Fear of rejection is natural, but when it makes us shy away from living fully and exploring great opportunities it can become an invisible force that holds us back.
Negative or irrational thoughts about rejection, make us afraid of being rejected. We might try to avoid rejection in unhealthy ways, which could wear us down and leave us feeling dispirited. If we operate out of fear of rejection, this behavior itself often results in the feared rejection itself.
Fear of rejection is only as powerful as its representation in your mind. By improving our viewpoint of rejection, we have the ability overcome fearing it - by realizing that rejection is a very valuable and enriching experience... Facing rejection masterfully and constructively is one of the most important skills we can acquire in order to achieve personal and professional success.
What is fear of rejection
It is the irrational fear of being rejected by others or being disapproved of for who we are, what we believe, and how we act – as well as a lack of self-acceptance. It persistently inhibits or impede our abilities, interactions and behavior to varying degrees.
- Dependency: When we are over-dependent on approval, recognition or affirmation from others in order to feel adequate, the fear of rejection could become the driving force behind our actions.
- Peer pressure: Fear of rejection is the underlying power behind peer pressure, which makes people act in stereotypical ways.
- Illusion: Our explanation for the rejection is more often than not only an illusion - a story we created by ourselves. In many situations we may be rejected for no reason whatsoever.
- Impersonal: There are hundreds of possible reasons why someone rejects what we present, but is has nothing to do with us personally. Many others in the exact same situation, would achieve the same result. We are not condemned or flawed. The person might need time to get used to the idea presented to them... who knows.
- Unknown: Rejection means that we unknowingly and unintentionally broke the someone's 'rules' so to speak. The facts are unknown and in a different situation, things might have worked out differently – on another day, what you proposed may have been accepted or you may even have received a worse reaction... What has actually happened? The answer is probably one which no-one will ever know for sure. It could have been office politics, someone's everyday modus operandi, was it a bad day? Phase of the moon? Maybe the offering is only temporarily unwanted?
Causes of fear of rejection
We may develop debilitating fear of rejection caused by some of the following experiences:
- Negativity: Someone who indulges in thinking negatively about rejection.
- Family affirmation: Someone who wasn't affirmed in their family during childhood.
- Dysfunctional family: Someone who grew up in a very dysfunctional or abusive family.
- Isolation: Someone who suffered from social isolation at a young age.
- By example: Someone who learned to fear rejection by observing others who fear rejection.
- Self-image: Someone with a debilitating lack of self-esteem and self-confidence.
- Identity crisis: Someone who is insecure in their personal identity.
- Self-worth: Someone who's self-worth depends on whether other people approve of and accept them.
- Generalizations: Someone who believes that if one person rejects 'them', everyone will continue to reject them.
- Emotionally sensitive: Someone who is emotionally over-sensitive may feel devastated if rejected.
- Self-censorship: Someone who sensor themselves and thus inhibit themselves.
- Traumatic rejection: Someone who is deeply scarred by traumatic rejection.
- Numerous rejections: Someone who experienced repeated rejection and has given up trying.
- Irrational: Someone who is unable to think rationally.
- Self-acceptance: Someone who doesn't accept themselves or feels they are not deserving.
- Not accepted: Someone who doesn't have someone who accept them as they are.
- Lack of exposure: Someone who hasn't been exposed to healthy ways of dealing with conflict.
- Dependant: Someone who let others decide for them how to feel about themselves.
- Social skills: Someone who lacks the social skills needed to interact with peers.
- Subconscious: Someone who is not consciously aware that they are acting out of fear.
- Automatic fear: Someone who experiences automatic fear when they anticipate rejection.
- Condition: Someone with a condition that they believe makes them unattractive to others.
- Beliefs: Someone who believes that they are not good enough or that others will laugh at them.
- Self-reliance: Someone who doesn't believe in their own abilities, such as their ability to be self-reliant.
- Achievement: Someone who lacks a sense of personal achievement.
- Success: Someone for whom success became too important.
