Taking The Sting Out Of Rejection (Part 1)

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If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you.

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I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you.

Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about taking the sting out of rejection. This is huge. This is probably huge for everyone, but especially if you experience any form of social anxiety or niceness or people pleasing or a lot of the stuff that we cover in this show, rejection is like a dominant force in your life. Even if you aren't getting rejected that often. And in fact, if you have social anxiety or niceness, you. You make sure that you aren't rejected very often. It's like a. It's. When I was really deep in the cage of social anxiety, I never actively got rejected, right? Because if you think about someone who's got a phobia of something and in fact, back in ye olden times, social anxiety was called social phobia and the phobia was not of other humans, right? Because it's like you walk down the street and if you saw another human, you'd. If you see someone has like a snake phobia or a spider phobia and there's a spider all over there, all of a sudden they'll like jump out of their skin. You're not jumping out of your skin when you see another human. You might be around humans all the time. You're not afraid of humans and social. You're afraid of some sort of aspect of that interaction. And what we're really, really afraid of is the, is the negative judgment, the rejection essentially, and so become really good at avoiding it. That's what I did. Become smart, not going to get pummeled every day. You just make sure you don't talk to the person. You don't speak up, you don't raise your hand, you don't ask questions. You don't draw attention to yourself. You don't do anything that someone could dislike. You stay low, low profile, under the radar, invisible, downsized, problem solved, right? Not quite. And there's a mounting Cost to not getting rejected. Right? Because the only way to not get rejected is all those things that I said before, and it makes your life extremely small and limited. And here's the worst part about it. While you might be, quote, safe from active rejection, no one's pointing their finger at you, judging you, saying no to you. But you are not safe from the emotional feelings of rejected. You could. You could feel rejected all the time. You could feel not good enough all the time. You could feel unworthy all the time. You could feel like people don't like me all the time. You could feel the pain of being pushed out or isolated all the time, even if an act of rejection isn't happening. So you're not protected, really, at all. You're just, like, constricted and limited in a fear state. So enough of that, right? What we need to do is stop running from rejection and move towards it and really just move towards your life, the life you really want, being who you really want to be, taking the actions you really want to take, really living fully. And, yes, some rejection is going to come along with that. Easier said than done, though, right? Because we nod as we listen to that in an audio. We're like, yeah, yeah, we're getting pumped. Let's go. And then you get out there that day and someone's like, oh, I'm gonna want to interact with that person. Want to put yourself out there? No. No, I don't. Right. Because then we're afraid. Afraid of the rejection. So what do we do? What do we do with this? Well, we need to learn how to take this sting out of rejection. And I actually just finished teaching an online virtual event three days called End Social Anxiety Now. And if you were there, you know, you know that this. It was a beautiful, deep experience. And I'm so grateful for you for being there with me to create that, because it's not just me, you know, talking at you like this podcast. It's a very interactive experience. So thank you. If you were there to participate. If you are not there, well, you missed out. You missed out on your opportunity to end social anxiety. And so now it's social anxiety forever. No, I'm kidding. There'll be more virtual events. I'm going to be doing one in 2025, and I'll be releasing the schedule, a calendar for some of the events coming out in 2025 a little later this year. So more opportunities. But you don't have to wait until 2025 to start to take this thing out of rejection. I'm Going to do you a solid here and give you some of the gems of that event, even if you weren't there. And if you were there, this will be great reinforcement for you to remember to practice this stuff. Because what I'm going to share with you today about how to take the sting out of rejection is truly a practice. It's not something you do once, and you're like, oh, I did that thing, and now rejection doesn't bother me for the rest of my life. Like, I don't know what that thing would be. A lobotomy. I mean, otherwise, it's something you got to practice. But there are practices you can do, and if you practice, then it lessens the sting, and you actually want to start to use the bad feelings after rejection as a reminder. Aha. Oh, a ding. A little bell. Wish I had a bell sound effect I could do right now, but I don't ding. Reminder. What's the reminder? Reminders to practice. Right. And. And this is a great reframe, which I've used, actually for body pain, too. So I used to have a lot of chronic body pain, which I'm sure you've heard about. If you've listened to any episodes of the show, there's whole shows dedicated to it because it's been such a liberating part of my life. But, you know, I've been free of a lot of that chronic pain for. For a long time now. And I used to have more episodes occasionally, but still was able to do all kinds of things. And in the Last year to 2, it's been just really few and far between, which is amazing. And I've been more active than ever in my entire life, which is also amazing. But I'm. I'm asking a lot of my body. I'm running and I'm lifting and I'm hiking and doing all this stuff. And so sometimes I'll get these pains somewhere. Oh, my elbow hurts. Or my. My hamstring. Pulled a hamstring running or something like that. And my default reaction to that. And look, if you're like, when is gonna get to the rejection part? This is a. This is a teaching point. There's a metaphor here. When I experienced that pain in my hamstring, my default story is, oh, geez, I'm injured, and I'm. It's gonna. I'm gonna be injured forever. My body's weak and fragile, and it's never gonna heal. What? Where did that come from? You were just running