How to Delete Your Fear of Rejection

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1:47Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. If you're out there and you want to create the perfect morning routine, go to theperfectmorningroutine.com right now and get my free workbook and video on exactly the step-by-step process according to science of how to create the perfect morning routine. Once again, that is theperfectmorningroutine.com. Today, I'm going to teach you how to overcome the fear that I find that holds most people back from creating the life that they want, which is the fear of rejection.

2:22Let's dive in. I want you to understand that the fear of rejection, it makes sense. As humans, we are wired to have the fear of rejection in us because we are tribal beings. And back in ancient times, rejection from the tribe literally meant that you were going to die, which is why rejection can feel so painful. It taps in to this survival instinct that's inside of all of us. Nobody in this world wants to be rejected. Nobody in this world likes to be rejected. And so everybody wants to avoid it in some sort of way. So it is, of course, built into our human circuitry, but I think it goes way deeper than that when you actually start to look at human psychology.

3:03So today, when you look at, okay, the fear of rejection, if you get rejected and you don't see another person your entire life, you can still live. It's not a tribal thing anymore like it was before. It's not a safety thing like it was before. Now, what I really think that it is, is I think it's actually a self-love and a self-acceptance thing. And so our brain might still process rejection as danger, but in today's world, rejection is mostly just social. It's not a threat to your actual survival. So what we're doing though, is we're actually searching for acceptance, not because we feel like we're going to physically be harmed or that there's death attached to it, but because we don't actually accept ourselves.

3:48And so in turn, we look towards others for acceptance, hoping that they'll give us what we're not giving ourselves. And I get it. This might not make a whole lot of sense, but by the time we get through today's episode, it's going to make a whole lot of sense to you. And so how does the fear of rejection correlate with self-love and self-acceptance? So let's dive in. Let's talk about it. When you look at it, let's make it really simple. We have the fear of rejection, okay? The fear of rejection. What is the opposite of rejection? It's acceptance, right? And so if you're afraid of rejection, what that means is that what you're really searching for is acceptance.

4:24It's like when someone has a fear of flying, they think they have a fear of flying, but flying is not the problem. They have a fear of crashing. That's what they have a fear of. And so you might think that you have a fear of rejection, but really what it is, is you're searching for acceptance. And here's where it starts to get really interesting. Why are you searching for acceptance for other people? Have you ever asked yourself that before? If you're a people pleaser, why are you searching for acceptance from other people? If you have a fear of rejection, why are you searching for acceptance from other people?

4:56Why is acceptance so important? And the reason why is because you don't accept yourself. Now, why don't you accept yourself? Well, because you don't want to accept what you are not. And you're going to be like, what the fuck does that mean? Right? This is why I said we're going to start getting really deep into this. The reason why you don't accept yourself is because you don't accept what you are not. And so let me explain this whole thing. When you were a child, you were your full, 100 % true, authentic self. You were loud. You were playful. You walked around without worrying what people thought of you.

5:34We all came into this world completely uninhibited, just free, doing whatever it is that we want, free to be who we are without any fear of judgment. We were born into that. You weren't born with the fear of being judged by other people. but then somewhere along the way it was programmed into us to fit in every one of us it was programmed into us in some way to fit in and in turn that turned into us caring about what other people think take a wild guess who do you think the first people who we developed this relationship were with of wanting to fit in wanting to be what we wanted they what they wanted us to be It's your parents.

6:16And I'll give you an example. My sister was in town this past week. My sister just recently became a therapist. And she's got four kids. And her youngest kid, Joseph, he's like the craziest, wildest, funniest kid I've ever met. Like he has just this personality and like just the stuff he says is so funny and so off the wall. And he's so witty. And he's 13 now. And my sister came in town this week and she was talking about how much Joseph's personality has changed. and she's like, oh, he's much more quiet. He's much more reserved. It's so crazy how much his personality has changed, and so then I asked the question.

6:52I was like, do you think that it changed naturally, or it changed because he's now more aware of himself? He's more aware of how he is around other people, and maybe he's just trying to fit in with his friends or what society wants him to be, because when he was young and he was wild and he was crazy, he spent a lot of time in my sister's house on the farm, and most of the people that he spent time with was his brothers and sisters and my sister and her husband. Now he's older. He has friends. He goes to school. He hangs out with them. He has sports. And so I was asking, do you think it's that his personality has changed because it's natural that he went into that or because he's changing as he goes into fit in with other people?

