Bulletproof Mindset: 7 Powerful Ways to Overcome Rejection

Rejection hurts. We’ve all been there. Anyone you can think of who is seen as some sort of demigod or cultural sex symbol has been there.

Denzel Washington has been rejected.

Brad Pitt has been rejected.

Powerful business leaders such as Bill Gates or Ray Dalio – have been rejected.

It’s “one of those things” of being human.

When people think of “being rejected”, they envision romantic rejection.

However, rejection comes in different flavors such as physical, mental, and emotional.

There’s a subtle nuanced type of rejection and how to overcome it. That’s what this article is going to be speaking of.

Here’s what you’ll also learn:

  • The true answer and response to rejection and being rejected
  • How to use rejection as a fuel source for motivation and taking action
  • How to lessen your chances of rejection in different arenas

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Why You Have a Fear of Rejection

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Your fear of rejection stems from 3 sources, each with their own effects on your psyche:

  1. Evolutionary Conditioning
  2. Parental Conditioning
  3. Societal Conditioning

Evolutionary – The human species evolved as a social animal. As a result, we had to develop high degrees of social intelligence. Not knowing how to fit in was literally deadly.

Now, we don’t have that problem but we do have deep fears of being rejected because our gut reaction is: “if I am seen being rejected, it will reduce my status, leaving me out of different opportunities”. It’s illogical to think this way, but it happens.

Parental – If you are a normal and well-adjusted adult, you were raised by your parents to fit in with society. You most likely care what other people think about you (don’t worry, we ALL do). You were conditioned to seek approval and validation at all costs.

Also, as a child, you had a deep fear of being alone or being abandoned, so you did everything to avoid that. Having love given or taken away by your parents is seen as rejection as a child and they internalize it on a deep level.

There are many people who had parents who used love as a weapon to condition the child into always following orders. This then becomes a habit and taken on as part of a personality.

Societal – Why do most men not approach women in public? Because approaching women in public in the daytime has a very high failure rate and will involve public rejection.

Men’s fear of rejection in those cases will involve self-image diminishment.

All of these three forces combine to create someone who is deathly scared of being rejected because it shines a bad light on them as a person.

How to Deal With Fear of Rejection: 7 Powerful Tips

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Your ability to deal with and handle rejection will ultimately determine your success in life.

Rejection shouldn’t be taken personally (easier said than done) because you don’t know the context for that rejection.

The person who rejected you, do you know their psychology?

What about their familial background?

Rejection has the potential to say more about who they are rather than who you are. There’s so many different factors that go into it.

If you don’t get a date, a job, or make a friendship, definitely look at how you acted but at the same time, look at various factors that influenced their decision-making.

Here’s something else: as a man, you will have fewer resources to fall back on when you get rejected.

In a dating context, a woman isn’t expected to bear the burden of approaching, being confident, and overcoming rejection.

Due to the nature of intersexual dynamics, relating to women in a way that implies romance will be one of the hardest things you do because it forces you to confront deeper issues in yourself and how you relate to women.

In a work context, a man who cannot hold down a job is seen as a bum. A man is partially defined by how he relates himself to work, by the value he creates. Applying for a job, seeking out jobs, etc, will involve inherent rejection.

When you’re going to make friends, just even suggesting “we should hang out” will involve one of two answers: yes or no.

All of these will inevitably involve a rejection of some kind.

Rejection is everywhere in life. It lurks around every corner.

So how do we deal with this?

In my opinion, there are only two real responses on how to handle rejection.

You either use it to get better or you use it to get bitter.

The following are all variations on how to use it to get better.

There are only two real responses on how to handle rejection. You either use it to get better or you use it to get bitter. Click To Tweet

1. Optimization Response

Think of all of life as one big feedback system.

Second by second, minute by minute, you are receiving subtle or obvious feedback based on your actions.

Stub your toe? It results in pain. Don’t produce results at your job? It results in getting fired. Don’t get the girl you want? Your approach was off or she just wasn’t interested in you.

Over time, if you pay enough attention, you will start to spot trends.

Maybe you’ve approached a certain type of girl who likes certain kinds of activities and you’re getting the same results.

If that’s the case, then that shows you the type of girl you’re not right for.

Rejection gives you the opportunity to tighten up your efforts.

This is how salesmen increase their “closing rate” and make more money because they refine their target audience over time.

Here’s how you refine your own “close rate”.

Overcoming Rejection Tip: Keep hard metrics on what you’re trying to achieve. Aim for quantity instead of quality. You want volume so you can adjust your optimization efforts in order to get quality.

If you’re trying to get a girlfriend, approach a lot of women.

If you’re trying to get a job, send out tons of applications.

In both of these cases, aim for a specific number per day.

You will get a trend of data based on what you need to optimize for, then you can start targeting specific types of women or specific types of job applications.

2. The Resilience Response

how to handle rejection

In reality, resilience (AKA mental toughness) is the only true response to rejection. Everything else is a variation of it.

Resilience is built by not fearing the outcome of a certain action and just “going for it”.

Whatever you do soon becomes a habit and habits, once formed, are hard to break.

Here’s how to create the good habit of being resilient.

First: Embrace the philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism is based around the idea that you cannot control outside events, but you can control your responses to them. Think of it like Western Buddhism.

Second: Develop a dispassionate gaze. View everything as objectively as you can. If you’re afraid of talking to people, then you need to view them as humans – no different from you. If you want to take this further, view them as “rotting pieces of meat” who will one day meet the same ugly fate as everyone else on the planet (thanks Marcus Aurelius).

