How to Overcome the Fear of Rejection Today

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the mindset mentor podcast the number one mindset podcast in the entire world. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you want to receive weekly sporadic text messages from me and you live in the United States or Canada, text me right now 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, we're going to be talking about how to overcome your fear of rejection. And we're going going to talk about the thing that I see, you know, this is when I look out into people that I've coached over the years and conversations that I've had and speeches that I've given, this is one of, if not the most, this is probably number two of the things that hold people back the most in their life.

0:55Number one is usually like the fear of failure. That's what I hear more than anything else. But fear of rejection is almost always number two. And so it's the fear of rejection when you start to dive into it, this episode is going to be different than you think that it's going to be. I'm not just going to talk about the fear of rejection. There's going to be a turn that you probably won't expect. And I'm actually going to go really deep into your subconscious and also your conditioning and your programming from childhood. And when we start off, just before we dive into that though, let's start off with the fear of rejection.

1:27The fear of rejection makes sense when you look at it as a tribal being. You know, if you look back 100 ,000, 200 ,000 years ago, our species, humans, had to survive, and the way to survive was being in a tribe. So to be kicked out of that tribe meant basically guaranteed death, to be kicked out of the tribe, to not have protection, to not have hunting, gathering, someone to take care of the children, all of that meant that you were going to die, your family was going to die if you weren't in the tribe. But what I want to dive into today is much, much deeper than that. It's not as much as of today's episode is not as much of a safety thing like the tribal being side it's actually more of a subconscious self-love thing more than anything else is what we're going to dive into today so when you hear that it might not correlate right now like how does the fear of rejection correlate with me not loving myself or not accepting myself and so let's talk about it where this episode came from just to give you an idea I was on my weekly live that I have with a group of people that's called MMU, which is Mindset Mentor University.

2:34And in Mindset Mentor University on the Zoom yesterday, one of the members was asking about the fear of rejection. And I started going really deep like I'm going to today. And they're like, holy shit, can you please do an episode on that so that we can have this to listen to forever? I was like, sure, I'll do an episode. So that's how we got here. Side note, if you're interested in learning more about Mindset Mentor University, which is like my weekly Zoom community and much more, just email me, rob at robdial.com and we can chat about it. But when you look at it in what I dove into with everybody is looking at rejection itself.

3:06Whenever I look at something, I try to actually pull apart what that thing actually is. And so when you look at the fear of rejection, when you look at the fear of rejection, if we're afraid of being rejected, what is the opposite of rejection? The opposite of rejection is acceptance, which means that we are afraid of rejection, which means that we actually want to be accepted. So what you're searching for, the fear of rejection is showing us what you're searching for is actually acceptance, being accepted. But here's where it starts to get really crazy and starts to take a turn you might not think of, okay?

3:43When you're looking out into the world and you're searching for acceptance of other people, so when you're afraid of being rejected, that means that you're searching for acceptance from other people. With me so far? That makes sense. why is acceptance important? Why is it important for you this year, this day and age, not being a tribal person, why is it important for you to be accepted by other people? Do you want to know why? Here's the reason why. You're searching in other people what you're actually wanting from yourself. What you're searching for from other people, the acceptance that you're searching for from other people, the love that you're searching for from other people is actually because you don't truly fully 100 % love and accept yourself.

4:30And so you're searching instead of, instead of being aware of this and trying to get it from yourself, what you're doing is you're trying to get it from other people, which is basically just like pouring water into a wholess bucket. Like it's just a whole filled bucket. It's just going to be coming out. You're not going to be able to actually fill yourself up with other people's love if you don't actually love and accept yourself first. Okay, so let's take a step back from that. So if we go, okay, I have the fear of rejection. Why do I have the fear of rejection? Because I want to be accepted.

5:00Why do I want to be accepted from other people? Because I actually want to be accepted for myself. So then we ask ourselves, why don't we accept ourselves? Right? Why don't we accept ourselves? You don't accept yourself and you don't love yourself fully because you don't want to accept what you're not. All right, here's where we start going deep. I told you we were going to, right? You, your true self, does not want to accept what you are not. And so let me explain what I mean by this. When you were a child, have you ever seen a child, like a two-year-old, three-year-old child? When you were a child, you were your full self.

5:39You were loud. You were fun. You would walk around naked. You didn't care what anybody thought about you. You did not give a damn about what anybody thought about you. so where did you start actually caring, right? We all came into this world not caring about what other people think of us, and then somewhere along the way, it was programmed into us that we need to care about what other people think about us, right? And then take a wild guess, who do you think the first people we developed this relationship with was, were, I guess you could say, where we actually cared about this person wanting to accept us.

