Episode 238: How to Overcome Fear in Relationship Building - Embracing Call and Visits with Unknown People
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
It's always an honor for me. If you take a few minutes of your day to join this podcast or any of them that we do here on a round with Randall. I had two things. One personal, one professional kind of happened within the same 24-hour period. Which brings us to today's conversation or discussion on the professional front, working with some younger, newer gift officers.
They're just kind of coming into the profession. Leadership annual giving individuals. We had a long conversation about making calls and not just sending emails and sending letters. You should be identifying a smaller group of people that are at the high end of your giving range of what you're responsible for, and be making phone calls to thank them, asking for their support.
Again, not for 500 bucks. Go. Do you know, ten visits, but a call. And there was such hesitancy. In the same generic manner or at least direction. There was a conversation with my son, who for the first time is going to go to a slumber party and or sleepover or whatever they call it nowadays for a birthday party of people he knows.
Incredible. These are his best friends. And there was great apprehension. Fear almost. And in both cases I began to realize the paralyzation that comes when you have fear. So in episode 133 of around with Randall, which would have been, you know, I don't know, two years plus ago, we talked about it at a very high level. I want to get into the more specifics.
So if you listen to 133, you'll catch some bigger suggestions. I'm going to get into language. I'm going to get into the science of what this means so that you can overcome it. And by the way, we all need to overcome it. And it doesn't mean remove it. Fear is we'll learn in a moment. It's natural, but how we deal with it can come through tactics.
And when we get into the detailed tactics, we have to get into the conversation around what do we say and what do we do? The reason I know fear is legitimate. It's not made up. I wasn't mad at my son in any way, shape or form. In fact, I empathized. And same thing with the gift officers. I wasn't embarrassed or disappointed in them because it's natural.
I can remember two points in my life where fear overcame me and I had to make decisions. The first was when I asked my wife to marry me, and as much as I knew she probably was going to say yes, and as much as I had planned it, I was terrified. The ultimate vulnerability. That was 27 years ago, and the way I got through it was the knowledge that living my life without her would be worse than the fear that I was feeling then turned out okay.
The second was when my father passed, and he had asked about two weeks before for me to do the eulogy, and there was much the same knot in my stomach, the same overcoming of anything rational that I realized when I asked Marilyn to marry me. I told these stories to my son and I talked about how you work through them.
I don't care if he goes to the overnight or sleep party or whatever. What I care about is how he deals with fear. And the same is true of all of us. And if you're trying to figure out how to raise money, I'm working on some things that we'll talk about in the near future around this conversation. You have to go call people and see them.
That's how this works, which means we can't let fear get in the way. So let's start with the philosophical where's your come from? Fear is actually a natural thing in our mind, in our body, in our thought process. It's the fight or flight or freeze kind of instincts that come. It's buried in our DNA from the millennial of generation of human beings that we are, that the unknown naturally provides a sense of concern.
And so there's fear that comes. We want to avoid risk. We don't want to harm. And sometimes when we have fear, because we don't have all the facts of what we're going to experience, we tell ourselves things and we generally tell ourselves things that aren't very positive. And so we imagine all of the negatives that come from how other people affect you, how you affect yourself to how you view yourself.
I don't know how I'm going to deal with this, so I'm incompetent. Fear is really a natural way that the brain is telling us something important is coming and needs to be overcome. So if you have fear, then you're like every other human being I know, including me. So don't dismiss it. The question is how we deal with it.
It's just like I talked to my son, my daughter, the kids that I coach. Life isn't about what happens to you. It's how you deal with it. That's the measure of the person. So what are some things that very high level, generic kind of moving from philosophical tact toward that tactical is generically sometimes good to put a name on fear because the unknown is by kind of definition scary.
So putting a name on it or writing it down, I'm afraid of this for these reasons. Overcoming that that issue can be done sometimes through clarity becomes survivable instead of uncomfortable and unknown. Sometimes we need to reframe the narrative a little bit around what else could be true. I talked a lot about this with my son, and my two fears is, is that I needed to figure out what was more likely, particularly with my asking my wife to marry me.
What else was true? That she loved me. We've been dating for two and a half years. This wasn't a surprise. The only reason I hadn't done earlier. She was young.
As I look back, I can understand how my father in law thought two young. We also need to, in that process of reframing the narrative that helps build us build confidence. And we think of small steps. Although I speak often presentations, conferences in front of highly skilled, trained, educated physicians and faculty members and university leaders and multibillion dollar corporation maybe in health care more than anything else, executives.
When I utilize my father, that was the most defined outline I had ever developed. I speak off the cuff, I impromptu speaking doesn't bother me in the least. Give me five minutes on the subject in my phone, right? Google few things. I'll figure it out and give you an hour. Not a problem. But that wasn't the moment the small steps were important.
I have an outline. I know what I was going to say. Was there a rhythm to it? Did I make connections? And even my wife commented afterwards when she saw the outline because I hadn't shown it to anyone. She said, I am surprised how much you wrote down small steps. They shrink the fear of not having the words or the needs that you have to overcome.
