My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [69]
The key is that rejection will not permanently halt your progress as long as you stay true to your path. You may have to face one hundred nos to get the yes you’ve been working hard for, but you will get it when you are passionate about where you are going.
TO CONQUER FEAR OF REJECTION
1. Recognize rejection is part of progress. Everyone gets rejected; some just hide it better. See all rejection as one step closer to your goal. As long as you don’t throw in the towel, all rejections are temporary.
2. Put the odds in your favor. Track how many nos it takes for you to get a yes. As you build your skills, you will see fewer nos between each yes!
3. Become a rejection detector. When rejected, ask why. People and organizations reject for their reasons. Sometimes these are valid and sometimes these are fluff. Pay attention to the valid reasons and ignore the fluff.
4. Get a clue. The valid reasons why you get rejected provide clues for what to do differently to get a different result. If you want this different result, incorporate these clues into your next attempt.
5. Call the help desk. Identify two or three friends who have proved their ability to overcome rejection. If you get rejected and start getting down on yourself, call them for inspiration. Nothing soothes rejection like unconditional acceptance.
FACE OF FEAR 3: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN
Events, situations, and other stuff you never plan for, want, or expect will happen. It’s not if, but when. To deal with this, you need to be prepared but not paranoid. Fear of the unknown pushes you toward paranoia and playing it safe rather than being prepared, confident, and persistent. If this fear grows unchallenged, you can become so concerned about “what might happen” that you make nothing happen.
Typical Fear of the Unknown Statement: I would never take that risk. Who knows what could happen?!
Fear In Action
Luis is a loud, charismatic twenty-one-year-old. Several of his old high school buddies wanted him to go to Europe for a week, and he flat out refused to go. He said anyone foolish enough to travel overseas is going to get abducted by terrorists no matter where they went. His friends kept teasing him about his fear until he finally gave in and bought his ticket to Europe. After his first full day in London—jet lag and all—he laughed about how he actually felt safer in London than where he grew up!
Fear of the unknown is powerful because it is tied to your biological aversion to pain and loss. When you have an oversize fear of the unknown your imagination highlights all the horrible things that might happen if you take a certain path. It’s as if a scary movie were playing in your head over and over telling you not to make certain choices necessary to reaching your Future Picture because you could end up as the lead story on the six o’clock news. The stronger this fear grows, the more it disconnects you from reality.
When all your options appear unacceptably risky, fear of the unknown has scared you into living defensively—the exact opposite of what you need to have the courage to reach for your Future Picture. The earlier fear of the unknown grips your imagination, the earlier in life you will be forced to settle for playing it safe and remaining unfulfilled.
To overcome fear of the unknown, you must confront your out-of-control bad dreams with the most powerful tool available for calming overactive imaginations: reality. Countering your imaginary worst-case scenarios with realistic choices that create tangible outcomes retrains your mind to see that your future is not predetermined to be bad or painful. You begin to see that your future is shaped by your actions today—which you control—so you, not your overactive imagination, determine you future.
By consistently adding a healthy dose of reality to your scary daydreams about what could