Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort

Imagine this.

The elevator doors open and you step in. Everyone looks at you, the way we all do. They’re guessing where you’re headed. They’re noticing your shoes, your jacket, the bag on your shoulder.

Normally you’d give the obligatory half-second side smile, turn around, and face the doors like everyone else.

But not this time.

This time, you stay turned around. You face the group. The doors close behind you, and you ride the entire way up looking right at them. No joke. No explanation. Just you, facing the opposite way of everyone else, breaking a rule nobody ever wrote down but everybody follows.

Be honest. Your stomach tightened just reading that, didn’t it?

The Elevator Experiment

In 1962, the TV show Candid Camera filmed a segment called “Face the Rear.” A few actors would step into an elevator and stand facing the back wall. Then an unsuspecting passenger would get on.

What happened next was almost comical. One by one, those regular people slowly shifted, shuffled, and turned around to face the back too. They didn’t know why everyone was facing the wall. They just couldn’t stand being the only one facing the “right” way.

That’s how strong the pull to fit in is. Breaking the norm doesn’t just feel awkward. It can feel physically painful. And that’s not only a figure of speech: a well-known UCLA study published in Science found that being socially rejected lights up some of the same areas of the brain that respond to physical pain.

Our brains are wired to avoid rejection the same way they’re wired to pull a hand away from a hot stove.

The Person Who Can Handle the Most Rejection

There’s a saying I come back to often:

“The person who gets the most in life is the person who can handle the most rejection.”

Read that again. Not the most talented person. Not the smartest or the best connected. The one who can hear “no” and keep going.

So if rejection is wired to hurt, how do we get better at handling it? One man decided to find out the hard way. null

Jia Jiang and 100 Days of Rejection

Jia Jiang grew up dreaming of building a big company. By 30, he had a good marketing job at Dell and a wife who believed in him, and he finally took the leap: he quit to start his own business.

Four months in, an investor he was counting on told him no. It crushed him. He realized the fear of rejection had been quietly running his life for years, keeping him from speaking up, pitching ideas, and taking the risks his dreams required. It had him stuck every time he tried to go out on his own.

So he did something unusual. He put himself through what he called “rejection therapy”: 100 days in a row of deliberately asking for things he expected to be told no to, just to desensitize himself to the pain.

• On day one, he asked a total stranger if he could borrow $100. The man said no, and Jia practically ran away.
• He asked a restaurant for a “burger refill.”
• He walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for doughnuts shaped like the Olympic rings. To his shock, the employee said yes and made them. The video went viral.
• He even asked to plant a flower in a stranger’s backyard. The man said no, but when Jia stayed and asked why, the man sent him to a neighbor who loved flowers. She said yes.

The lesson Jia shares in his TED Talk is simple and powerful: when you stop running from rejection, stay in the conversation, and ask “why,” doors open that you never knew were there. Rejection is often just one person’s opinion in one moment. It isn’t a verdict on who you are.

His talk has been viewed millions of times, and it’s worth every minute: Watch Jia Jiang’s TED Talk, “What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection” →

Becoming Comfortable with Discomfort

Here’s why this matters so much for us.

Our work is full of elevator moments. The follow-up call you’ve been putting off. The client conversation about coverage they don’t want to think about. Asking for the referral. Telling a family the honest truth about a gap in their plan. Putting yourself out there when you’re new and nobody knows your name yet.

Every one of those moments carries that same tightness in your stomach. And every time, you have a choice: turn around and face the doors like everyone else, or stand there in the discomfort and do the thing anyway.

Try the Elevator Experiment Yourself

This is one of the best experiments you can try for yourself if you want to practice pushing through discomfort. The next time you step into an elevator, don’t turn around. Face the group, and ride the whole way like that without an explanation.

Pay attention to what happens in your body. The heat in your face. The urge to smile, apologize, or crack a joke. The almost physical pull to turn around and face the doors like everyone else. Then notice what happens next: nothing. The doors open, people step off, and the world keeps going.

That’s the whole point. You are going to have conversations in sales that feel just as physically uncomfortable. Asking a client about their health history. Talking with a young parent about what happens to their family if they don’t come home. Asking for the business. Asking for a referral. Your heart rate climbs, your palms sweat, and every instinct tells you to turn around and change the subject.

The more you’ve practiced standing in that feeling on purpose, in low-stakes places like an elevator, the less power it has over you when a client and their family are counting on you to have the hard conversation.

Becoming comfortable with discomfort doesn’t mean the fear goes away. It means you practice feeling it so often that it stops making your decisions for you. Like Jia, you build the muscle one small “ask” at a time. (We wrote about that kind of steady courage in Persistence: The Edge Nobody Talks About and Make Progress or Make Excuses.)

The agents who grow the fastest aren’t the ones who never hear no. They’re the ones who hear it, learn from it, and pick up the phone again.

So here’s a challenge for this week: do one thing that makes you uncomfortable on purpose. Make the call. Ask the question. Face the group.

At Elevate, we believe growth lives on the other side of discomfort, and we’d love to help you get there. If you’re ready to build a career with a team that will stand beside you through the hard conversations, let’s talk.

Become an Agent with Elevate Life Team → and let’s build something great together.

Let’s help people win.