Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. This is TW short. Welcome to my new podcast.
[00:00:17] Our podcast today is titled the fear of Rejection and the role toastmaster membership might play. There are, are multiple manifestations of the fear of rejection. But before I go into that, let me tell you a quick story about my own personal experience with this. At one point, I was responsible for recruiting and training salespeople. And so we recruited a lot of salespeople, and in the process, we went through seminars, workshops, and training exercises. And what I noticed about the majority of them was that they always seemed to be excited about it. They had prospects in mind. They talked about the different people that they might work with as soon as they became certified or licensed in the profession. What I found, though, was that when we finally finished and many people took their certification test and they passed it, they become somewhat of a secret agent. They became afraid of rejection, and in many cases, wouldn't even start the process of becoming a salesperson in that particular field.
[00:01:22] That was my first or early experience with the fear of rejection with adults. But it is a fear. It's a real fear that people do have, and there are things that we can do about it. There are also things that we can recognize that are manifestations of it, the detrimental impacts and also the mitigation. So that's what I wanted to cover with you today.
[00:01:45] Let me start with the manifestations of the fear of rejection.
[00:01:50] One of the first and the most noticeable is the fear of public speaking. The fear of public speaking is very common fear among people. Of course it is, and it's one of the biggest fears. Some people have said it's a bigger fear. It's a greater fear than actually dying. Public speaking is not an easy thing to get into, but that is one of the first manifestations of the fear of rejection. Is the fear of public speaking actually terrified? In some cases. We'll talk more about how to mitigate this, but I wanted to identify in the very beginning what the manifestations of fear of rejection are. Another manifestation is in job interviews. When a person goes for a job interview, if they are extremely afraid of rejection, they are unlikely to disclose all the things they need to in a job interview or be confident and calm and collected during the questioning session of the job interview. So there's another manifestation right there of the fear of rejection. Another one is speaking out in meetings. All of us attend meetings. Everybody in business is going to go to meetings. And it is our obligation at a meeting to say what's on our mind. If it is that type of meeting, one of the manifestations of the fear of rejection is an unwillingness or an inability or a struggle to speak out in meetings. That's another manifestation of the fear of rejection. Another one is failing to defend ourselves in an argument, in a debate. If we have a point of view, a lot of times we're afraid. Some people are afraid of rejection so they won't even speak up. So even defending ourselves in an argument or a debate, failing to do that is a manifestation of the fear of rejection.
[00:03:45] Obviously, another one is in the inability or the difficulty in developing relationships with other people. We know that we need relationships with other people. Everything we're going to accomplish is by and through other people. But often people that are extremely afraid of rejection miss the opportunity to create these relationships. And the last one I'll mention here, and it's one of the most dominant ones, is the failure to confront difficult people and difficult situations.
[00:04:20] That is a manifestation of the fear of rejection. Failure to confront difficult people and difficult situations. Nobody wants an argument, nobody wants to confront other people. Nobody wants to go through their day in that mode. But there are times when it's absolutely necessary for adults to confront difficult people and difficult situations. People that are extremely afraid of the fear of rejection are unlikely or unwilling to do that. Let's go out to detrimental impact what are some of the detrimental impacts of this fear of rejection? The first, of course, is a limited opportunity. We limit our own opportunities when we're so afraid of rejection that we're not willing to pursue new opportunities and new challenges. Another thing is we miss out on relationships with other people. We miss out because we're afraid of rejection.
[00:05:24] A person that's extremely afraid of rejection will miss out on relationships. They'll never even know they would have had another one. And this is very critical here. I would say if you're in a group, you're in a group meeting and they're brainstorming. These are all stakeholders and you don't have the courage to actually create your input to the meeting so others don't receive the value of your input and you're very reluctant to do that, then that is another manifestation of a very high sensitivity to rejection. And as we've said before many times, missed opportunities. We won't even know what opportunities we missed if we're afraid of rejection, if we're too sensitive to rejection. I'll say here that everyone is afraid of rejection to some extent, but the sensitivity on a scale of one to ten, one being not sensitive at all and five being very and ten being very sensitive. Somewhere in the middle is where most people that are healthy emotionally would be. Let's address mitigation. Some of the things we can do to deal with this or help other people that we know are paralyzed by fear of rejection. One is we have to work on our mindset. I know everyone's heard this before, but how we talk to ourselves, what we believe about ourselves, has a lot to do with how well we deal with these relationships and how well we deal with rejection. Another way to overcome another mitigating technique is to take on difficult assignments, actually look for difficult things to do, things that are outside our comfort zone. We all know what that means. We all know where we're comfortable. We're comfortable talking to the same people about the same things all the time. But in order to overcome this fear of rejection, or to minimize our sensitivity to it, we have to get out of our comfort zone. And that is an intentional act to get out of a comfort zone. And of course, always paint a mental picture of how we want things to look, not how we are afraid that things might look. And the last one, of course, in mitigation, there are many others. But the last one we'll talk about today in mitigation is intense determination. Not unlike a person who decides they want to lose weight and they want to go to the gym, and they decide to be absolutely determined to go to the gym every day and work out and get closer to their goals. The same thing applies in overcoming this high sensitivity to rejection. It requires intense determination and a game plan to get that done. I'll conclude by saying this.
[00:08:29] Some people are not going to like us. And if that's what our main reason for being afraid of rejection is, we have to overcome it. Some people won't like us, but let's not be the person who doesn't like us. Now we know the original fears. We know that we're born with a couple of fears. One is the fear of falling, one is the fear of loud noises. But we're not born necessarily with an intense sensitivity to rejection. We learn that as we go along, and it seems to start right about middle school. Prior to that, children are not usually very sensitive to rejection. They're sensitive to being ignored, but they're not sensitive to rejection in the sense that we're talking about here.
[00:09:14] I'll conclude by saying, I know it's not easy. It's never been easy for anybody to do this. It takes courage to confront this. It takes positive feedback, it takes accelerated practice. And one of the things I'll end with is to say that there is a place where a person can go. In the United States and around the world, there are clubs called toastmasters International. In these clubs, people get a chance, members get a chance to do public speaking. One of the first manifestations of the fear of rejection, they can overcome that. It isn't easy, and it takes a number of attempts for people that are extremely sensitive to rejection to overcome it. But toastmastersinternational.org go there to find out how you could potentially use that resource to become less sensitive to rejection. As I said at the very beginning, we'll never overcome the fear of rejection 100%. But what we can do is become less sensitive to it and more productive by becoming less sensitive to this fear of rejection. Accelerated practice is also something that's going to have to happen to overcome this fear of rejection. A lot of it is mindset. A lot of it is practice. A lot of it is determination. All these put together create the possibility to overcome the fear of rejection, or at least the sensitivity to reject action and have a more successful life. Thanks folks for listening in. I appreciate it.
