Want better outcomes? Start making bigger asks

One big consequence of our fear of embarrassment is that we’re almost all overly sensitive to rejection. We haven’t built up our acceptance-of-rejection muscles, and this is a major impediment to agency. I’ve found that the most efficient way to build these muscles is to make audacious requests. Most of us carefully assess which requests that we might make are acceptable and which go too far. We avoid any request that’s likely to generate social friction, behaving as if it would be immediately…