Practicing Rejection
Practicing Rejection
A muscle we can all build.
Growing up, I went to a tiny progressive school in Montana called Sussex, where the unofficial motto was “Yale or jail.” We called teachers by their first name, never cracked a textbook, wrote Haikus, made found object art, and jumped the irrigation ditch at lunchtime. There were some great traditions—group sleepaway camp to kick off every year and a school-wide water fight with all the teachers and parents to mark the end—along with multi-day fieldtrips for grade clusters that changed destination every year. (There were about six or seven kids per grade so 7th and 8th were together, etc.) We paid for these sometimes grand fieldtrips—camping in Moab! sailing in the San Juan Islands!—by way of a fundraiser that my mom invented. She didn’t see the point of pledge-based fundraisers where kids, for example, swam laps for money. So every year, we split into teams, enlisted our parents for supervision and support, and spread across Missoula to pick up roadside trash for six hours: It was called the Sussex Ecothon and it was brilliant.
In the months leading up to the Ecothon, we dialed for hourly pledges. I made a lot of calls to raise $1 or $2 an hour per donor to pick up said trash. Then I called everyone after to report our results and tell them where to mail their $6 checks. I am not an extroverted person or natural salesperson (at all), but boy did this teach me how to ask for money.
It also taught me about rejection, in a way I didn’t understand at the time—that as scary as it is to ask, it doesn’t kill you when someone says no. It’s actually not that big of a deal.
Many don’t get that many turns at the rejection bat, particularly those who are high achieving kids who get picked for sports team, accepting into schools, and pursued by prospective partners.
I’ve received a mixed bag throughout my life—some easy wins and some hard no’s—and for that I’m very grateful. I wrote about my single days in my 20’s, along with some early career struggles, in this newsletter, “Resisting Being Saved.” The TLDR version is that as compelling as it sounds to be rescued, or for every door to conceivably fly open, struggle is essential for growth. We need to be knocked down.
In The Dance of Fear, therapist Harriet Lerner tells the story of a client named Frank who was really struggling with dating post-divorce—he felt alternately paralyzed and anxious to move forward. From what I remember, Frank had waltzed into his career immediately after college and maybe met his wife in his early 20s as well. Lerner did something that she admits was unprecedented for a therapist, but Frank was desperate and willing and so she told him to go to a shopping mall, and approach 100 women to ask them out for coffee (in a non-creepy, non-aggressive way). He stood at the bottom of an escalator and began, feeling ridiculous and vulnerable, but he did it—and didn’t need to get all the way to 100 before he felt something in himself break free.
Here’s Lerner: “Why was this assignment successful? When Frank’s problem was reframed as ‘a lack of experience with rejection,’ failure became impossible. Every rejection constituted a resounding success, while each acceptance (‘Sure, I’d love to have coffee with you’) obstructed progress. Moreover, merely starting the assignment required Frank to ask a woman on a date, which he initially claimed he could not do. Also, his assigned task was so thoroughly staged—he had to stand in a certain place and repeat certain lines—that he had no room to become anxious about his approach or berate himself for saying something ‘uncool.’”
I know we love the saying “Rejection is God’s protection,” and I think this is true—but I also think it’s important to open yourself fully to wanting something, to put yourself out there, to harvest this particular gold. I know a lot of people who half-try in order to self-protect—and then blame it on fate.
Here are the lessons Lerner wants us to all take away:
“Action is powerful. Sometimes you can move past a fear quickly, if you are willing to act. When you avoid what you fear, your anxieties are apt to worsen over time.
“Succeed by failing. If you fear rejection, you may indeed need to accumulate more experience getting snubbed. This applies not just to asking someone for a date, but also to making sales calls, trying to get an article published, or approaching new people at a party.
“Risk feeling ridiculous. Most people feel deeply ashamed at the very idea of appearing foolish, and shy away from taking healthy risks to avoid that possibility. Frank learned that feeling ridiculous—over and over—was tedious and uncomfortable, but not the primal threat to his dignity that he had imagined.
“Invite fear in. When you anticipate a guest coming to visit, you are more prepared for whatever happens. Almost all treatments and strategies that help people with fear involve inviting fear in.
“Motivation matters. If you’re not at least a 6 or 7 on that 1-to-10 motivation scale, you may need to be in more pain about the status quo before you are willing to act. At the very least, you need to deeply feel the negative consequences of not acting.”
This reminds me of the tool, “Reversal of Desire,” from Phil Stutz and Barry Michels in The Tools. In short, it’s the practice of looking for pain or fair, of inviting it in, of imagining it as a black cloud that you’re going to throw yourself into so that it can push you through to the other side. (You can listen to my podcast episode with Phil here.) If you’re on the other side of most big life rejections, this is a good way to warm yourself back up, to look for every opportunity to get knocked down and get back up. While we learned from Soraya Chemaly that there’s a lot of myth-making around resilience (podcast episode is here), there is a certain fragility that comes when we don’t put ourselves out there. Flexibility comes, willingness comes, when we remind ourselves that we can and will endure.
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
A wonderful read Elise, thank you.
I'm reminded of Sarah Wilson's work around anxiety in kids, to which she draws a connection between anxiety and lack of resilience building opportunities in modern childhood — schools that cutt down trees and remove monkey bars so kids can't break an arm, etc.
Via text messaging, email, social media, we were all handed "an out" for doing the hard things face-to-face, but in sitting behind screens managing to avoid life's conflicts, don't we also manage to avoid life itself?
I'm also very impressed with your mum...says a mum who is ready to skip the seventh sausage sizzle fundraiser for this year!
I’m inspired! I’m going to start submitting work to be published. Success can feel like a list a of publications I’ve been rejected from! And eventually something will hit I’m sure. 👍