- Humour: Someone who doesn't have a well developed sense of humour or take things too seriously.
- Opinions of others: Someone who is too dependent on what others think.
- Perfection: Someone who aims for too much perfection.
- Comfort zone: Someone who wants to stay in their comfort zone.
- Holding back: Someone who holds back from experiences because of fear of rejection.
- Not interested: Someone who is not really interested in the things they are pursuing.
- Unknown: Someone who wants to be in control and cannot deal well with uncertainty.
- Worst cases: Someone who's fears have been intensified by expecting 'worst case scenarios' as seen in movies, TV or other media.
Effects of fear of rejection:
When we are driven by the need for acceptance, we operate out of fear of rejection - this could affect our behavior in many destructive ways:
- Cause regret: We may experience regret when we consider what might have been, if only we had the courage to act. If we at least acted, we would know. Chances are thrown down the drain and sometimes lost forever.
- Peer pressure: We may not have the courage to do what we enjoy and be different from others.
- Loss of identity: We may lose our identity by trying to mimic the ways in which others act, dress, think, talk and operate by becoming inauthentic clones.
- Destructive: We may get caught up in a vicious cycle of behaving in destructive ways.
- Choices: We may make inappropriate choices with regards to education, relationships and how we spend our time.
- Escalate: We may be unable to reach our potential, as the fear of rejection becomes more debilitating the higher we set our sights.
- Self-image: We may view ourselves in the negative light of experiencing humiliation, inadequacy, being useless, a loser, not good enough and/or pathetic.
- Dependency: We may hand over the ability to control our lives to others.
- Inhibition: We may find that our creativity, productivity and imagination is inhibited.
- Panic or anxiety: We may experience excessive anxiety or even panic due to automatic negative thoughts.
- Assertiveness: We may lose so much courage, that we display little or no assertiveness.
- Hesitation: Hesitation may prevent us from taking important actions toward success.
- Refuse help: We may refuse or ignore it when others offer help or useful advice.
- Speaking up: We may not speak up for ourselves when our opinions differ from others.
- Socializing: We may feel uncomfortable and nervous around people, especially when meeting people and find it difficult to hold a conversation.
- Risk taking: We may avoid taking risks and lose out on opportunities.
- Integrity: Others will recognize our dishonesty and will find it hard to trust our integrity.
- Habitual liars: We may become habitually dishonest or 'sneaky'.
- Secrecy: We may hide our feelings from others and wear 'masks'.
- Play games: Instead of showing our real feelings, we might resort to playing games with people.
- Passive aggressive: We may resort to passive/aggressive behavior and prevent open communication.
- Anger: We may express our anger about our unfortunate experiences caused by our fear of rejection in unhealthy ways.
- Excuses: We may come up with numerous excuses for not doing anything constructive about our fears or finding alternatives.
- Depression: Our behavior may result in depression and stagnation.
- Inflexibility: We may become obsessed with a particular 'norms' we view as valid, that we may become inflexible and unable to accept the validity of healthier alternatives for behaving.
- Turn-off: Our unauthentic behavior will be detected by others and it may push them away.
- Interpretation: When we avoid someone whom we fear would reject us, it may appear as though we are rejecting them.
- Exploitation: When someone realizes that we are afraid that they will reject us, they may exploit the situation. They may ignore our rights, put us on guild-trips, or apply pressure on us to bend over backwards to avoid rejection.
- Manipulation: Someone might manipulate us to do them favors and once they have no further use for us, they will reject us.
- Taken for granted: Someone might not take us seriously, ignore our input or take us for granted and never allow us into their inner circle.
- Used: Someone might openly reject us once they have used us, especially once we have the courage to confront them about their unfair behavior.
Free yourself
Create new ways of thinking about rejection! Eliminate the debilitating effect of fearful thoughts about rejection by expanding your views of rejection.