a bunch. You're fine. No, it's over why? Because that's what happened then. That was the past. That was many years of my life where that was true, unfortunately, but now it's not. So something's out of date, and something might be out of date for you. So you have a default response to rejection that's out of date that we're gonna get into in just a second. Now, what I do is I practice. So when I notice that pain in my body, it's a reminder. It's a ding, and it's telling me. And there's two things that it could be telling me. I mean, there's probably many things, but there's two main categories that I've seen of the message and the pain. And, you know, message number one is just the. The. All the mind, body stuff that you've heard about a million times on this show if you listen to it, which is, am I straining myself emotionally? Am I not taking any downtime? Am I putting all kinds of pressure on myself? I have to do this. Or else, whether it's the physical activity or something else in my life, am I suppressing my emotions, essentially? Am I keeping myself in hyperdrive, fight, flight system going? Or am I allowing some more calm and relaxation? That doesn't mean you go to a spa and just completely not have responsibilities or work in life, but it means am I moving through the day with a sense of kind of frightened urgency, in which case I'm probably gonna get chronic pain? That's something that I've learned about myself. The second thing, though, is sometimes the ding, the reminder to practice is like, hey, you know, you've been running a lot. Have you actually learned how to strengthen different muscles, like your hip flexors and stuff? You know, your elbow's hurting. Have you. What. What causes that? Oh, my grip strength is weak. Oh, have I done specific exercises for grip strength? Right. So there's learning about how to be with the body, especially, as you ask, more of it. So those are reminders to practice. Oh, this is a reminder to practice slowing down. Oh, ding. That's a reminder to do some of my exercises that strengthen my forearm, for example. No, no, not that exercise of strengthening my forearm. Get your. Get your mind out of the gutter. Okay, so how does this apply to rejection? It's the same thing when you get a. No, when you get rejected, there is an old default response, just like my version with the body of like, oh, I'm broken and my body's weak. You're going to have some default response. What is that for you? That's what I guided people through in the event to really uncover and discover what it was. What is that? And the way you discover that is go get rejected. And if you just had this happen, you can draw upon that. But if you haven't been rejected in five years because you've been so good at avoiding it, maybe you don't even know. So think back, reflect back. Was there a conversation? And the rejection doesn't have to be a straight up, like, I hate you, get out of my life. It could just be someone seemed disinterested when you were talking to them. You went to go try to have a conversation with someone and it felt really forced, like maybe they just didn't want to talk to you. Great. Maybe that was a recent experience you could draw upon. So. Or a specific situation where you actually got a no. I mean, that's ideally, ideally the kind of rejections we want in life are when we get straight up no's. And even more ideally, you get a no. And you ask again in a different way to see if that means no forever or not. Right now. Now I know in this day and age that somebody could hear what I said and say, oh my God, you know, consent police, lie. How dare you. Look, I'm not saying that you're like, hey, you want to go on a date with me? You know, or hey, baby, take off your pants. And she says no. And you're like, shut up, let me ask you five more times. Like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm talking about in your general life when you ask someone, hey, do you want to hang out with me? You're making a new friend. And that person doesn't reply. Or. Which is a no, isn't it? Not reply. I mean, they didn't say yes. That's a basically a no. Or at least not right now. And a lot of people will just, that's it. They try once and they're like, well done forever. Maybe that person was busy, maybe that person just didn't. Is overwhelmed by messages. Are you overwhelmed by messages? I know I am. There's so many pathways. You got imessage, you got freaking WhatsApp, you got Signal. Why do we need so many different. I don't know, we got so many different things and then we got email and you get your personal email, your work email, you got phone calls, you got audio messages from other things like, holy cow. Not to mention all the social media crap, right? So on and on and on. And that person might just be overwhelmed. Listen, just get off my back. Everyone I'm overwhelmed by my messages. That's the point of this, the segment of this episode. No, the point is you don't know really what's behind that. No. And so in a respectful way, in a non pushy way, you simply ask again or clarify. Right, because there might be, oh, they didn't say yes because they have something going on this weekend, but maybe they're available. Maybe the weekends don't work for them, but they're available in the evening. What evenings are you available? And so all of a sudden you get to create this beautiful connection because you persisted. So that's the key word, is persistence. I'm not talking about stomping over people's boundaries or, or if someone says, listen, I don't want to spend time with you, and you're like, why not? Why not? Why not? No, that's not going to work. But what I'm talking about is gentle persistence. And then, you know, you get enough no's, or a very clear no, then you just move on. That is the most ideal way to approach it. So, but what happens? Well, you get the first no. And I want you to study inside of you and you can reflect on this. That's gonna be your action step. Just a little foreshadowing there. But what comes up for you? And this could be, if you have a recent rejection, you could really study this and draw a lot of useful insight, liberating information from this. But essentially, when I study this with myself and when I help clients guide through this, there's some themes. And one of the key themes is, well, they just maybe instantly, it's like, I feel really bad. I feel so bad. Okay, all right. I hear you. Like, I'm drowning. Usually it's like a pain. I'll be like, oh, I feel a squeezing in my chest. Ah, right. Kind of want to hunker down or head down, slump. It's like a slump, physical thing. Right. But then what's