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How to Free Yourself From the Fear and Pain of Rejection
Rejections don’t hurt you, your worldview surrounding them does.
I’ve had more rejections over the years than I can count. Hundreds. With record labels, with productions as an actor and screenwriter, and more recently with online publications. Rejections have always been part of my life. They used to hurt. Now, I can’t remember the last time I cared.
This isn’t because I don’t have ambition or hopes for my work. I do. It’s just because I’ve been rejected so many times, it doesn’t hurt anymore.
As a child, I hated broccoli but was fed it so often that now it’s fine. In fact, I quite like it. Familiarity takes away the bad taste. What used to be bad becomes good and healthy.
So how do we get to the point where rejections don’t hurt? We can’t become familiar with rejections without experiencing them, and that hurts.
How can we get around that? Let’s turn to concepts from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and psychology, and a guy who made his career out of being rejected.
Change the thought; change the feeling
CBT’s idea is that if we change the thought around something, the feeling around it will change too. So the pain of rejection…