7:33She was like, that's a crazy question. I've never thought of that before. I'm going to have to think about it. And so, you know, as parents, we need to socialize children. That's the way that it goes. That's the way that they fit in with society. And so what all parents do is they socialize their children. It's a necessary part of all of us growing up is we learn to fit in with society. And so we learned at some point in time, don't be loud, don't take off your clothes in public, don't touch that, don't hit her. We learn all of these things of what we can do and what we can't do. Not necessarily what we want to do and what we don't want to do, but what we can and cannot do.

8:12And the average child is reprimanded eight times more than they're praised. And that means that subconsciously, a child subconsciously in their mind thinks, there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with what I'm doing. There's something wrong with my true self. Eight times more than they think there's something right with me. And this all happens unconsciously. Like, I don't think that a seven-year-old is sitting there thinking there's something wrong with me. It's usually subconscious of like, I want to do this thing. Now I'm not being accepted. There must be something wrong with my true desires.

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11:42The children aren't actually sitting there, but it really shapes their understanding of themselves and the way that they fit in with the world. And for us, all of being children at one point in time shaped us as well. And we follow what our parents and what older people tell us to do. And then we follow what our friends tell us to do and what our friends are and what makes us fit in with them and the clique that they're in. So we start to build ourselves essentially into someone else who will be accepted by other people. We take our true self, who we came into this world as, and we start to build ourself into someone else that will be accepted by other people.

12:17This is called your conditioned self. So you have your true self and then you have your conditioned self. So there's your true self, which is the version of you that you were as a child, free, unfiltered, don't care what anybody thinks about you. And then there's the conditioned self, which is the version of you that you built yourself into being for society, to be accepted by others, to be accepted by friends, to be accepted by siblings, to be accepted by your parents. And this is where the problem lies. And I want you to really understand this. You've become your conditioned self. And this is why your true self struggles to accept you.

13:00Get that? So you have built yourself into a conditioned self, a set of programs who you're supposed to be in. It might not necessarily be who you truly are. And so it's really hard for your true self, the consciousness behind everything that you're doing on a day-to-day basis, to accept yourself. And so what do you do? You start to believe that you need acceptance from other people. And so you mold yourself into a different version of yourself to fit in. You do it for your parents, you do it for your siblings, you do it while you're in middle school, while you're in high school, when you get into college, when you get your first job.

13:36You become someone else to fit in with the group. And now you're 20 or 30 or 60 years old and you don't know how to truly love and accept yourself. So you search for acceptance from other people, hoping that they will accept you. So you become a chameleon and you adapt yourself so that you fit in wherever you are. But what you're truly searching for is love and acceptance for yourself. If you fully, truly accept yourself, you don't have a fear of failure that much because you're already on solid ground. You're not on quicksand. Quicksand of like, oh my gosh, I don't know if I love myself, if I accept myself.

14:19Maybe I should go ask other people if they love and they accept me. And so what you're truly searching for is acceptance from yourself. But here's the tricky part. Your true self will never fully accept your conditioned self because it's not who you are. why because it's a character that you're playing it's not truly you i told you we're going deep today so what the hell do you do in this situation well what you need to do is this you need to understand sure we can want love and acceptance from other people and that's a good thing we are you know tribal beings we want to we're social animals we want to be around people but you don't need, need anybody else to accept you.

15:00What you need is you to accept you. But you will never truly accept you if you're playing a character for other people to accept you. And so what you need to do is rediscover who you truly are. This is the key to real self-acceptance. It's not always very obvious. It can be really subtle. You know, when I think back to like, think back to your childhood. Think back to who you were as a child. Think back to if you see a home video of yourself as a child. How were you? What were your hobbies? What did you love to do? Did you do dancing? Did you do painting? Did you love playing sports? Did you love going out in nature?

15:41You need to rediscover your childhood self because that's who you truly are. I get it. Some of you guys are like, but I need to pay the fucking bills. We all do. I get it. But there's no reason why you can't pay the bills and have some fun with your life and be the childhood version of you that happens to be an adult as well. That child, I want you to know, is still inside of you. It's just sitting there waiting for you to reconnect, to start doing the things that you love again, to start being more creative, to start putting yourself out in nature. Ask your parents. You know, ask them about what you were like as a child.

