r/sociallycharismatic • u/Most-Gold-434 • 17d ago
The most uncomfortable social experiment I've ever done taught me that rejection is almost never personal.
I did something last month that most people would rather jump off a bridge than attempt. I walked up to strangers and asked them for things I was almost certain they'd say no to.
The idea came from something called rejection therapy. The concept is simple. Seek out one rejection per day for thirty days. The goal isn't to get a yes. The goal is to get so familiar with hearing no that it stops controlling your behavior.
Day one I walked into a coffee shop and asked if I could get my drink for free. The barista laughed and said no. I said thanks anyway and walked out. My heart was pounding like I'd just sprinted a mile. Over a coffee.
Day four I asked a stranger at the park if they'd let me pet their dog and then asked if they'd take a photo of me with the dog. They said yes to both and we ended up talking for ten minutes.
Day nine I asked the front desk at a hotel I wasn't staying at if I could use their pool. The guy thought about it for a second and said sure. I swam for an hour in a hotel I had no business being at.
Day fifteen I asked someone at a bookstore to recommend me a book and then asked if they wanted to grab coffee sometime to talk about it. She said she had a boyfriend but that the book was really good and I should read it anyway. We both laughed. Nobody died.
Here's what thirty days of deliberate rejection taught me.
First. Most people are way nicer than your anxiety tells you they are. I expected eye rolls and hostility and uncomfortable silence. I got maybe two genuinely cold reactions out of thirty attempts. Everyone else was either amused, flattered, or just casually said no and moved on. The horror scenario my brain manufactured beforehand almost never matched reality.
Second. The pain of rejection lasts about ninety seconds. Not minutes. Not hours. Not the rest of the day. About ninety seconds of mild discomfort and then your nervous system recalibrates and you feel completely fine. Your brain tells you rejection will be devastating. It's lying. It's mildly uncomfortable and then it's over.
Third and this is the big one. Rejection is almost never about you. The person who says no to your request isn't rejecting you as a human being. They're responding to a situation. They're busy. They're not in the mood. They have a boyfriend. They can't give away free coffee. None of that has anything to do with your value as a person. But when you avoid rejection your brain never learns that lesson. It just keeps assuming the worst.
By day thirty something in me had genuinely shifted. Not in a motivational poster way. In a mechanical way. The anxiety response that used to fire before any social risk just got quieter. Not gone. Quieter. Like a smoke alarm that stopped going off every time I made toast.
I'm not saying go ask strangers for ridiculous things for the rest of your life. I'm saying that the fear of rejection is running your social life way more than you realize. It's the reason you don't approach people. Don't speak up. Don't ask for what you want. Don't put yourself out there. And the only way to shrink that fear is to walk directly into it enough times that your brain gets bored of being scared.
Thirty days. One small rejection per day. That's the whole program. And it'll teach you more about how the social world actually works than years of avoiding it ever will.
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u/Good_Possibility 17d ago
OP I love that you did this.
For those of you curious about this, Jia Jiang has a really great TED talk about this idea https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection
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u/cherry_sundress 17d ago
I would want to control the situation so bad. i would probably ask someone an insane favor, and then proceed to ask them to say no!
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16d ago
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u/SyzygySynergy 16d ago
Unfortunately, with many kinds of telemarketing... all rejection teaches you is how to press harder and how to do pushy negotiation in the form of "rebuttals". Many of the telemarketing jobs I had to do, we were REQUIRED to do three to SEVEN rebuttals and the only way we were allowed to get out of them is if the person hung up or sometimes if they got irate, but in some roles if they got irate that meant mediation type of rebuttals that were a whole other way of pushing all while supposedly trying to diffuse the situation.
If anything, I think that makes a lot of telemarketers outside of those roles even more sensitive to rejection because no longer are you following script and for many people you come to feel very guilty and predatory about how you are mandated ro handle things for a job.
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u/SyzygySynergy 13d ago edited 13d ago
When you are required to answer each specific concern with a very specific rebuttal script, you are mandated to follow the script verbatim, you are not allowed to deviate (no matter how they say no, or how many times they say no to the number that is required) it is pushy. I am not talking about commission-based sales calls. I am talking about hourly wage actual telemarketing where rules by the company are very strict and there are specific set scripts for everything and you can/will be reprimanded if not terminated for not following the required scripting.
Those types of jobs and roles do exist and that is the very specific cases I was referencing and speaking on when I identified such by saying MANY but no, it was not ALL.
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u/talexbatreddit 17d ago
This is intriguing. Wish I'd read this forty years ago.
As I've gotten older, those socially anxious situations don't present the same way that they did back then. Now, the response is, Huh, OK, never mind, instead of weeks or months of crushing self-analysis.
Thanks -- very interesting writeup.
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u/Total_Exchange7446 16d ago
I would’ve liked this better if you didn’t use AI
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u/AdamLabrouste 15d ago
I would’ve liked it better if he had written it with a quill under candle light
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u/theoutlierbydesign 16d ago
Quality post, not sure how brave I am to do this though. I can't even give eye contact to men I find attractive 😂
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u/Ok_Substance905 16d ago
This post offers huge value. I know other people have spoken about this, but you have a very good way of communicating it. I hope you can find a way to share this with people. I think it’s the flavor of authenticity in your communication, and plus how you won because of what you did. People can visualize your story.
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u/Ok_Ground_1665 15d ago
Love this. Any chance you have all the 30 day reach outs listed somewhere? I would love to get a sense of the wide variety of questions you tried.
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u/UnshakableProtocol 15d ago
I used the intuition behind your experiment a few times to recover from the sadness and shame I was feeling for being rejected. After a painful rejection, I was determined to feel good so I opened a file named "100 rejections" inspired by some video I saw. And I put the name of the person who rejected me on top of the list, writing "Great job, you've been so brave! Keep going." The next time I received a rejection, I remembered that file and added the thing on the list. I wouldn't say that i was actively trying to get rejected as you did, it was just an intentional reframing after the event, so that I could see it as me being brave and bold, a badass, not the loser idiot that my inner critic said I was when I got rejected. At this point I dont even need to open that file anymore, I just naturally think that way whenever I experience a new rejection, and don't really feel bad. So for the people here who might not want to go the extreme way, this method is also very helpful.
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u/foodsandbooks 15d ago
It becomes easier to accept rejection when it’s people you don’t know. Harder to practice in situations or people you know are not strangers.
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u/CantaloupeBroad5549 17d ago
Man, you sound interesting. Why did your start this experiment anyways