If you want to make cold calling a peak experience instead of a trek into the emotional depths, there are five things to consider:

(1) Peak experiences, blissful episodes, feeling in the groove, on the beam, in the mood, and in the zone, depend on something called "Flow." It is organizing your work so it gently but fluidly proceeds, from one part of a conversation to the next, and from one call to another. The baseball batter who sees the ball well and feels he cannot do anything but hit it solidly, is flowing. The first violinist at the symphony is in the same rapture when he forgets about the audience and lets the music flow through his fingers.

(2) Winning and losing, being accepted or rejected, earning the sale or not, shouldn't matter. If you're too "end result" oriented, you'll sound desperate and less than fully in control. Appreciate the Law of Large Numbers, also the title of my Nightingale-Conant audio seminar, which says if you do enough of anything, including cold calling, you're bound to succeed. Do more and you'll get rich. Surpass that, and you'll become a legend.

(3) Cold calling is no more or less "professional" than any endeavor. If you succumb to negative stereotypes about this activity, or about selling in general, you'll unconsciously sabotage your efforts. As management legend and my professor, the late Peter F. Drucker said, "We don't succeed in what we don't respect."

(4) Appreciate the wonder, the simplicity and at the same time the complexity of communicating, one to one, as we do over the phone. To me, it's endlessly interesting, and always new and teaching me important lessons. Each new contact is a relationship in microcosm, with a beginning, middle, and end. And depending on your call volume, you might have as many as fifty or a hundred relationships come together in a single day.

(5) Yes, your purpose in cold calling is to make a sale or to prospect or to set an appointment. Still, as author Robert Pirsig pointed out in his amazing novel, ZEN & THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, the motorcycle you're working on, when its engine is purring along or in pieces, "is yourself." Who you become in the process of cold calling is by far more important than any sale you'll make.

Pirsig found a certain amount of enlightenment in his motorcycle trek with his son. Cold calling can get you there, too, if you're ready for the journey.

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