Interpreting rejection as evidence of your lack of ability

Do you transform a single rejection into a negative perception of your whole professional life and sense of worthiness?

Welcome to the club. The world is filled with people like us who globalize our wounds.

Football players do it all the time. Purdue conducted a compelling sports psychology study on how an athlete’s performance can influence the perception of the size of the target.

According to the researchers, after a series of missed field goal kicks, players began to believe that the field post was taller and narrower than before.

But when they started to see more successful kicks, they reported the post to appear larger than before.

Funny how our poor performance can affect our perception of the larger world. We really do believe a single rejection is a verdict on everything we are. We really do believe this is a disaster that has long term consequences.

Of course, it’s just a story. It’s just fear messing with us. The goal posts don’t change size, the mind of the kicker does.

Seligman’s term comes to mind. Learned helplessness is when we feel an utter loss of hope and a reluctance to take risks in the face of constant rejection.

And yet, sitting there licking our wounds, gazing at the formidable world around us, won’t move us much closer to our goal.

But the opposite of this term is learned responsiveness. It’s when we learn to discern differences in situations and develop positive expectations around them. Much more useful.

My thought is, because rejection is more than inevitable, it’s a strong guarantee; and because it is to be expected more than not, then we might as well change our mindset around to it.

Hell, if they are going to say no to us anyway, then why not take risks? Why not go down swinging? Why not try harder to succeed than take action to avoid rejection?

The yogis are always saying that we have nothing to lose because we had nothing to begin with.

Seems appropriate for whatever it is we are afraid of not getting.

Are you globalizing your wounds or doubling down on your risk?