Banish Fear of Rejection
Hey Woody,
I freeze whenever I’m around guys I want to meet. The thought of them looking for something better as I’m talking to them or excusing themselves from the conversation is too much to bear. My fear of getting ignored, or worse, mocked, pretty much guarantees that I never approach anyone remotely good looking. I operate under the philosophy that it’s better to leave with my self-esteem intact than to take the chance that a hottie will crush it under his heel. Needless to say, my love life sucks. How do I turn this around?
– Fresh fear, never frozen.
Hey Woody,
I freeze whenever I’m around guys I want to meet. The thought of them looking for something better as I’m talking to them or excusing themselves from the conversation is too much to bear. My fear of getting ignored, or worse, mocked, pretty much guarantees that I never approach anyone remotely good looking. I operate under the philosophy that it’s better to leave with my self-esteem intact than to take the chance that a hottie will crush it under his heel. Needless to say, my love life sucks. How do I turn this around?
– Fresh fear, never frozen.
Dear Fresh,
How do you get rid of this fear of rejection? By disconnecting yourself from results and connecting with the process. Let’s take dieting as an example. Your goal (the desired outcome) is to lose ten pounds. The method (or process) is to eat fewer calories.
Focusing on the outcome drives you to weigh yourself every day looking for signs that you lost weight. You then become frustrated that you’re not losing weight fast enough, so you starve yourself to get quicker results. The starvation leads to anxiety and a sense of futility and next thing you know, you’re off the diet.
Over-attachment to the outcome rarely works.
Here’s another approach: You never weigh yourself. You forget your goal of losing ten pounds. What matters is getting healthier and the only way to do that is to eat better, so you focus on that, eating smaller portions of healthy food, avoiding high-fat snacks and desserts. You’re adapting to a new lifestyle and at the end of the month you realize you’ve lost some weight.
That’s committing to the process and detaching from the outcome. And it works every time.
Now, how does this apply to meeting high quality guys? Let’s say you’re going to approach Mr. All That and you really want him to go out with you. Your focus is on impressing him and trying to do so well that he can’t help but date you.
But you have no control over whether he’s going to date you. Maybe he’s going to go out with the other hottie in the corner no matter how great a candidate you are. Maybe he’ll have an irrational dislike of you, or maybe he’ll be in a bad mood when you talk to him. You can’t control him and you know this at some level, but you feel that you must control him because the desired outcome is too important.
Result? You feel like you’re under tremendous pressure, you become self-conscious, your mind goes blank and you have a very awkward encounter. He smells your nervousness and desperation. You try to hide it and end up looking even more desperate. When you leave the bar you’re worn out and feel sick to your stomach.
But suppose you do commit to the process and detach from the outcome. How would that look? First, you study up on the conversational skills that predispose guys to like you. You can find these types of social skills –WARNING: Shameless plug ahead—in my ebook, “Meet the Hottie in the Corner–The 21 Day Plan to Overcome Your Fear of Rejection, Master the Art of Icebreakers and Snag Guys You Never Thought You Could Get.”
Once you get good at knowing what to say, then you let you let go and accept the fact that there’s NOTHING you can do to compel guys to date you, so you don’t try to control that.
In other words, your priorities are the skills you’re practicing (the process), not on the results (outcome). Your fear of rejection will fade into nothing as you get better at the process. Why? Because competence builds confidence, not the other way around.
Dating life drier than dirt? Download woody’s best selling ebook, “Meet the Hottie in the Corner,” available at MikeAlvear.com/getmorefromgaydating
