And I was like, how many interviews were you actually going on? What were you actually doing? And we determined that he wasn’t actually going on that many interviews, and he wasn’t actually doing that many activities. He wasn’t engaging in this challenge. He was just poking around on LinkedIn, applying for some positions electronically. Some he was getting no responses for, he was having some half-ass conversations with recruiters for positions that weren’t even what he wanted. He wasn’t really attuned and aligned with getting this specific goal that he came to me to get.
Once we started working together, he did it in three months, it’s because he got very focused and very clear on exactly what the activities were and what needed to happen, on how we needed to approach this in order to actually be serious about it. And I think that’s what happens, is people are like, oh, it takes nine months to get a job. It’s like, well, if you’re not serious about it, then yeah. If you’re willy-nilly just doing whatever, not really focused on it every day. Well then yeah, it’ll take longer than that. And again, no problem, no judgment. It’s just, it doesn’t have to. So the point is to train your brain to take action and continue to go even when nobody is giving you a cookie. So this is something my coach said to me, when I first started, I was putting out a lot of content and people weren’t responding to it. I wasn’t getting any activity, nothing was happening. And she’s like, this is the key skill that you’ll need to learn in business, is you need to keep going even when nobody is giving you that cookie.
And it was so true. It was like, I’m doing this for me. I’m in this for the long haul. I’m going to do it until I get it. And it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to get a cookie every time. And this is, again, the thing that we learned in school, it’s like, oh, you got an A, good job. Here’s a cookie, here’s a lollipop, or here’s a prize. And if you don’t, then you don’t get a prize for failing or for trying. So you’re like, oh, there’s no point in doing that, that sucks. So again, that primitive programming of we have to get it right. And then
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we get the reward, but the rewards have to be given by you. And this is why this challenge is so effective, is because you get to succeed at it, even when you haven’t succeeded yet. Because the process, every single time you connect with a human, that is succeeding. When instant gratification is not handed out at each step, because in life, that is not what happens. We do not get instant gratification for every step we take, for every step forward we take.
We have to know that that is something we need to recognize for ourselves. We need to find the satisfaction in having taken those steps and having our own back with those steps, but to keep taking those steps, we have to. So this is the foolproof way. And it is so important because it’s the missing piece for everything that awaits you on the other side, everything that awaits you, which is the opportunities, the things opening up, the maybes that turn into yeses, the companies that you don’t even know about yet, the people that you’ve never met yet, and all that stuff is on the other side. And you only need one, one really high quality opportunity to say yes to you, that’s all you need. And then you know how to do it again. So a lot of my clients say, it’s not just having gotten the job, it’s having that confidence and having the skills, knowing that I can do that again.
And stay tuned for next week where I’m going to teach you how to get a 5k raise or more, but the 5k raise challenge is what it’s called. And for anybody who says they can’t afford my program, or doesn’t have the money, we’re going to help you get the money if you want to. So no excuses, this is how it’s done. We dive in, we go, we feel all the feelings and we get the job, because it’s literally inevitable.
All right, hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you have questions, like what do I say to people? How do I do this? How do I know I’m connecting with a real human? Who do I connect with? How do I know if I’m applying to the positions that I’m aligned with? All that is inside the six figure curriculum where we do this challenge together. So if you want to do it together, get on in there, it’ll give you everything you need. It’ll be so much simpler. Otherwise, get off your butt and do it anyway, because seriously, this is the answer. This is the thing that’s been holding everybody back. This is the reason why people think things are so slow. They are not. All right, I can’t wait to see you in there. I can’t wait to support you through this. Let’s do it.
Financially, I’m stable. I’ve been having so much fun working with my team. If I would’ve done it all over again, I wish I would’ve find your program sooner.
If I were to sum it up, I would say the most common thing people come to me with is I’m going on interview after interview, after interview and I’m not getting the offer. What am I doing wrong? So I’ve put together a freebie where you can get this download completely free. It has the eight reasons that this is happening. And I break down each reason very specifically and how to fix it. So to grab that download, the link is in the show notes, you can click on that link, you just have to enter your information. It’s called the eight reasons you’re not getting hired, and I will help you figure that out. I will see you in the freebie. Okay. Talk to you soon.