How to Beat the Fear of Rejection and Find Healthy Dating Relationships
Finding healthy dating relationships will require you to beat the fear of rejection. That is, unless you want to wait around for the rest of your life for the right person to fall into your lap and beg for your time and attention. As you know, when this happens the quality of the relationship usually isn’t that great. No, if you want healthy dating relationships you must go after what you want until you find it, which means you’re going to get a LOT of rejection.
So if you’re struggling with the fear of rejection right now, I’m guessing that your dating relationships are crummy because of it. However, you might be amazed at how you’re reinforcing this fear by trying to overcome it…
Why Fear of Rejection isn’t the Real Problem
If you’re feeling anxious about rejection, I’ll bet you $1 that the fear of rejection isn’t what’s actually causing the anxiety. The anxiety is caused by your mind feeling like it’s being pulled in two different directions by conflicting goals. Let me explain.
Goal #1: Get a yes (avoid rejection)
Goal #2: To overcome the fear of rejection (face rejection)
Now, look at these two goals. Can you see where they conflict with one another? Goal number one is focused on avoiding rejection while goal number two is focused on facing rejection. Have you ever had a job where you had two bosses and they were both giving you conflicting orders? Stressful isn’t it? Your mind can’t run in two directions at once and the more you try to force it to, the more anxiety you’ll create.
Not only that, the more you run away from something, the more afraid you’ll become of it. It’s only when face your fear that you start to build courage. So pursuing goal #1 actually creates more fear of rejection. What you need to do is acknowledge these as two separate goals and work on them one at a time, starting with the hardest one…
The Best Way to Beat the Fear of Rejection
The only way to beat any fear is to face it. Again, the more you try to avoid it, the more afraid you’ll become. So instead of starting with the goal of getting a yes, go for the no. Make it your goal to get rejected and to KEEP getting rejected until you become comfortable with it. You can do this by approaching someone with a request which is 100% certain to get you rejected. For example, walk into a tire store and ask if they sell snow cones. Walk up to someone you’ve never met and ask them where you can buy some canned steam. Ask them if your nose is on backwards or if they want to babysit your pet alligator.
Don’t just approach people of the opposite sex that you’re interested in either. Do this with as many people as you can and make the requests as whacky and ridiculous as possible. The more ridiculous they are, the more uncomfortable you’ll feel and the easier it will become for you to face social discomfort and rejection. After a few weeks of this, you’ll be ready to work on the goal of getting yeses.
However, it’s a good idea to still take one day a week (or one outing) to only practice facing rejection, just to keep your courage up. If you have questions or want more information, send me an email or download our healthy relationships mini-course.
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