The fear of rejection is one of the most destructive forces there is. It can paralyse you in any area of life: declaring your love to someone, going out to sell to a customer, asking a bank for a loan, or even starting your own business.
The thing is that, to a greater or lesser extent, the fear of rejection is present in every one of us, though not with the same intensity. The good news is that we can ease that fear.
Jia Jiang came up with a method for overcoming the fear of rejection. It will sound like the most absurd thing you’ve ever heard, but, curiously, it’s backed by science and even by common sense.
Jiang dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur, which in itself means a lot of rejection, and probably failures too. But he managed to beat that fear by turning it into a kind of game. His game consisted of 100 days of making ridiculous requests of strangers, looking for rejection. Naturally, over those 100 days he was rejected many times, but he also got plenty of completely unexpected yeses.
Among the most curious yeses was knocking on a stranger’s door holding a ball and asking the homeowner: “Can I play football in your backyard?” To Jiang’s surprise, the answer was: “Sure, go ahead.”
He asked a police officer whether he could drive his car, and the answer was: “Go on, do it, but be careful.”
As the saying goes, if you don’t ask or try, the answer is already no.
Clearly, the aim of this game was to be rejected so many times that our own brain would get used to failure and see for itself that absolutely nothing happens if you’re rejected: you don’t die, life goes on, and so on.
But by studying Jiang’s experiment and the science behind rejection, Eric Barker, who runs the blog Bakadesuyo.com, has drawn many lessons from it to help us deal with the inevitable noes and get what we want in life. And all of it is backed by science.
Rejection is very powerful
Suppose you tried to join the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) but they turned you down. Who cares, right? After all, they’re a bunch of ignorant racists.
But in fact, according to Barker, research says that even if you’re rejected by the KKK, you may well feel bad. In fact, you may well find yourself attracted to someone you don’t like if you notice that person rejecting you.
Yes, indeed: the feeling of rejection is so powerful that it can make you stupid. According to various studies, rejection can even drastically lower a person’s IQ and their capacity for analytical reasoning.
It’s as if people were designed to get along with everyone else, and being excluded (rejected) usually has negative effects on our minds. In fact, rejection is so powerful that you feel it even when you’re rejected by a group you didn’t even like.
Various studies have shown that the brain doesn’t distinguish physical pain from emotional pain. To the brain, heartache and a heart attack aren’t that different. In one of the latest studies, researchers found that the same brain networks are activated whether a cup of boiling water is spilled on you or you’re rejected by the person you love. So when we talk about rejection, we’re on a line that doesn’t separate emotional pain from physical pain.
But if you hide out of fear of rejection, you’re dodging opportunities
Being rejected, like failing, is a possibility that’s always there and may come, but it may also not come, and we may find success instead. In the end, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to take a risk in pursuit of a result.
So the way to approach situations in which we might be rejected is that method, as absurd as it is effective: let’s treat it as a game.
Some clichéd advice will tell you to ignore rejection. I don’t know if you’ve seen those people who spend all day posting messages on Facebook saying “I don’t care what other people think of me”.
Well, it isn’t true. Those people do care what’s said about them, or else they wouldn’t post it. I don’t do drugs, and I don’t spend all day posting little signs on Facebook saying I don’t do drugs. The truth is that the feeling of rejection is so strong that you’ll rarely find anyone who isn’t emotionally hurt by being rejected.
Reframe things with a sense of humour
According to psychologist Rod Martin, a sense of humour kills stress. Once again, the idea of how important it is to laugh at the absurdity of a situation comes up, especially when we’re caught in a highly stressful one.
A while ago we wrote about how tough Navy SEAL training is, and several instructors agree that seeing the gruelling training as a game was key to getting through what are probably the toughest tests in any combat unit.
See also: What you need to know about excellence, according to a Navy SEAL
A man called Joe Simpson smashed his leg while descending a mountain, and he says that the logical thing for anyone in their right mind to do would have been to give up and die on that mountain.
But Joe made up a game in which he concentrated on patterns of steps and progress, so that he mentally detached himself from everything around him, including the pain. Joe thought only about the patterns he had to follow, and his fight for survival became a dance, and that dance freed him from fear and pain.
But let’s leave the extreme cases and go back to Jiang
If we treat it as a game and have fun, maybe we can stop seeing rejection as a kind of social death.
Thanks to the game Jiang came up with, during those 100 days of rejection, when people gave him the dreaded “no”, he no longer felt like a loser, but like someone who loses at a video game: “Game over, you shrug and try again.”
Still, we need to understand that whether we’re doing it as a game or facing a real rejection, in neither case is it the end of the world.
Once we accept rejection as a possibility, and not as the end of the world, we can try new things without fear.
Jiang also discovered something curious: when you lose your fear of rejection and gain confidence (or nonchalance), people pick up on it, and you realise that people tend to be more receptive than you think.
Is anyone out there brave enough to try 100 days of deliberately seeking rejection? 😉
Further reading
- This bias makes you judge other people by standards you don’t apply to yourself
- 5 books to make you smarter and help you make better decisions
Featured image: Jeremyfrimer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
