At one time or another we all have that fear of rejection. “What if they don’t want me?” is often a question we ask ourselves before applying for a new job/role/promotion or starting a new relationship.
Often times this fear of rejection is formed when jobs, relationships and the likes were outside of our awareness. The fear has often formed during childhood, and without your conscious knowledge. When we are young there are many ways in which we can experience rejection, parents, siblings, friends and other children at school. Over time, experiencing these rejections we can develop really unhelpful beliefs about ourselves and our value. In fact, the belief can be so strong that it not only prevents us from doing things but it can actually lead us to self exclusion, this is where the unhelpful belief drives us away from things we are already involved in because it will ‘only happen anyway’. The fear of rejection can be so strong that we self sabotage.
The self sabotage is not always going to be obvious. It could be that we treat family, friends or colleagues badly, because in our minds they would get fed up with us anyway. So in order to protect ourselves we end up pushing people away before they can hurt us.
Fear of rejection can also leading us to ‘settle for’ and this can lead to us ending up in jobs and relationships where we are not happy but at least we found someone who likes us. This can end up with people in abusive relationships, both at work and at home.
This unhelpful belief and fear of rejection lives in our unconscious minds and will often seek out evidence to prove itself right. It will seek out experiences in life to support its’ existence, often making us see rejection where it is not actually present.
So, what can we do about it?
The great news is that if you want, there are things that can be done to help.
- Removing the negative emotions of anger, sadness, fear, guilt and hurt associated with past events. Ditching that emotional baggage allows the potentials of the future to be embraced without being tainted by the past.
- Replacing limiting beliefs of ‘I’m a fake, fraud or not good enough’ with more empowering beliefs.
This is the fabulous thing about NLP, within a matter of hours we can have made huge progress. That is when, for the first time in your life you may go after what you want and deserve without the fear of what others think or say. !
Instead of worrying whether you will be picked at interview or liked by others, you will be thinking whether you like them or want their job!
