The Mathematics of Rejection

Brendan Burchard gives great advice in this blog post about rejection. He basically says that for every person who really rejects you there are hundreds and even thousands who don’t reject you. He is one hundred percent accurate in what he says. The problem is that though he is right and most people will agree with his point, my hunch is that it will not have a very big effect on people’s behavior. The reason is that fear of rejection is an emotional response and you cannot overcome an emotion with a logical argument. If you don’t believe me just try to talk your spouse out of being mad at you by giving her/him three logical reasons why they should not be upset.  I made a similar argument to Brendan’s  in my blog post last year. Both appeal to logic. But the only way to actually overcome the fear of rejection is to face the fear and really deal with the issue. The reason rejection is so difficult to deal with is that rejection is a primal fear related to an “abandonment fear” developed in early childhood.  How to address it and overcome it is too complex to deal with in this blog post but it will be the subject of an upcoming white paper.