Cold calling is definite emotional labor… But the mental warm up before starting to cold call can feel 100x worse than the actual cold calling itself. I feel terrible before I cold call, then relieved afterward. This is true almost every single time. Also, I’ve noticed that when I do call a client after hours, making an extra effort with them to help, even when I don’t want to, if they’re not in my time zone, or whatever reason, sometimes good things happen that I didn’t expect.
The writer Samuel Johnson strived throughout his life for internal reformation and wrote about the mental anguish that he observed people needlessly put themselves through. He wrote in Essays no. 58:
“It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. He that has pictured a prospect upon his fancy, will receive little pleasure from his eyes; he that has anticipated the conversation of a wit, will wonder to what prejudice he owes his reputation. Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction.”
If we didn’t have hope, we would maybe never make the first call, or maybe never make the second after being rejected on the first.