I pay attention to what I'm bringing into the call.
Am I sitting there replaying the worst thing that might happen? Am I going over words in my head and feeling smaller the longer I wait? I know that experience because I lived it.
When the calls had to get done
One of the worst times was when we bought our first house. It was our dream house, under contract, and the address began with E. Words beginning with vowels were incredibly difficult for me.
Because of my wife’s busy work schedule, I was the one who had to make the calls. The mortgage broker. The home insurance broker. The bug spray company. The alarm system company. And on and on.
Time after time, I had to give our new address and my name. I felt humiliated. And there was a tight window to get those calls done because of the closing date. It freakin’ sucked.
Struggling to say that simple address and my name made me determined. That is one of the experiences behind what I share about phone calls.
When I could not get through hello
There was also a time when I hid how hard it was to say hello on the phone. After a few seconds of struggling with it, I would hang up.
Then I would call the number back and apologize for the phone cutting off. I had been embarrassed by trying to get the word out.
What I worked on before a call
One thing I used was music. Before a conversation, I would play something that made me feel alive, the kind of song I might run or work out to. I wanted to shift how I felt before I started speaking.
I want the distinction clear: playing a song and then having good speech are not the same thing. I've said that directly. I'm talking about the state I wanted to be in before I spoke, and what helped me get there.
I also recalled a small time when my speech had gone better. Something actual. I wanted to have that in my mind too, instead of thinking only about the bad calls or the word I feared.
How did I help someone find a feeling to bring into a call?
The person was already practicing. He was calling restaurants in other parts of the country and asking about items whose names were difficult for him. He was doing it a couple of times a week, but said it almost seemed pointless because he wasn't making progress.
I asked how he felt before the first call. Anxious. Uncomfortable. It took energy just to make it. Then I asked about something he enjoyed outside speech. He made music.
He told me about a mashup he posted on TikTok and YouTube. It took about two weeks to take off. Seeing people enjoy his work felt good, and the amount of attention was a little overwhelming too.
I asked, “And how good did that feel?” Then I brought it back to the phone: spend five minutes reliving how good that experience felt, and then make the call. That was the memory I wanted him to draw on.
Later, I offered another possibility: remember a conversation, or even a phrase, when his speech had been good. Find an actual experience and feel it again. That was what I was asking him to do before the calls.
What did he say happened as he kept calling?
When I said starting two inches tall could only go down, he pushed back: “But it, but it can go up though.” He said he became more comfortable as he made more calls. He wasn't saying he could say everything fluently. He was saying it was better than before.
I asked whether that meant going from two inches to five inches tall. He said four. My response was that I wanted him to go in three feet tall. I returned to the memory of his music and how it had felt when people enjoyed it.
He said that made sense, that he hadn't tried it, and that he had mostly been going in cold. That was his response to the suggestion during our conversation.
Did I keep doing the full preparation forever?
No. I explained to someone that, as I improved, the preparation became shorter. What had taken more deliberate time could later take a few minutes, and eventually I was mainly doing it for the biggest calls.
I still cared about how I came into a demanding situation. But the amount of preparation changed as I gained experience.
That matters when you hear me describe what I did earlier. I'm explaining a stage of my own work. It wasn't a fixed amount of preparation that stayed the same for every telephone call in my life.