6:21Ah, yes, correct, your parents. And so because your parents need to socialize children, because all parents need to socialize children so that they fit in with society, or as I like to call it, instead of socializing them, we domesticate children. It's part of all of our processes of growing up and learning to fit in. So we learn not to be loud. We learn, don't take your clothes off. We learn, don't touch that. We learn, be quiet. We learn every single piece of who we're supposed to be. In the way that most parents do this, sadly, is through reprimanding children. So the average child is reprimanded eight times more than they're praised, which means the average child child subconsciously thinks to themselves, there's something wrong with me eight times more than they think there's something right with me.

7:12And obviously this is unconsciously. A child's not consciously sitting there thinking in their mind, there's something wrong with me. They're just knowing that eight times more, they're doing things wrong eight times more than they're doing things right. And because we follow our parents and we follow people older than us, we build ourself into something and someone to be accepted by them. This is what we call your conditioned self. And so now we start to look at the two different versions of yourself. So there is your true self, which is who you were as a child, the things that you like to do, the toys you like to play with, the being loud, the doing all the stuff that you did.

7:49That was your true self, how you came into this world. And then over time, you've developed your conditioned self, which is the set of programs that we're taught to run through our parents, through society. This is how you're supposed to act. This is how you're not supposed to act. This is how you're supposed to talk. This is how you're not supposed to talk. This is how you're supposed to dress. Everything. So you have two different versions of yourself, right? You have your true self, and then you also have your conditioned self. And so who you learn that you are supposed to be, who you're supposed to be, in that case, is basically your conditioned self.

8:25But this is where the problem lies. This is who you've become. And this is why it's hard for you to love and accept yourself because you're trying to get your true self, which still exists inside of you. There's still that little kid deep down inside of you. That is who you truly are. You're trying to get your true self to love and accept your conditioned self, but your true self deep down inside of you subconsciously knows this is not who I am. This is what I've been told to be. This is what I've been told to do with my life. Some people are conditioned way past childhood and they're conditioned into this is what you need to go to school for.

9:03This is what you need to go to college for. This is what you need to do as your job. And some people are still being conditioned by their parents at 20, 30 years old. And so that the problem here and the reason why you have a fear of rejection is not because of anybody else. It's because the internal battle between the two sides of you. It's your true self not accepting your conditioned self. And so what do we do? We search for acceptance outside of us from other people being like, please just accept me. Please love me because I don't know who the fuck I am. And so that's what we do. We search for that acceptance from other people.

9:39You mold yourself into someone else. If you think about, like think about middle school, for instance, right? I don't know about middle school for you, but every person that I talked to, myself included, middle school was like hell. Children are vicious. And so we learn and mold ourselves. Like I remember middle school, like we didn't have any money. And I remember that was like the time when children, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13 year old kids were starting to wear like Tommy Hilfiger. And I was like too poor to have it. We used to shop at like TJ Maxx and you know, all of that. And I was like, I can't, we couldn't afford that stuff.

10:09And then, so kids would make fun of me for not wearing like the quote unquote cool clothes. So I thought there was something wrong with me. Like how many times has that happened over and over again in our childhood where we're conditioned by our parents. Then we get older and we go to school and we start to be conditioned by other kids at school or conditioned in middle school. Then we get to high school and high school is fun for some people. It's really hard for other people and you become someone a lot of times to fit in. So it's like you're conditioned by your parents and then you start conditioning yourself based off of who you want to fit in with and you try to start fitting in.

10:39And by fitting in means that you're actually changing your true self. So now you're 20, you're 30, you're 60 years old, and you don't truly love and accept yourself because you don't know who the fuck you are anymore. And so you search for that love in other people and you hope that they will show you some acceptance. Sometimes we become a chameleon. We act this way around this set of people. We act this way around this set of people. But what you're truly searching for out of all of this, and the reason why you have the fear of rejection is because you truly are searching for the love and acceptance from yourself.

11:14You want to rediscover who you truly are and to stop being this person who you have been quote unquote conditioned or built into being. But your true self will never love and accept your conditioned self. Why? Because it's a character you're playing. It's not who you truly are. And so your true self deep down inside that little child that's been waiting for you to come and rediscover it for years is saying, this is not who I am. That person that you're playing, that character that you're playing, that role that you're playing is not who I am. And so we don't know this. Like I would assume most people have never actually thought this before.

11:53And so we feel a void within ourselves. And to try to fill that void, we go and try to get somebody else to fill that void, right? Like if you hear people say, oh, it's my better half. No, no, no, there shouldn't be half of you and half of another person. It should be your full self to a relationship and someone else's full self to relationship. Otherwise you're building a relationship of half and half, uh, in full fitting and molding yourself into who that person either wants you to be or who you want yourself to, who you think that you need to be. And so it's a character that we've built up over years.

12:25So what the fuck do we do? Right? What do you do? So, okay, damn, I guess this kind of makes sense, Rob. I guess it kind of makes sense that I've lost my true self. If I'm searching for my love and acceptance from other people, and it's really just love and acceptance, I'm searching for myself. What do I do? What the hell do I do? And you're not going to have like, you're not, I'm sorry, but you're not going to leave today's episode and be like, I've got it all figured out. Because really what you need to do is use today's episode to rediscover who you truly are, to start going on the path of rediscovering who you truly are.

