There are many fears that hold you back in life or that can distort the way you see it. Here we explain just three of them, look at why they arise and give some advice on how to avoid them. We’ll come back to all this from other angles later on.
1. The fear of rejection
We’re talking about the fear of rejection in its broadest sense. By definition, to reject means to refuse or to spurn, that is, not to want something or someone.
That makes rejection one of the most destructive forces a person can face. We know today that someone who has been rejected enough times to feel like a rejected person not only suffers damage to their self-esteem but may even see their IQ drop.
This is where another very powerful force comes into play: the need for acceptance.
I usually explain this with an example that may sound a bit absurd but describes perfectly what happens in our brain.
I imagine none of you reading this article wants to join the Ku Klux Klan. For those who don’t know what the Ku Klux Klan is, let’s just say it’s a group of very nice people who hate almost everyone.
See also: Six psychological biases that rule your life
Always keep in mind that a person who is happy and comfortable with themselves doesn’t usually waste time meddling in the lives of people who think or act differently from them. But that’s another subject.
As we were saying, assuming you don’t want to join the Ku Klux Klan, one day they tell you, “We don’t want you in the Ku Klux Klan,” and your brain says: fine, I don’t want to join the Ku Klux Klan, but it bugs me that you’re rejecting me. Why can’t I join? Why am I not good enough?
Research suggests that even if you don’t want to get in, the mere fact of being rejected will make you feel bad to some degree.
That’s why one of the most popular seduction techniques in history for sparking attraction in someone is to reject them, because unconsciously the brain of the person we reject will feel the discomfort of rejection and the need to avoid it.
And there you have the answer to why so many people end up hung up on someone who hasn’t the slightest interest in them.
So when you put the need for acceptance together with the fear of rejection, many people become paralysed and don’t even try anything, simply for fear of being rejected.
How to overcome the fear of rejection so you can keep moving forward
Step 1. Accept rejection as an option
First, understand that rejection is part of life, that we can’t please everyone and certainly won’t be liked by everyone, but above all, that whenever we try something, rejection is one of the possible outcomes, and it can’t be allowed to affect us.
Step 2. Inoculate yourself against rejection
For this we can turn to Jia Jiang’s method. He knew he lived in constant fear of rejection, so one day he decided to face that fear. And he did it as a game.
For 100 days he went looking for rejection. That is, for 100 days he made ridiculous requests of strangers, until rejection became normal and he felt comfortable with it.
Among his requests, he knocked on a stranger’s door and asked the owner if he could play ball in his garden, and to his surprise the owner said, “Sure, go ahead.”
He also asked a police officer if he could drive his car, and the officer said, “Well, all right, but be careful.”
And mind you, what Jiang was after all that time was to be turned down for every single request. The last thing he expected was for anyone to say yes.
He simply wanted to make his brain understand that if he was rejected, absolutely nothing would happen. You don’t die or anything like that. Life goes on.
But he also discovered what happens when you lose your fear of rejection: you find that people say YES more often than you thought.
So the next time you want something, ask for it. Just like that. They may say yes or they may say no. If they say no, life goes on, but nobody is ever going to say yes to something you haven’t asked for.
Apply this to your relationships, work, business and so on.
See also: Two examples of how failure leads to success: how the dots connect (a true story)
Now let’s go to the other extreme, the second fear we need to overcome…
2. The fear of saying no
Some people simply find it hard to say no. The homeowner who let Jiang play ball in his garden, or the police officer who let him drive his car, probably had this problem.
This fear of saying no may seem harmless, but it can cause us a lot of trouble, especially for our personal and mental well-being. Some people have a plan in mind, then they’re offered a different one, they can’t say no and they accept it. In other words, they do something they didn’t want to do because they can’t say no, and then they feel bad, first because they did something they didn’t feel like doing, and second because they couldn’t say no.
Curiously, people with this problem might openly say no to someone they’re already close to, but their need for approval or acceptance makes them unable to turn down people they’re less close to.
In the end they’re more at the disposal of people they shouldn’t give a damn about than of the people closest to them. Either way, however close we are to someone, we should never say yes when we really mean no.
Bosses, door-to-door salespeople and toxic people alike often take advantage of this.
But why does the fear of saying no appear?
