How to Overcome Fear of Rejection
Decisions are open to two doors: rejection and acceptance. When you have something in mind and tell it to your collocutor, either door will most probably be opened. They accept your idea or reject it. When accepted, the action that will support that decision will start sooner or later. However, when rejected, you need to find another type of solution. At that point, your stress levels run high, and you begin to feel bad. We are human beings; we feel bad when our ideas are rejected. The fear of rejection begins there. But there’s no need to panic! Because in this article, we show you how to overcome the fear of rejection alongside the signs and results. Reading further, you can find some juicy information regarding the topic. Let’s begin!
What Causes Fear of Rejection?
To understand what causes fear of rejection, we need to go deeper. Deeper to our ancestors’ behaviors and their type of living. Homo sapiens lived a fight-or-flight kind of life. Their only concern was to eat, take shelter, and reproduce. That’s why they hunted for food, built shelter for security, and gave birth to continue their bloodlines. And doing so, they relied on acceptance for survival. They need to get on well with each other, as fighting is the only way they can communicate with their enemies. And the fighting was brutal enough to kill one side.
Above story is crucial to understanding how the human brain is evolved over the years. The Fight-or-flight mode of the brain, called the amygdala, is for preparing the man for threats. It sets rejection as life-threatening. Since the time of our ancestors, our brain has been processing rejection in this way. That’s we have hard times dealing with the fear of rejection symptoms when they occur. For example, say that you will give a public speech. Hours before the speech, your stomach feels weird, your blood pressure runs high, or you start to make negative talks to yourself. These all are gifts from our ancestors and super normal. Even before important meetings you attend for many years, you may feel that fear of rejection. That is because your brain takes the stress as a threat and tries to make you ready for a fight. Your blood starts to run fast, and your heart starts to pump like a drum just to prepare you for actions good enough to get acceptance from your surroundings.
To overcome the fear of rejection, you must find the symptoms and then fight them bravely. In the next part, you will read about the signs and results of fear of rejection.
Signs & Results of Fear of Rejection
When you are afraid of getting rejected, you automatically put others’ wants and needs in front of yours. Because all you need, consciously or unconsciously, is to be approved and loved by others. We are programmed to get accepted for survival, remember? This happens almost instinctively. Below, we listed the signs of fear of rejection most of which you are familiar with.
- Always try to please others who are sometimes your colleagues, your family members, your close friends, and your partner.
- You become to be afraid of doing wrong at any task you are on.
- You find yourself stuck in unbalanced relationships. (For example, you let your boss abuse you in an unhealthy way.)
- Thinking that you will be rejected, you cannot release your true thoughts. You mostly try to veil the reality.
- Because you turn yourself into a servant, you work too hard.
- While working hard, you try to pay excess attention to details as you are afraid of making mistakes.
- You always depend on someone else seeking a sign showing if you are on the right way.
- You feel like you have to bear the poor treatment from others just because you consider that they matter more than yourself.
If you have any one or more of these signs, you suffer from fear of rejection. Overcoming the fear of rejection is the topic of the next part. Keep reading!
Ways to Overcome Fear of Rejection in 5 Steps
As you can clearly see from the previous parts, fear of rejection and failure are very close friends who cannot live without one another. Not to live fear of rejection at work and in any other place, here are five easy ways to battle this horrible feeling.
- Credence: Fear of rejection in a relationship or at work feels bad, that’s for sure. However, as in almost every psychological situation, acceptance is the answer. When you finally deeply know that getting rejected is a part of life, you begin to see that everyone experiences this feeling once or twice. This revelation can make you feel better.
- Proof: When you see that everyone around you lives this feeling in different parts of their lives, it becomes more normal each time. However, when you experience it, saying to yourself that you do not care about getting hurt doesn’t work. Instead, try to make suggestions to yourself like, “Yes, I’ve been rejected, but this will pass, and I will come up with another solution and live my life. It hurts, but I can deal with it as anybody else can do.”
- Self-Confidence: Self-confidence is the biggest and foremost enemy of any type of fear. That’s why try to do things to boost your self-confidence. Hook more on to your hobbies, spare more me-times than ever before and do things you love most.
- Evaluation: Crisis can be a hidden opportunity. This is valid for almost every bad situation. When you are rejected, consider that everything happens for a reason. This may be a chance for you to shoe yourself with a more powerful idea.
- Meditate: Meditation calms the mind. As mind and body are one, they work simultaneously. Once you manage to suppress the negative talks in your brain, you have very little way ahead to success.