What to know and do:
- Self-image: When our self-image is unaffected by other people we don't fear their rejection. The most important person whose acceptance we need, is our own! The most important thing to know, is knowing ourselves! We each need to be secure in who we are and define ourselves via our values, integrity and authenticity. It can be very challenging when external opinions are in conflict with our own, but we must remain true to ourselves, yet willing to grow and develop.
- Imagine things working out: We can change how rejection is represented in our minds! The more we make a point of noticing how things usually respond positively to us, the less we would worry about things going wrong. We can imagine things working out well! Mentally rehearse how things go well in a variety of situations and with various people. Include vivid, enjoyable pictures, sounds, your favorite music, feelings, events, rewards and positive consequences. The mind-power we are creating through our imagination, will stimulate us into action!
- Listen and communicate. Listening to and communicating with others help us to adjust our approach and improve our chances of success. Find out how they prefer to be communicated with.
- Be sensitive: Be sensitive to others and look for signs of receptiveness. In many situations, by behaving sensitively and in a non-threatening way, you will gain a more positive response.
- Start small: To start out, allow your ability to face rejection to develop slowly and naturally by gradually taking up bigger and bigger challenges, without ever holding back due to fear.
- Comfort zone: Debilitating fear is a self-imposed sentence to be locked away in a debilitating prison cell, namely our comfort zone. We can go as far as the cell will allow. Thank goodness that we can set ourselves free to experience everything life has to offer. Get out of your comfort zone - you will grow.
- Take risks: With risk, the thing to remember is that if we take the risk of getting a NO, then we certainly stand a chance of getting a YES!
- Realistic: Are our thoughts realistic? If we entertain more realistic thoughts and more positive emotions, we will not feel so overwhelmed. We cannot assume that our quick, automatic thoughts are realistic, because very often they are not. We could come up with realistic, optimistic and positive thoughts by measuring our fearful thoughts against reality. By being realistic, we can set ourselves free from the distortions that have been introduced into our thinking processes during past experiences.
- Rational thinking: We cannot predict the future, it is out of our control. There are so many arbitrary variables at play, that we do not know for a fact whether we will be rejected. The only way to improve our chances of success is by taking risks, taking action and learning on the go.
- Behavior: We can identify which of our behavior patterns have been affected by fear of rejection by noticing how our behavior is affected when we feel the fear of rejection and we can then also identify healthy, constructive, rational alternatives.
- Interrupt fear: To sustain fear, we have to give it constant, uninterrupted attention. We can remove our attention from fear by thinking of or doing something else which completely remove your attention from fear. The fear we experienced will have been instantly removed.
- Belief: It becomes much easier to face rejection when we believe in what we are trying to achieve and have a deep desire to achieve our goal.
- Self-reliance: Know that you can provide the things in your life that you value - provide the things you want through your own efforts and sometimes with some help of your friends.
- Read body language: Be receptive and notice whether the person is comfortable, has an open posture and is giving you encouraging body language, facial expressions or nods. Make sure that you are sending these encouraging body signals as well.
- Pay attention: Learn about what works and what doesn't by paying more attention to how people around you interact and approach situations.
- Biographies: You can read biographies of successful people to find out what they have learned through rejection.
- Worst case scenarios: We may intensify our fears by imagining worst case scenarios... just keep in mind that normally nothing bad happens when someone rejects us - nothing bad happens...
Thoughts about rejection:
Change your perspective of the fear of rejection:
- Rejection is OK: Rejection isn't a big deal - it is a part of life. We all experience rejection. Accept that some people reject and others will accept - rejection is out of our control. We can built up our ability to be OK with rejection.
- Fear is OK: Realistic fears prevent us from walking straight into potentially hazardous situations.
- Anxiety is OK: A bit of anxiety can help us to perform better, as long as it is manageable and leaves us capable and motivated to pursue our goals.
- Rejection is a point of view: Change what you say to yourself about rejection and make sure it is healthy and useful.
- Rejection is a result: Improve the likelihood of acceptance by being observant and making the best of the aspects you do have control over, such as your approach and being sensitive.