This fear is very simple. Often we don’t say NO simply so as not to look bad in front of that person. Full stop.
Imagine someone you know comes up to you and says, “Hey, can I ask you a favour?” The natural answer is, “Yes, of course, go ahead.”
Consciously or not, that question is already a form of manipulation that somehow makes it very hard for you to refuse the second request. That second request might be:
“Could you lend me 200 or 300 euros? I’ll pay you back next week. It’s just that I’ve got this problem…”
Why would you lend that person the money? As a rule, you don’t feel like lending it.
Because you don’t know how to say no, so as not to look bad, to keep that person from feeling disappointed or angry with you.
If you don’t learn to say no, you’ll always be easy prey for manipulation.
How to avoid the fear of saying no
The first thing is to commit to being aware that we’re not going to do anything we don’t feel like doing.
I start from the premise that learning to say no takes effort, because I think we’ve all been there to a greater or lesser extent. I went through that people-pleasing phase too.
We can start by dressing up our refusal or with little white lies until you reach the pro level some of us have already achieved.
In my case, if someone says, “Let’s go to the beach” or “Let’s go to the cinema,” and I don’t feel like it, my answer is, “Nah, I don’t feel like it.” No frills or embellishments. In other cases, depending on the request, my answer is simply, “No way.”
Those just starting out in the art of saying no to things they don’t feel like doing could begin with the embellishments or white lies:
“Are you coming to the beach with us?”
“I’d love to, honestly, but I have to finish some work. Another day, though, for sure.”
But it’s much simpler to learn to say straight out, “Look, I don’t feel like it right now,” or “I already have other plans.”
See also: The only difference between peace of mind and stress is attitude
The truth is, though, that all these fears lead to what is probably the mother of all fears.
3. The fear of what others think of you
This fear really is something you need to get rid of, right now. Immediately.
When the 2007 crisis hit, some people lost their homes, and, as you know, some even took their own lives. In many cases what went through these people’s minds was a kind of shame before their neighbours or their circle of friends, rather than the material loss itself.
I personally knew two builders who went through the same tragedy but were as different as night and day in the way they thought.
Both lost everything and were left in debt, unable to pay their workers’ last wages.
One of them tried to keep up appearances for a while, and when that became impossible he stopped going out so he wouldn’t run into the people who used to respect him for everything he had. Over time, this situation led him to try to take his own life.
The other builder would say openly, “What a mess I’ve landed in.” He knew he was still the same person he had always been, even if he was broke for the time being.
The curious thing is that in the towns where both builders lived, you couldn’t find anyone who laughed at them or spoke ill of either of them. Quite the opposite. People still respected them, because for a long time they had provided a lot of jobs in those towns.
Although both went from rich to poor (in fact, neither of them ever actually lived in poverty), the only difference between them was that one wanted to keep the supposed respect people had for him because of everything he had achieved, while the other didn’t give a damn what people might think of his business failure or his new socio-economic status.
The fear of what others think of you, or the effort to make others have an excellent opinion of us, has recently reached levels never seen before.
It’s reaching a point that’s even unhealthy in today’s society, and we can see it on social media: the constant effort people make to show what they really aren’t, to keep up appearances all the time.
Where does the fear of what others think of you come from?
In psychology, the main factor would be low self-esteem, but now we can see something more common on social media, which is no longer low self-esteem but false self-esteem.
And what is false self-esteem?
Basically, it’s hiding low self-esteem by putting on a show of high self-esteem.
This leads a person to pretend to think a certain way, even though they don’t really think like that. Even to say things they don’t believe themselves but want others to believe.
Take, for example, those posts saying, “Now I love and value myself much more.” The truth is that if you felt the need to post that on social media, we can draw two conclusions:
- You don’t love yourself yet.
- You don’t value yourself yet.
Basically, people are being pushed to try to make others believe they have much more than they really have, in every sense: material goods, self-esteem, happiness.
It’s as if their happiness lay in making others believe they’re happy.
This, which is very typical of, and necessary for, those trying to sell you courses on whatever, has ended up rubbing off on a high percentage of users.
Even now, when talking about the importance of personal branding is so fashionable: how can anyone have a good personal brand if they aren’t an authentic person?
How is that possible, when the brand may be personal, but it’s a fake brand? But that’s another subject.
Featured image: dynamosquito, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