Third: Go out and “get your reps in”. As I stated before, resilience in a certain area is a habit. A habit is formed by repetition via neuroplasticity. Your brain responds to repetition – meaning frequency. The hardest part is “starting”. Start and it will get easier. Don’t start and it will get harder.

This is the essence of rejection therapy.

3. The “Small Bets” Response

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Same goes here. If you’ve never done something before, you don’t want to go the whole hog and start hitting it hard immediately.

You’ll use up too much willpower and you may not even be doing the right actions to produce a good result.

Instead, you want to take small bets to lessen your chance of unnecessary failure.

For example, if you’re applying for a job, you’ll want to apply for jobs that you know you can get, jobs that are a bit of a reach, and jobs that will be a stretch but not ridiculous.

You don’t want to go for a job that requires 10+ years of experience but you only have 2 or 3. You want jobs you know you can easily get and maybe a couple of jobs that “require” 5+ years of experience but allow you to compensate for skills.

Overcoming Rejection Tip: Make experiments on how far you can go outside of your comfort zone. Next time you’re in line at a restaurant, ask if you can get 50% off your meal. You may most likely get rejected…but what if you don’t? Once you get it right with these little things, you can start asking for the bigger things – like a number from a cute girl or a raise at your job.

4. The “Fuel Injector” Response

learning to deal with rejection

Most of us have had times where someone called us names, someone bullied us, or someone made us feel like dog shit in general.

When that happens, you feel a rush of anger, a rush of “I’ll show them” build up inside of you.

This can be used as motivation, which is an incredible spark to taking action.

Overcoming Rejection Tip: This type of motivation is very combustible and incendiary. It is not suitable for the long term. It will just grind you down into dust.

You use motivation to help you establish habits, a routine, and a bias towards taking action that will ensure you come out the other side a better person than when you went in.

5. The Antifragile Response

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” – Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Here’s a question: is it possible for a system of parts (corporation, family, or even a human body) to not only be resilient to chaos but to thrive from it?

The answer is an unabashed yes.

Mentioned earlier, resilience is one answer to failure and rejection. The other answer is feeding off of it to become stronger, which is a step above resilience.

Getting to this point of antifragility is not easy, especially when it comes to rejection. Here’s a few tips:

First: Seek out challenge. The human body and the brain are examples of systems that can take massive amounts of stress (to a point) and become stronger as a result. Going to the gym and exercising deep focus are two ways the brain and body adapt to levels of stress being placed on it.

Second: Always seek to get better. What would happen if you could get 1% better per day for an entire year? You would get about 37% better by the end of the year.

Third: Max out. Every day, you want to be hitting on your limits or coming close to them. You rest and then recover. That’s how you make gains and that’s how you become antifragile.

6. The Abundance Response

how to handle being rejected

A great way to respond to rejection is to fall back on what I call “a robust ecosystem of positive happenings”.

What’s an ecosystem? An ecosystem is a collection of diverse organisms made up of living and nonliving components.

An ecosystem that’s very diverse will be very resistant to outside interference. If one animal species get killed off or go extinct, the ecosystem will still survive and thrive without taking a major hit. If the ecosystem is very barren, a loss of one part of the ecosystem can potentially kill the entire system.

You want your life to be like a diverse ecosystem full of great things. You want a lot of things going on in your life to fall back on if you get rejected in another area.

You’ll want friends, you’ll want potential lovers, you’ll want a great income, you’ll want hobbies, you’ll want a well-rounded life in general.

Do you think someone with half a million in the bank is worried about being fired from his job or a girl rejecting him? Not remotely.

Overcoming Rejection Tip: Start focusing on the fundamentals and then building successively from there. Take inventory of every area in your life and write out what you have, what you’re lacking, and how you can improve successively.

7. The Long-Term Response

In life, you want to generally become a long-term thinker. By long-term, I mean 3+ years ahead.

Short-term thinking is great, but it needs to be informed by a long-term plan.

The problem is, we human beings are not made for long-term thinking. Our ancestors grew up in an environment of extreme scarcity, so they needed to think in terms of life or death, which automatically means immediacy. Most of us don’t have those problems today, but we are still primitive humans.

How does this relate to rejection?

When you get rejected in any manner, it shouldn’t be the end of the world. Instead, think of it as a stepping stone. Every no soon becomes a yes.

Overcoming Rejection Tip: Map out a vision for your life. Where do you want to be in 5 years? What milestones do you want to accomplish? Write them down and make a step by step plan on how to get there. This will give you some motivation so you can suffer now in order to live the life you want to live.

Live like no one else now so you can live like no one else can later. Click To Tweet

Final Thoughts on How to Deal With Fear of Rejection

overcoming rejection

If you are taking appropriate action in life (educated risks), you will inevitably run into some form of rejection.

No one wants to hear “no”. But everyone will hear “no” at some point in their lives, it’s just a matter of when.

There’s several things you can do to lessen your chances of a “no”. One of these is being smart about your actions (discernment) while at the same time not being so conservative as to not miss out on opportunities (taking educated risks).

These strategies do not eliminate the possibility of rejection, instead, they make you handle it better so you can take more effective action in the future.

How do you deal with rejection? Let me know in the comments below.

One Response to “Bulletproof Mindset: 7 Powerful Ways to Overcome Rejection

  • Hello, I really like your view of childhood impact on us, our childhood experiences make us who we are.
    My parents used to punish me for everything I did, in particular it was my father, I feelthat my messed up father daughter relationship has negative influence on me. I ‘ ve become insecure person, scared of not being good enough. That fear of rejection halted me from doing things I wanted to do. I always undermine my abilities until today, though people think opposite I still crave to be the best in terms of not being good enough at something.

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