- Rejection is a broken rule: View the broken rule as erasable or repairable, not a final nor a definitive result – it's an opportunity to learn.
- Rejection is an opportunity. Rejection is an opportunity to learn how to better control aspects of your behavior, intelligence and appearance. That person might also put you in touch with other opportunities!
- Rejection is progress: See getting rejected as a form of progress and success. Now take the next step. Choose your next move wisely, and believe in your next approach. Take action and get things done. Keep going at it.
- Rejection is constructive criticism: Look at rejection as constructive criticism and incorporate the cause of the rejection into a plan to evolve.
- Rejection deserves reward: Reward yourself for investing your time into making the effort and for taking action.
- Rejection means it didn't work: What happened was that we took an action which didn’t work.
- Rejection tests deliberation: Express your deliberation by taking the required risks and actions to achieve your goals. The more rejections you collect, the more likely it is that you're making progress.
- Rejection overcomes unrealistic fear: Keep your thoughts about rejection realistic and it will never be scary. Aim for getting rejected. You may get a positive response or you may gain experience in surviving a rejection.
- Rejection provides perspective: Always place more focus on the fact that you tried than on the actual results.
- Rejection should be celebrated: Celebrate the fact that you chose to participate fully in what life has to offer and that you will never suffer from regrets!
- Rejection is relative: By exposing ourselves to rejection, we do occasionally experience pain and discomfort, but we also qualify for all the benefits, the potential wealth, comfort, fun and excitement.
- Rejection is a function of opportunity: We miss 100% of the opportunities we don't take.
- Rejection is a feedback loop: When we strive to find constructive feedback from our rejections, we create a loop for increasing success.
- Rejection requires choice: Even though we can’t control whether or not someone will reject us, we can choose how we react to rejection.
- Rejection makes us flourish: We flourish as much from acceptance as from rejection, whether things work out well or not - the one doesn't exist without the other.
- Rejection is a learning experience: Rejection is an opportunity to learn and it makes us better people. It makes us stronger and teach us some of the most important lessons about life. When we assess what happened, we learn about what works and what doesn’t and this enhances our attitude of wanting to learn more.
- Rejection takes practice: How can we practice getting rejected? By deliberately putting ourselves more often in situations where we interact with others, we improve our chances to face rejection. The more we practice, the more we'll get used to taking risks and dealing with rejection as nothing unusual, keeping in mind that it is only practice. Even if we go out of our way to get rejected, we would probably get unexpected acceptances as well!
- Rejection is a blessing in disguise: Someone's rejection may prevent us from achieving something dreadful. A few days, weeks or months down the line after the rejection, we would feel outright glad that we were rejected.
- Rejection builds our skills: The more we handle rejection, the easier it gets to approach a situation where we may be rejected and the closer we are to overcoming fear of rejection. Each rejection gets easier.
- Rejection requires reflection: For future reference, reflect on past rejections and consider which lessons can be learnt. Discussing these with someone we trust can help us gain insight about any controllable aspects and we can figure out what we can do to improve.
- Rejection brings understanding: By understanding our fear of rejection, we put a big dent in it! The more we learn about and experience rejection, the easier it gets!
- Rejection is impersonal: Do not take rejection personally - it happens to everyone and usually happens due to reasons we are not aware of.
- Rejection has no power over us: By proving to ourselves that we can face up to our unrealistic fears, those fears will eventually lose any power it had over us.
- Rejection means it didn't work: Rejection is the result which helps us to know that our plan didn't work and the plan needs to be adjusted. Plan adjustment is an ongoing process. Think ahead and plan what you are going to do next.
- Rejection is statistical: By knowing the acceptance-rejection ratio, we can increase the odds of acceptance by taking more action!
- Rejection sets us free: Once we are comfortable with rejection and living to the fullest, past acceptances and rejections would have added up to immeasurable joy in our lives.
As we face our unrealistic fears we find that they are nothing to be afraid of. Make the most of your life. Go out and try those splendid things you previously only feared.
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