This a brilliant hack if you’re a solopreneur who wants to collaborate with someone who feels out of your league | by Risa Haasbroek | Mar, 2023

If you want to make your business grow in quantum leaps and bounds, you want to push yourself into doing things that make you uncomfortable, and that will move the needle, like reaching out to people who feel out of your league.

So gather all of your chutzpah. And chutzpah is the perfect word to use here. It’s Yiddish for guts, audacity, fearlessness, gumption, or boldness.

Here’s a great technique to use when making an audacious ask. For instance, to be on a big-name podcast or to have that host be a guest on yours. Or to be a speaker at a high-profile conference.

The fastest and most efficient way to establish a quick working relationship with someone is to acknowledge and diffuse the negative first.

This brilliant insight comes from Chris Voss’s book Never Split the Difference. Voss is a celebrity hostage negotiator who worked for many years in intense, hostile, and dangerous situations for the FBI.

Research confirms Voss is right; the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it without reaction and judgment.

Here’s why it works so well.

Human brains have a negativity bias. So, by default, we pay more attention to the negative than the positive. You know this by how you feel the weight of criticism much more than compliments.

Focusing more on what is dangerous and harmful makes sense regarding our survival. Say, you walk out of your house with a deadly snake on the porch and a friendly neighbor across the street waving at you. Which of these should you pay attention to if you want to live another day?

On the snake, of course.

It’s mostly your amygdala that comes into play here. The amygdala is a small part of your brain that helps you feel fear, excitement, and anger. It’s like a guard dog for your brain because it lets you recognize when something dangerous or scary is happening around you.

When you see or hear something that your brain thinks is scary, like the snake, your amygdala signals to the rest of your brain to get ready to fight, run away, or hide. This is called the “fight or flight” response, a way for your body to protect itself from danger.

So, the amygdala helps you feel emotions and react to things your brain thinks are important. It’s an essential part of your brain that helps keep you safe.

Imagine your amygdala constantly putting everything into two categories: dangerous and not dangerous. And then alerting you to danger again and again while at the same time underplaying the positive. That is your negativity bias in a nutshell.

Because all human minds have this basic tendency, insight into your brain’s negativity bias gives you an advantage when dealing with others.

Insight into your own brain’s negativity bias gives you an advantage when dealing with others.

When you have a request to make of someone requiring much chutzpah, you can use your knowledge about the negativity bias to give you the edge.

You want to calm down the amygdala of the person you’re making a request to by labeling the fears they immediately have when you reach out.

What you want to do, is what Chris Voss describes as bathing the fears in sunshine, bleaching them of their power.

Defense lawyers do this all the time. They list everything their client is accused of right before making their case. It’s called taking the sting out.

Voss calls it an accusation audit. You are to list every terrible thing the person you’re contacting could say about you.

Say you message an Instagram influencer with many more followers than you, asking them to recommend your product. You begin by saying something to this effect, “perhaps you’re asking yourself why you would engage with someone who has a tenth of your followers.”

It’s incredible how you disarm the other person’s accusations by anticipating and naming them openly at the beginning.

It’s incredible how you disarm the other person’s accusations by anticipating and naming them openly at the beginning. By addressing their fear, you calm down their amygdala and show them you are no fool.

The next part is to consciously replace each negative portion you’ve labeled with positive, compassionate, and solutions-based statements.

In the case of the Instagram influencer, you can now, for instance, state how exciting your product is, how it will make the lives of their followers better, how it will make the influencer look good, and how easy you are to work with.

By paying attention to the negative first, you diminish it. And by listing out the positive after you’ve labeled the negative, you amplify the positive.

It may feel scary the first time you use this technique but scoop up all of your chutzpah and do it anyway.

Because it works. As it’s so soundly rooted in neurology and human psychology.

While building a new online business as a solopreneur, you’ll often find yourself engaging in unhelpful behaviors.

* Getting in your own way.

* Sabotaging your progress.

* Not working in your business for weeks.

* And then you are working yourself to death.

* Spending hours on social media instead of creating your own content.

You want to know WHY this is happening.

But you also want to know how to change that.

So that you can build your business ASAP.

That’s what “The Solopreneur’s Survival Guide” is all about​

There’s nothing wrong with you. You just have a human brain.

All you have to do is to learn how to toss your brain’s standard operating procedure for something better …

And learn how to choose a different path instead.

Within its pages, this downable PDF booklet has everything you need to get yourself out of despair while building your business.

Learning to do this will save you thousands of dollars and hours and hours. Information this helpful usually doesn’t come for free.

Go to my website https://risa4coaching.com to download it now.