The other thing is, is that sometimes fear is a child of isolation. It's an only child. The more you isolate yourself and fear, the more you become paralyzed by what you might think might happen or what might be a negative outcome. Not realizing that others are going through similar things. There are times when you have to go through it by yourself, but when we're talking about philanthropy and we'll get into this in a moment, this isn't one of them.
At the end of the day, as I told my son, as I told myself and those two circumstances part of if you what you want is that outcome, you have to pick yourself up and get it done. You have to look fear in the eye. Step up to it. Knock it in the nose. Move forward. Small steps. Reframing.
What else might be. Seeing a bigger picture. Reframing kind of that narrative. Taking, you know, all of the little steps that lead you to maybe naming it all kinds of techniques. But this brings us then to the truly tactical how do we do this? What does it sound like, and what are these moments occurring? Most often I hear them occurring when it deals with in our industry of philanthropy, the nonprofit world, in making calls and seeing people.
There are certainly moments when we have to, you know, let someone go or fire them. And that's or you have a sense you might be fired. Terrifying moments, yes. But I often see, because in those moments, particularly if we're the ones being fired, it's out of our control. We haven't had time to think about it, maybe as much as we have other circumstances.
Many of you might know that our son had immense medical challenges very, very early on in his life. Eight days in, we knew a couple days even before that, there were some issues. We couldn't care what they were. And my son, when I said, you know, the times I've been fearful, he said, well, not when I was in the hospital, all those all those months, days, forever.
And I said, actually, no, because I didn't know they were coming. Fear is about when we have to anticipate, or at least heightened, when we have to anticipate. The longer we anticipate, the worse it gets. That's why we procrastinate. Calls and visits are why that happens. Those are moments when we really don't want to do this. So the first thing is about a mental perspective in what we do.
I spend more time in particular with faculty members and physicians and board members educating them about a lot of general philanthropy nonprofit work, but most importantly around the concept of what we do is not what they think. And why do I do this is because reluctance. See, this idea of what it is we do isn't based upon what we ask people for money.
Some of the largest gifts I've ever been involved with, either as a consultant in the last, you know, ten, 11, 12 years into my practitioner years, the first two decades, just sort of as a someone who was a gift officer, always chief diamond officer. But I was asking for money. I didn't ask him for money. I never asked him for anything.
We'll get into this. The perception is, well, you just go out and you shake people down. Now, inside of our business, we know that. But if we take that to the next level, if we aren't shakedown artists, if we're not salespeople, if we truly are thinking about the generosity crisis with nation, which Nathan Chapelle talks about constantly about the increasing number of people being generous.
If we view ourselves as relationship builders, which is what we aim for, what we should do, how we should contemplate our daily activity as we build these relationships, then things get a lot less scary. Two things we labeled it, and number two, we reframed it and we reframed it accurately. All too often, when we think about the first calls that we have to make, and I see this in particular with younger gift officers who are building portfolios, newer gift officers and organizations building portfolios, those health care gift officers who are who are doing grateful patient philanthropy.
So there's probably more calls to people they don't know. I'm constantly telling them you're not asking them to give you money in this call, unless it's 25 bucks and just ask. But most of the time we're looking for the story. We're looking for building opportunity to build rapport. So the verbiage now we get into the incredibly detailed tactical.
I'd love to hear more about why you think this is important. I'd love to know more about what's important to you overall. What's the value that we offer that you find interesting? Tell me more about what else you're involved with.
That's the first phone call. Now, if it's a meaningful opportunity, I'd also like to follow up with. I'd love to hear more. We have a cup of coffee. People have asked how I've always viewed this, and in fact, I was on site with a client here just recently, and this was a question amongst the executive, the hospital's executive team, not the philanthropy team.
And I said, it's Frank and Joe Hardy. And there was one person who got it, which tells me how old I'm getting Frank Joe Hardy, the Hardy Boys. It was an still has a small place in my heart as the most impactful books I ever read. Franklin Dickson, which was actually not a person. It was several people who wrote under that name.
He crafted the Hardy Boys, or they crafted the Hardy Boys as Frank and Joe Hardy, 18 and 17, from Bridgeport, Bridgeport, who had their friends Chet Morton and Biff and their girlfriends in Ireland. Like, I have forgotten this over the years. And no, I didn't look that up. And all they did was is they investigate it. They asked questions, they viewed the situation, and then they moved through the mystery.
I look at this like Frank and Joe Hardy. I want to know more about them. I'm offering them an opportunity to tell me who they are and what they believe. I'm not asking for money. I've always viewed that part of the job as glorious perspective reframing it, moving it into actuality, talking about why I'm doing what I'm doing and finding the joy in it, and then deepening the relationship.
I'd love to spend some time with. Could we chat about that? We have a lot of things going in that area. Would you be more interested in it?
There's also this idea, and I've talked about this a lot in a different series of different podcasts. There's a lot of people that say, no, and maybe my own life's journey of not having a lot of really close friends, but the ones that I have, I trust with my kids lives. I've always assumed most people weren't that interested in me personally.
