Fear of Rejection, Part 2: The Limitations of Positive Thinking

In my last post, we explored how many of us accidentally train ourselves to expect failure. Today, we’ll look at why your attempts to reframe rejection and failure as “good” usually fall flat, and what you can do instead to start overcoming the fears that are holding you back.

We’ve all heard that you should think of failure as learning, that every no just brings you one step closer to a yes, and that rejection is the natural byproduct of success. And yet, despite your best efforts to adopt a more positive spin on failure and rejection, it’s likely that you still struggle with both of them.

There’s a way to detach from fear-based conditioning and start seeing through the limiting stories that are keeping you stuck. But first, you need to get out of the habit of trying to cover up your limiting beliefs with positive thinking.

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[Full Transcript]

In my last post, we explored how many of us accidentally train ourselves to expect failure. Today, we’ll look at why your attempts to reframe rejection and failure as “good” usually fall flat, and what you can do instead to start overcoming the fears that are holding you back.

We’ve all heard that you should think of failure as learning, that every no just brings you one step closer to a yes, and that rejection is the natural byproduct of success. And yet, despite your best efforts to adopt a more positive spin on failure and rejection, it’s likely that you still struggle with both of them.

There’s a way to detach from fear-based conditioning and start seeing through the limiting stories that are keeping you stuck. But first, you need to get out of the habit of trying to cover up your limiting beliefs with positive thinking.

Hiding Your Fear

The typical advice for overcoming fear of failure and rejection involves replacing “bad” beliefs with “good” ones, like:

• Successful people fail fast and fail often.
• Success is a numbers game.
• You can’t be rejected, because it’s not you they’re rejecting.

When you’re able to look at failure and rejection from these new angles, your fear temporarily loosens its grip. You might find it a bit easier to make those cold calls, or hit send on that proposal email, or launch your new product.

But the core fear is still there, gathering strength as it lingers beneath the surface of your awareness. As soon as you slam into the inevitable obstacle or rejection, your fears get triggered and come back with even more intensity than before—strengthened by yet more “proof” that you’re destined to fail.

The reason that this “just reframe failure” approach lets us down again and again is that it attempts to solve the problem by slapping an abstract concept like “failure leads to success” on top of a deeply conditioned, emotionally intense core belief.

If you could eliminate your core fears simply by convincing yourself that you believe B instead of A, you wouldn’t still be stuck. Platitudes about success won’t change your inherent beliefs about failure or how it relates to you personally.

The foundational limiting belief that triggers your fear is already laid down in the neural pathways deep within your psyche, and usually beneath the surface of your conscious awareness. It’s an automatic mental and emotional habit that’s been reinforced far more often—and with far more emotional intensity—than the new positive belief that you’re trying to consciously replace it with.

Trying to layer a new positive belief on top may mask your fears temporarily. But the deeply ingrained, habitual thinking response and conditioning is still there, just waiting to be triggered by the next setback or rejection.

Why Limiting Beliefs Are So Sticky

It’s true that you can learn a lot by failing, and that many successful people lose a lot more often than they win. When you’re able to think about the failure/success dynamic with cold rational logic, it’s easy to see that your fears are based on an illusion.

The problem is that we’re actually hardwired to avoid failure and rejection. Throughout most of early human evolutionary history, failing to catch our dinner meant we didn’t eat, and being rejected from the tribe meant we were cast out on our own. In both cases, failure meant almost certain death.

And even though the consequences of failure and rejection are no longer quite so severe, we’re still psychologically driven to avoid both of them. Our minds can’t really tell the difference between real or imaginary danger. Being rejected by the cool kids in middle school stirs up just as much visceral fear as being rejected by the tribe 50,000 years ago. And we carry that deeply ingrained fear with us into every other area of our lives.

Your life may not be in danger when you’re picked last for softball during gym class, or when you’re rejected by 127 prospects in a row. But it’s still a death of sorts—the death of your identity, of who you think you are or who you hope to become. Trying to look at the bright side of failure isn’t going to make you any less afraid of it. When your core belief is “I’ll fail,” and you start facing the day-to-day rejection and failure it actually takes to succeed, your unconscious, deep seated drive for survival will quickly take over.

So if trying to cover up your limiting beliefs doesn’t work, how can you actually overcome your fear of rejection and failure? In the next post, we’ll explore how to gain a much deeper understanding of your limiting beliefs, see where they came from, and start to dismantle them with one simple question.