The three skills people will not learn

My first proper sales job was at 20, and one of the games the team played, framed explicitly as a game, was to call a company chosen more or less at random and see how many people in it you could end up speaking to. You struck up a conversation with whoever answered the phone, found a reason to be passed to another person or department, did the same again there, and kept the chain going as long as possible. Nothing was sold. The point was to dissolve the specific fear of being on the phone with a stranger who had not expected the call, by turning the situation into something to be extended rather than escaped. It worked, on me and on every other person who played it, and I did not understand why for 25 years.

There are three skills that, in 30 years of running businesses and watching other people run them, I have found people are extraordinarily reluctant to learn. They are not technical skills, and they are not, in any meaningful sense, difficult skills. The mechanics of each can be taught in a weekend. The reluctance has nothing to do with the mechanics. The three skills are presentation, negotiation, and cold calling, and the thing they have in common is that each one requires you to put yourself in a position where you may be rejected, in public, by another person, with no intermediary and no place to hide.

This is the entire problem. Most other business skills (financial modelling, project management, even managing people) can be acquired in private, practised in low-stakes settings, and gradually deployed at scale. The three I am about to discuss cannot. The only way to learn them is to do them, badly at first, in front of other people, and accept the social cost of doing them badly until you are doing them well. Most people are not willing to pay this cost, and they construct elaborate reasons why the skill is not really necessary, or is someone else’s job, or can be replaced by some structural workaround: a deck, a written proposal, a marketing funnel, an introduction. None of these substitutes works as well as the original skill, and most people, in their heart of hearts, know it. They pay the substitute’s tax for the rest of their careers, and the people who did pay the original cost are paid a lifetime premium for having paid it.

The literature on each of these skills, when one digs into it, is much deeper than I had realised before I started writing this. It also converges on a single underlying mechanism, which is the part I find most useful.

I. Why They Are Hard

The three skills are not difficult for three different reasons. They are difficult for one reason, which manifests three different ways.

The mechanism is the brain’s response to potential social rejection. Humans evolved in small groups where exclusion from the group was, quite literally, a death sentence. The neurological circuitry that fires when you contemplate standing up in front of a room of strangers, or asking another person for more than they have offered, or interrupting a stranger’s day with an unsolicited approach, is the same circuitry that fired in our ancestors when they faced the prospect of being cast out of the tribe. It does not distinguish between actual physical threat and the social threat of public embarrassment. The body responds as though both are the same, because for most of our evolutionary history, they were.

This is not a metaphor. Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues showed in 2003, with people excluded from a simple ball-tossing game inside a scanner, that social rejection activates the same region of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate, that registers physical pain, and the finding has held up in the two decades since. The empirical work on each of the three skills traces back, in the end, to the same mechanism.

Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, affects something between 75% and 85% of the population to some degree, depending on whose survey you read, and around 10% severely enough to interfere with their working lives; the figures come from popular surveys rather than clinical ones, and I use them for the shape rather than the decimals. The prevalence is so high, and so consistent across cultures, that the evolutionary reading is the only one that makes sense. As one of the better summaries of the research puts it: public speaking places us in a vulnerable position where social rejection or judgement could threaten our standing within a group, something historically dangerous for humans as social creatures. The body releases adrenaline, the heart rate rises, the cortisol levels climb. The brain has decided that this is a survival situation, and the body is preparing accordingly. Cicero noticed it: every time I make a speech, I feel I am submitting to judgement, not only about my ability but my character and honour. The Romans had the same nervous system we do.

The cold-calling literature is, if anything, more pointed. George Dudley and Shannon Goodson at the Behavioral Sciences Research Press have spent decades formalising what they call sales call reluctance. Their finding, the headline number, is that sales call reluctance accounts for over half of all failures in one of the largest professions in the world. The figures come from their own instrument and their own consultancy, so I hold them loosely, and the shape of them matches what I have watched. Almost 90 per cent of salespeople have at least one form of it. Up to 80 per cent of new entrants to sales fail to complete their first year, and the dominant cause is not lack of product knowledge or weak technique. It is that they cannot bring themselves to make the calls. Forty per cent of experienced, high-producing salespeople will admit to episodes of reluctance severe enough to threaten their continuation in the profession. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is the central problem of the largest commercial activity in the world.

The neuroscience underneath this has been worked out. Ethan Kross and colleagues, in 2007, used brain imaging to show that individuals with low rejection sensitivity exhibit higher activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the brain region associated with top-down cognitive control over behaviour. The rejection-sensitive person and the rejection-resilient person are not feeling different emotions. They are exerting different degrees of cognitive control over the same emotion. The skill is not the absence of the threat response. It is the capacity to override it.