12:58And sometimes there's things that are obvious to you. Oh my gosh, when I was a kid, I used to love to do this. You know what I want? I haven't done in a really long time. I used to love doing this. Sometimes it is a little bit obvious. And sometimes it's not always obvious. Sometimes it's very, very subtle. And that's why it's like, you're not gonna have it figured out by the end of this episode. It's gonna be having the awareness, building the awareness of like, who am I? Who do I truly, who's my, Who do I truly want to be? What's my inner child calling for? You know, if you think of like yourself as a child, what were you like?

13:30What were you like as a child? Were you loud? Were you outgoing? Were you calm? Were you quiet? When you see videos of me as a child, like I usually just was sitting there and I didn't say a whole lot of words, right? And so like, yeah, there's definitely times where I can sit up here and I can talk and public speaking is one of my favorite things to do in the world. But majority of the time, I'm not talking. I'm sitting. I'm quiet. I've just kind of rediscovered my quiet self. So when you look at videos of yourself as a child, what were you like? What were your hobbies when you were a kid? What did you love to do?

14:00Did you do dancing? Did you paint? Did you build things with your hands? Did you play sports? Did you play with Legos? And what you really need to do is start rediscovering and building the awareness of your childhood self because that's who you truly are. That's still inside of you. It's really sad that that little child has just been sitting there in a corner waiting for you to come back for decades and to do the things that you truly love to do. Now, am I saying that you need to just become a child and play with, you know, Play-Doh all day and quit your job? No, that's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is, can you take that little version of yourself, the true self, and start to integrate it into your adult self?

14:41Can there be a world where your adult self is integrated with your childhood self and you can just have some freaking fun? stop being so serious all the time and do the things you love. Think about the things that you love to do before you were told who you should be. What else can you do? You can ask your parents. You know, like for me, one of the things that was really interesting for me that I don't even remember if I'm being truly honest with you, but I had a conversation with my mom and we were talking about when I was a kid. And when we lived in a duplex when I was a kid, it was me, it was my mom, it was my dad, and it was my sister.

15:12My sister though was always six years older than me. And so when she became a teenager, obviously a teenager and her little brother that's six years older or six years younger don't really share rooms. And so my mom and dad had a room and then my sister had a room and I slept on the couch. So I never actually had a room until I was about 13, 14 years old. And so I didn't really have a room. And one of the things my mom told me that I completely forgot about is we used to have a front porch that was screened in. and instead of sleeping on the couch in the living room, a lot of times what I would do is at night, I would go outside and I would sleep outside on the couch that we had that was inside of the covered area and inside of the screened area and I didn't even remember it much until it was brought to my awareness and my mom was like, you used to love sleeping outside and my sister was like, you used to love sleeping outside and I was like, shit, I forgot how much I loved being outside and then I started looking at my surroundings and I was like, wait, I live in downtown Austin in a condo that's not really the surroundings that I like like I love downtown Austin I love being there but I can't go outside and be in nature immediately and put my feet on the ground in the grass and then so when we moved into the house we have now we moved into a house with three acres I can't see anybody's anybody else's house from my house and it feels more like me and it was interesting because when we moved into the house there was like a little bit of tension that was just kind of there, they just kind of slowly disappeared.

16:37And I was like, man, it's because I'm rediscovering these things that I truly love that I completely forgot about. And that came because I had a conversation with my mom and that reminded me of it. So maybe you have a conversation with your mom and start to figure out who you used to be and what you used to do and just start to rediscover and see if there's some hobbies that you loved or maybe some hobbies you want to pick up. And I'm going to say this, it's not an overnight thing. This is like a rest of your life type of thing. This is a rediscovery. When you discover something, you're trying to discover something, you have to go on a journey for it.

17:08So it's about building the awareness of the reason why I'm afraid of being accepted, afraid of rejection and why I care so much about other people's opinions is because I'm searching for acceptance in them. And then I'm searching for the acceptance that I'm actually searching for in them is the acceptance that I'm searching for myself. And my true self is not accepting my conditioned self. And so the natural path is to go, who am I? Who is my true yourself? What do I love? What do I want to do? And you start to go on this path of rediscovery because always what you're searching for outside of you is actually what you're always searching for inside of you.

17:45And so that's why you're afraid of rejection. That's why you care so much about other people's opinions because really what you're searching for is what you want from yourself. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories and tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, if you love this podcast, I guarantee 100 % you're going to love my book that just came out last month. It is called Level Up, How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, Upgrade Your Life. It is a step-by-step process to understand the most complex piece of machinery in the entire world, which is your brain, your mind, and how to use your mind to actually create the life that you want.

18:21And so once again, it's called Level Up. It is anywhere where books are sold. go ahead and buy it if you want to. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.