I'm okay with that. Plus, I'm sometimes a little more of a recluse, so I never really took it personally. When they said no or they called me back or didn't call me back or whatever. I've done trainings where doctors yelled at me in the middle of the presentation. It wasn't personal. And that water off a duck's back. Maybe it comes to me a little more naturally, but it's something we all have to embrace.
We're going to be told no, I don't want to listen. No, I'm not interested. No, I don't like you. No, I don't like your organization. No, I don't like my experience. This whole thing stinks. It's not about us. But that's reframing it and giving that exposure to understanding what's actually happening. If you start any call with a thank you.
Use open ended questions, connect stories, and close with gratitude. You will reduce your fear and increase your conversion rates. So when you build that confidence to make those calls, realizing that if we just offer them the opportunity to chat, they might tell us more than we realize, and then it's not really about us. Our fear may be reduced, but that brings us to the greatest fear of all.
And that's quote unquote asking for money. And I never reviewed it this way. Maybe it's because I was mentored by a fabulous Jesuit priest who taught me this early, early on in my career. I didn't even really understand what he was saying at the time. But in context, in time, it's become part of who I am. Anytime that I have sat down and thought about or worked with or had a conversation about someone making a gift, I wasn't really asking them to reframing it.
I was offering them an invitation. Are you interested in having this discussion? Would you like to think about what this means and how you might like to be involved? Are you open to something more formalized on a piece of paper that might clarify what we've been talking about here? By the way, those if you listen to any of these podcasts, soft asks.
All these things are intertwined.
Asking for money is an enormous fear in the world, and people are terrified of it. And I have to explain to executive leadership, to physicians, to faculty members, to board members, hey, we're not asking for money. We're offering invitations. We're offering them the chance for them to make a choice if they want to do something that they believe in.
I'm just a conduit for them to get from A to B, reframe building smaller steps, that language, then talking about it from the perspective of labeling it. We're not asking. We're offering.
All of these things are important because what fear does in the end is shrink action. It reduces our effectiveness. And you can take what we're talking about today, and you can apply it to way outside of philanthropy in your personal life. That doesn't mean that you're a bad person or you're wrong, or you're less if you have fear.
We all have it. We all choose to deal with it differently. The reason we have fear is usually because of the way we were raised, or what's going on in our own personal life, or home life, or how we view ourselves. It's complicated. I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist, and I'm not trying to diagnose anybody. But what I do know is, is that fear cripples.
And that was my fear for my son. How do I help him work through it? Now, while that fear isn't as personalized with gift officers and with relationship builders, it's still fear. And in the end, it's okay to be nervous. It's okay to maybe contemplate, man, this is not what I thought it would be, but it's not okay to get stuck and you have to embrace some of these tactics, because if you do it more often, you do it.
The less fear you have that I can promise you. Even in my early days with the crazy thought process in way I was, I was brought up in my mentors and never sure I had a fear, but I had apprehension. And what I didn't understand was, is there's a psychology to this. What we're talking about today, I just had some people that help me get through it.
My parents, when I would contact, sure, I want to do this. At the end of the day, that's the job. And I'll finish with what my father told me many years ago. If it's ethical and moral and you know what those things are, if you're not willing to do them, then you need to leave. And the fear of failure actually became at times more powerful than the fear of rejection.
Because I didn't want to let my dad down, not let my mom down, not let my wife down. I didn't want to let me down. Work through your fear. Find and be okay with it. Embrace it. Don't run from it. Use some of these tactics to overcome the need to really do what we should to be doing at the highest level.
Building deeper, more meaningful relationships. Find out what people want to do and help them do it. If our organization does those things as an invitation to make a difference, the essence of philanthropy. Don't forget to check out the blogs at Hallett Philanthropy two per week. Some things inside the industry. Some things leadership. Some things personal. Hallettphilanthropy.com/blogs, you know, RSS feed right to you.
And if you'd like, you can reach out to me at podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. There's also a fear that comes with the unknown when we talk about the grander world. And I think this is where what we do and how we do it and why we do it is so important. I always talk about that philanthropy and nonprofit work and charity, and however you want to look at it fits between the idea of free enterprise business.
Who doesn't want to extend a profitable government which isn't very efficient? There's in the middle. Philanthropy nonprofit world. And when you have a lot of unknowns in the world, fear nonprofit Step Up. Which brings me to my all time favorite saying, and what you need to remember because you are the first of the three. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. That old Gaelic saying I use all the time, the end of the day, working through fear to be somebody, to be an organization that makes things happen for the people and the parts of our community that are wondering what happened. There's power in that. And if you think about the outcome and you think about some of the tactical things, you can overcome fear to be even more so of someone who's making things happen.
And I don't know a better way to spend a life. I appreciate your time today, and I really thank you for your support. I know a lot of people listen. I'm becoming a little bit more aware of it and I feel very blessed. And I will continue to ensure that we do our very best here to give you something tactical each time, to do the work you need to do.
So you, as always, always say, be somebody who makes things happen. We'll see you the next time. Right back here on the next edition of around with Randall. And don't forget, make it a great day.