The negotiation literature gives this its cleanest experimental treatment. Alison Wood Brooks, at Harvard Business School, has spent her career on the role of state anxiety in negotiation, and her finding, set out in Can Nervous Nelly Negotiate? with Maurice Schweitzer in 2011, is that anxious negotiators make lower first offers, exit the negotiation earlier, and earn less profit, even when they hold an identical position to a non-anxious counterpart. The anxiety is not a vague psychological background. It is producing measurable, costly behaviour in real time. The negotiator who is uncomfortable shortens the conversation, settles for less, and leaves the room before the value has been extracted. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, in Women Don’t Ask (2003), put a price tag on it. The compounded lifetime cost of failing to negotiate a first salary is, in their figures, somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million, depending on profession and assumptions. The decision not to ask, taken in a single uncomfortable meeting at the start of a career, propagates forward for 40 years.

The mechanism is the same in all three cases. The body experiences potential social rejection as a survival threat. The threat response interferes with performance. People avoid the situation rather than override the response, and the avoidance, repeated over a career, compounds into very large costs.

II. Why Each One Is Hard in Its Own Way

Although the underlying mechanism is shared, the three skills require slightly different forms of vulnerability, and they tend to be harder for different temperaments.

Presentation requires you to be visibly judged on the quality of your thinking, in real time, by a group of people whose reactions you cannot fully read. The vulnerability is on the substance, not the relationship. The audience is not deciding whether to do business with you. They are deciding whether you are credible, intelligent, prepared. Most people, when they imagine presenting badly, imagine being thought stupid. This is the specific fear, and it is more piercing than the generic fear of rejection, because it goes to the part of the self most people defend most fiercely.

Negotiation requires the opposite. The vulnerability is on the relationship, not the substance. The substance, the price, the terms, the deliverables, is usually well understood by both parties. What is being negotiated is the willingness of each party to risk the relationship by asking for more than the other side wants to give. The fear is not of being thought stupid. It is of being thought greedy, ungrateful, difficult, or unreasonable. Most people, when they fail to negotiate, fail because they cannot bear to be perceived as the kind of person who asks. This is why Babcock and Laschever found, repeatedly, that the people who do not negotiate often do not even realise that they could have. The threat response has done its work pre-consciously. The opportunity to ask is not noticed, because noticing it would be uncomfortable.

Cold calling is the hardest of the three for most people, and the literature is clear about why. It combines both fears (substantive and relational) with a third element neither of the other two has, which is the absence of any prior consent. In presentation, the audience has chosen to be there. In negotiation, the counterparty has agreed to negotiate. In cold calling, you are imposing your presence on a stranger who has not invited it, and who is statistically more likely to respond with hostility, indifference, or polite dismissal than with interest. The rejection ratio is real. The figure that has been doing the rounds for years, that it takes around 80 calls to land a meeting, is folklore with no traceable source, and I quote it only because it is the order of magnitude that people in the trade recognise. Seventy-nine of those calls are some flavour of no. The body cannot tell the difference between a stranger declining to take a meeting and the tribe deciding to cast you out. Most people will, after a few cycles, simply stop calling.

This is the part of the literature I found most useful, because it explains a pattern I have watched repeatedly. People are not equally bad at all three skills. A confident presenter is often a poor negotiator. A skilled negotiator is often unable to cold-call. The reluctance attaches to the specific vulnerability, not to the general category. Knowing which of the three is hardest for you is the first step in deciding which is most worth your attention.

III. Why Competence Is So Disproportionately Rewarded

The reason these skills pay so well is, in part, that they are scarce relative to demand. The reason they are scarce is that most people will not pay the cost of acquiring them.

In any given organisation, the number of people who can stand up and deliver a clear, convincing argument to a board, a customer audience, or a regulator is small. The number who can sit down across from a counterparty and hold a position long enough to extract real value is smaller. The number who can pick up a phone and have a productive first conversation with a stranger who did not expect the call is smaller still. Each capability constitutes, in effect, a small monopoly inside the firm. The person who has it is asked to do more of it, is paid more for doing it, and accumulates a reputation that compounds over time.

The compounding is the part most people underestimate. The Carnegie Mellon study that Babcock and Laschever cite, in which the graduating students who negotiated their starting salary, most of them men, earned on average 7.4% more than those who did not, and the gap grew over the career, captures only the salary component. The reputation effects are larger. The presenter who is asked to give the company keynote at the conference becomes the public face of the company, which positions them for board appointments, advisory roles, and external opportunities that have nothing to do with their day job. The negotiator who closes the deal everyone else thought was dead is in the room for the next deal, and the next, and gets the equity, the title, and the carry that comes with being indispensable. The cold-caller who built a book of business from nothing is the one the next venture wants as a founding sales hire, with the founder-grade compensation that comes with that role.

