No one enjoys being rejected. If you’ve ever watched The Bachelor, you know how devastated most of the girls are when they’re not one of the lucky ones who receive a rose.
On the ride home in the limo, they often cry and wonder why he didn’t choose them. Rejection is loss – loss of a relationship, money, our youth or looks. Those who feel they’ve been rejected by their parents remain devastated most of their lives unless they take action to work through their feelings of rejection.
Some kids in school try desperately to be accepted by their peers – only to be taunted and teased until each day at school is a nightmare. People who live through this during childhood years may have such fear that a partner will reject them that they must have constant reassurance.
To overcome the fear of rejection and get the reassurance you need, you need to look within, rather than depending on others to tell or show you your self-worth. Small success in what you love and want to do with your life can go a long way to rebuild your self-confidence and help you realize that rejection doesn’t define who you are or what you can be.
One way you can overcome fear of rejection and get on with your life is to use visualization techniques and your imagination to picture yourself getting through particularly difficult situations.
How would you handle a situation if you were sure of yourself? Fear of rejection may impair your ability to be different and break out of the comfort zone you’ve built for yourself. You will go through live living a cookie-cutter existence and never realize your true potential.
You may also base your emotions and your life on how other people feel about you. If someone praises you, your attitude soars upward, but crashes as soon as someone criticizes you or makes a derogatory comment about you.
Your life can become like a rollercoaster with constant ups and downs, thrills or boredom because of taking other peoples’ opinion of you seriously. You can lose your identity and make your life a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure if you keep riding this rejection rollercoaster.
Take a close look at your life and how you’re living it. Do you tiptoe around possible rejection by never offering a new idea or way of doing things? You won’t be enthused about beginning a new project or working toward your goals if you base your enthusiasm on others’ opinions. Work on your fear of rejection by seeing it for what it is – an unfounded fear that you will overcome when you cease letting it have power over you anymore.