16:15What were you passionate about? You know, for me, I recently remembered, I was living downtown a few years ago and I loved being downtown. It was great, but it was like, I felt really like claustrophobic living downtown in Austin. And I remembered through like an experience of like, I remember how much I loved being outside as a kid. When I was a kid, you know, I didn't, I never had my bedroom until I was about 10 or 11 years old. And so what I would do is I had to sleep on the couch. And so I slept on the couch, but we also had a couch that was outside in a screened-in area. And I used to sleep outside on that couch, outside in the screened area, more than I would sleep inside.

16:55And my family was like, you used to just love being outside. You always felt free when you were outside. You'd always, you know, we grew up in Florida, so you'd always be at the beach and you'd always be playing with your friends. You'd always be outside playing baseball. And so when I lived downtown, I felt like really crammed and I didn't feel, I don't actually feel really good. And so we kept taking trips when I lived downtown. We'd go to Sedona and we would go all these different places. And I realized I was going to all these places where I loved the nature that was there. And it's just like tapped me back into a part of myself that I haven't had for years.

17:29But I didn't realize that until I was like 30 something years old. And so I want you to understand like rediscovering yourself is not like an immediate thing. It's not an overnight thing. This is like a lifelong journey. This is a rediscovery. And this is the key part is I've always been thinking to myself, like, why is it that so many of us, like almost everybody has to lose ourselves? We have to become someone that we're not. Like I have built myself for years in my 20s and early 30s into a different version of myself. And then I realized like, this isn't who I am. And so I had to go on this path of rediscovery.

18:02And the reason why we have to lose ourselves is so we can find ourselves. You cannot find something that you've never lost. And so if you listen to this podcast, there's a part of you that does feel like you've lost a version of yourself most likely. And so what you need to do is go on that path of rediscovery. So ask yourself, like, who am I? What do I love? What do I love to do? What do I miss doing? What do I not have enough time for anymore? And then what I want you to do is I want you to start taking action towards that. You know, start small if you need to. Take 10 minutes to do just something that you loved as a child.

18:38Dancing, drawing, playing outside, going to a park and playing soccer with your friends, or just going to pick up a game of basketball. Anything that really connects you to the joy of being yourself. Be creative in some sort of way. Remember, the journey is not about being perfect and being like, I have to figure this out and putting stress on yourself. It's about making progress towards just rediscovering who you truly are. And so really what it comes down to is the reason why you have like, if you listen to other people say like, here's how you get past the fear of rejection. Stop caring what other people think.

19:09Do whatever the fuck you want. Sure, you can do that if you want. But the reason why you fear rejection, the deepest core version of you, is because you're looking for other people to accept you. And the reason why you're looking for other people to accept you is because there's a part of you that's like, somebody please accept me because I don't accept me. I don't accept this version of me that I built. It might not be, and I don't want you to think like you don't accept all of you. There's definitely some versions of you that are amazing and great. But there's some version of you and everybody that we've built ourselves into being a chameleon, into being somebody for somebody else.

19:42And ultimately, that's not who we truly are. And so what I would recommend for you is go on a path of rediscovery and spend the rest of your life going on this journey of finding what you love, what you're passionate about, what your hobbies are, do new things, try new things. go to different places and start to find out what you love and what you want to be and who you want to be throughout your life and let go of the things that are no longer you. If something doesn't fit you now and into your future, let go of it. You won't miss it, I promise you. And then once you build yourself into who you truly are and you build yourself into the real true version of yourself, you won't really fear rejection because other people don't really need to accept you for you to feel better about yourself.

20:25You just need to accept you. And so ultimately at the core of the fear of rejection is acceptance. And the person that you want to accept you is you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories. Tag me in at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And once again, if you want to download my free workbook and video on how to create the perfect morning routine based in science, go to theperfectmorningroutine.com right now and download it for free. And with that, I am going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better.

21:00I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day. Fidelity Active ETFs have the flexibility to shift and transform as markets do the same. So instead of just riding an index, they can seek to outperform it by adapting to market conditions and pursuing new opportunities as they emerge. And while you get the potential outperformance of an actively managed fund, you can still buy and sell it on your terms, just like any other ETF. Markets can change in real time. Make sure your ETF can too. Learn more at fidelity.com slash active ETFs. Before investing in any exchange traded fund, you should consider its investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses.

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