happening? Well, I, I, I feel people are aware of their feelings, usually right after rejection, which is I feel either some sense of unworthy, I did something wrong, I am wrong, I'm not likable. Some feeling of shame or badness. And then where the real magic happens is if you start to listen to what is the meaning, what are the stories, what are the interpretations that go through my mind, what are the perspectives that I hold when I have this experience. And when you look at them and you study them, it's of course your body wants to slump. And of course you feel shame and Bad because the perspectives are things like, and these are maybe verbal things you tell yourself or when you slow down and probe into it, it's just the way you're seeing the situation. A lot of our perspectives are almost non verbal. It's the way you just like in a moment you take in a scene and you just see everything, right? We just kind of get the situation. And one of the things that we get, the conclusions we come to is because this person says no to me, it means there's something wrong with me. There's some flaw, badness, ickiness, grossness, repulsiveness in me. It's not about that person and their preferences or their availability or maybe their own blocks or issues. It's about my worth. Boom. Gut punch number one. And then the next punch is, well, because it's about my worth, this is inevitably going to be how it is forever, ever. You might even have the echoey thought in your mind, right? It's, well, no, no one's going to want to date me. No one's going to want to hire me, no one's going to want to buy my thing. No one's going to want to be my friend. There's a sense of certainty that this is just the way it is because this is the way I am. Which sucks, by the way. There's nothing I can do about it. Case closed. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. And that's punch number two, Kapla. You know, they got the gut punch, then you got the uppercut and you're probably down for the count, right? I mean, what, what, what are you gonna do, right? And then if you're not down for the count, there is one more final punch, which is because you're on something wrong with you, unlovable, unworthy, bad. And because it's permanent, unchangeable. And therefore your future is going to stay the same, something really bad is going to just keep happening in your life. You're never going to have what you want. You're never going to experience love or connection in a deep relationship or friendships or community. You're going to never going to, you're going to run out of money, you're going to never going to get a job and you're going to end up homeless. Like, there's some terrible situations that are going to occur, at least in your mind because of this badness in you and therefore this perpetual rejection, string of rejection that's going to occur. And then there's little subtle ways that might be added to this. Those are the big three. But, you know, maybe your. Your mind will pull in some recent evidence. Be like, look, you got rejected on Tuesday, you got rejected on Thursday, and now it's Saturday. You got rejected third time. I mean, look, it's bullet. Airtight, bulletproof. You're just. You're awful. You're done. Done. Death ruined gutter. Right? And so now we're just knocked out on the floor. Fetal position. Ball. That's the. That's the default pattern. Some version of it you can study in yourself. So what the hell? How do we. How do we. How do we save ourselves? How do we free ourselves from this? Ah, this is a great question. Right? So this is a two parter. That's why this episode is two parts. Because you can't free yourself until you do this first part. Because if you say, I'm just gonna have rejection not bother me. Who cares what they think? All right? Have you tried read anything on the. Any meme on the Internet? That's what they all say. You probably already read that and tried that. Like, yeah, yeah, I don't care what they think. Yeah, who cares what they think? And then you get out in the world and you're like, oh, my God, I really do care what they think. This is awful. I feel terrible. I'm dying. Right? So that's not the answer. The answer is to this is to see what is the default pattern that I'm creating. What am I doing to create this experience? Because that's the beginning of the liberation. It's not that the no is painful. The pain is not in the no. The pain is in what I am doing with the no. That's where your power is. That's where change occurs. That's where freedom lies. So in the next episode, in this little two parter, we're gonna get into some very specific tools. I'm gonna guide you through a process that's gonna help you release this and do something very different. The thing to practice instead. But the first part of the practice is to catch it. Ah. Ah. And I call this your derp. Your default rejection pattern. Aha. Mm. I'm doing that derp thing. So what is yours? Which brings us to your action step for today. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step for today is to really study. Even ideally, what I had people do at the event is write yours out. Because if we just kind of. Oh, yeah, I got it. I got it. I tell myself terrible things when I get rejected. Yeah, it's awful. I don't want to do it. Okay, what's the next thing? Right. It doesn't really sink in. That's like someone saying, like, yeah, yeah, I know. Smoking those cigarettes is awful. I'm gonna die. I just probably should stop. And then they go light up and move on with their day. Right? Some verbal sort of. What's the word? When people just give acknowledgement but they don't. Lip service. That's the term I'm looking for. Some verbal lip service that people do. And then it doesn't even mean anything, so we need to really slow down. It's like, what exactly am I telling myself? Because when you really put it under the magnifying glass, you can just start to see how extreme it is, how distorted it is, how delusional it is, and then we automatically start to buy it less. So what specifically do you tell yourself? Is it one of those three major punches that I was describing earlier? Is it something different? And even if it is one of those three, like what specifically? What's the language you use? What's the perception you have? Make a study of it and it will be the first step in setting you free. Thanks for being with me today. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. We're going to dive more into the practice of this, of setting yourself free and removing the sting until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

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