None of this is hidden information. Every one of these effects is visible to anyone watching a career unfold. The reason most people do not pursue the skills despite knowing the rewards is that the costs are paid up front and the rewards are paid out over decades. The threat response is in the present moment. The compounding return is across a working life. Human discounting being what it is, the present cost wins almost every time.

Two qualifications, before I say how I came by the skills myself. The first is that not everyone needs them. A great many good careers are built by people who never present to a board, never negotiate anything larger than a salary, and never make a cold call, and the engineer who does the work that the presenter presents is not paying a substitute’s tax; she is doing something else, and the firm needs her more than it needs another speaker. The premium I have described is paid to the people in commercial and leadership seats, and it is a premium for scarcity in those seats, not a verdict on everyone else. The second is that my sample is the survivors. I have spent 30 years among people who did learn the three skills and were paid for it, and I have watched the ones who did not learn them mostly from the far side of the table, which is where they are least visible. Some of the people who refused the cost were right to refuse it, because the seat they wanted did not require it, and I would not have seen them succeed.

IV. What the Research Suggests You Can Actually Do

The mechanism being shared has one very useful implication: the same intervention works for all three.

Alison Wood Brooks’s Get Excited research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in 2014, makes the point as cleanly as anyone has. She had participants sing karaoke, give impromptu public speeches, and perform difficult cognitive tasks under pressure. Before each task, she had them say one of three things to themselves: I am anxious, I am calm, or I am excited. The third group consistently outperformed the other two, often by very large margins. In the karaoke study, the I am excited group scored an average of 81% on pitch, volume, and rhythm. The I am anxious group scored 69%. The I am calm group scored 53%. The intervention is a single sentence, said in private, before the performance. The difference in measurable output is 20 to 30 per cent.

The mechanism Brooks proposes is simple. Anxiety and excitement are physiologically almost identical. Both are high-arousal states. Both produce racing heart, elevated cortisol, sweating palms. The body has no separate machinery for the two. What differs is the interpretation. Anxiety is the same physiological state read as threat. Excitement is the same physiological state read as opportunity. The body is doing the same thing; the brain is labelling it differently. Reappraisal is cheap, takes no training, and works. The manager who designed the phone game had stumbled on exactly this, a quarter of a century before Brooks formalised it. Same physiological state, different label, different behaviour.

This connects directly to the Kross neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex doing top-down control over the threat response is, in effect, performing the reappraisal in real time. The skill, the actual underlying competence behind being able to present, negotiate, or cold-call, is the trained capacity to do this reappraisal quickly enough that it intervenes before the avoidance behaviour kicks in. This is what Dudley and Goodson, in the call-reluctance literature, mean when they say the only real cure is repetition. The human brain cannot tell the difference between social rejection and the historical kinds, and it cannot be argued out of treating them as the same. What it can do is develop a faster cognitive override of the threat response through repeated exposure. You do not stop feeling rejected. You stop letting the feeling dictate the next action.

There is one further finding worth quoting, because it is what I would tell a younger version of myself. The research on negotiation outcomes, and Babcock and Laschever cite this directly, has shown that participants who focused on their target outcomes reached agreements that were 13% higher than participants who focused on the minimum they would accept. The whole essay reduces, on the prescriptive side, to this. You will perform better at any of the three skills if you can hold, in your head, the outcome you want rather than the outcome you would settle for, and act from that position rather than the defensive one. This is not bravado. It is not a confidence trick. It is what the body, properly directed by the brain, will actually deliver if it is told to deliver it.

This is also why the people who do acquire these skills are not necessarily the people who started with the lowest fear. The most accomplished public speakers I have known are not naturally relaxed in front of audiences. They are, in many cases, the opposite: people who felt the fear acutely enough to recognise it as something to be confronted rather than ignored. In my own case the skills were not so much chosen as imposed. I joined Xerox as part of their management training programme, and presentation was treated not as a topic but as a discipline. We were made to present, formally, once a week. The first few were not enjoyable. By the time I had done 30 of them, the threat response had not disappeared, but it had stopped being the loudest signal in the room. The training also included negotiation, more than once, which was unusual for the time and which I now recognise as a deliberate structural choice on Xerox’s part: they had decided that the skill was central enough to commercial life that it warranted repetition, not exposure.

Xerox in that period had decided, at an institutional level, that the three skills were the skills, and that the only way to teach them was the way you teach anything the body resists: through structured, repeated, low-stakes exposure until the resistance is no longer the dominant fact. By the time I was running my own businesses and standing in front of boards, customers, and investors, the muscle had been built, and I had stopped noticing it. The fear had not disappeared. Thirty years later it has still not disappeared. What changed at Xerox was its volume, and that turned out to be the whole of the skill.