The most powerful skill in your resilience toolkit is becoming rejection-proof. All it takes is laughing off deniers, and this is how.
One of the irritating YouTube ads I see contains the scene, “Hey guys, Nina just built an app.” To which one of the guys responds, “Impossible,” before even looking. He is so punchable, if violence is your thing. So laughable, if baby-like behaviour is your thing. So skippable, if resilience is your thing.
That’s happened to me once or twice and never when I think it might. It didn’t happen when I told people I can control the weather, heal cancer, or manifest whatever I want. No, it happened when I told a friend that I’d gotten my Honda CRX out of a ditch by myself.
“Impossible,” he said.
Momentum was my friend, like the swing set. A ditch that was nicely parabolic, which meant I pushed forward and then let it ride as far up the opposite bank as possible, with a little push, then got out of the way of gravity. Only using muscle at the end of the swing. It worked, so screw your impressions of what is impossible.
I know I’m possible. Point to note – the CRX is the tiny two-seater, not the CRV, which is the large SUV.
I even liked that guy, and he knew that I am crazily strong.
Being rejection-proof and laughing off the ignorant and certain, like these guys who assume that women can’t have done the things they claim, simply requires seeing their ignorance and certainty.
I didn’t even argue. I just laughed. After all, he’d had to help me get my snowmobile around the parking lot, and that was flat pavement.
Automatic Preferences
One of my friends told me that whenever she tries to meditate, she falls asleep. Another friend told me that he’s only into using his brain at 100%. When I told him that meditation is the act of disappearing and that it indeed uses 100% of your power, he said he wasn’t interested.
I wasn’t surprised. Most people prefer the spotlight, not the opposite.
But when I was a kid asked what superpower I wanted, I chose invisibility.
Today, I know I’ve mastered it, but to heal my soul, I must reverse my perspective of being safe in the shadow to being comfortable with fame, and that’s a bridge I’m not sure how I will cross. First, I have to want to.
In the act of disappearing is the act of merging with the universe and creating any future you want.
It sounds woo-woo and too good to be true, but I’ve tried it, and it works. There are testimonials for those who want social proof. Dr. Joe Dispenza and team have experiments and measurements for the scientists who want precision and accuracy.
To the question of controlling and designing my future, I have to say, yes, please. I do understand that people have other priorities, and good for them. The fewer people deciding the future, maybe the more likely it is to turn out in my favour. Don’t vote. Do something else. Thank you. I love a good rainy day, and I know you don’t, so pack your umbrella.
On the other hand, these comments actually hurt me. Rejection. Shut down. Who wants that? Not me; I want to be laughing off deniers.
Avoiding Pain
Avoiding future pain is one of the tasks your emotional unconscious handles on your behalf. Whatever it takes to avoid pain, your unconsciousness says. Just don’t let me know about it, your consciousness says.
Dr. Claparède discovered the power of a pinprick to elicit avoidant behaviour in the face of the risk of pain a century ago. The prick of a pin is such a minor pain, yet it can permanently undo you–until you consciously face it.
In the 1900s, Dr. Edouard Claparède was treating a woman who had suffered a brain injury. The injury prevented her from processing new information, and she could not form new memories. For instance, he had to introduce himself at every appointment, as she had no memory of previous interactions with him.
On this fateful day, he placed a thumbtack in the palm of his hand. For the first time, when she shook hands with him, she suffered a painful prick. After that, she refused to shake hands with him for every subsequent appointment but couldn’t articulate why.
Claparède postulated her brain must have warned her. Her brain learned what might be coming and swerved to avoid it. Memory was not required. Learning happened without any conscious indication that it could or did.
Previous pain is encoded in your brain, and action is taken before you become aware of it. Painful experiences create future avoidances that never enter your consciousness. When your brain makes your decisions for you, you don’t notice, and just like that, you live a life well, well, well, within safe boundaries for a smart, strong, capable adult such as yourself.
You aren’t naturally laughing off deniers; you are letting them cage you into a small, false life that doesn’t work for you.
Naturally, rejection is fear, pain, and even identity all wrapped into one, because if I don’t belong here, if they don’t love me, then where and what now?
Avoiding Catastrophes
The pain of rejection at the age of 19 led Chase Hughes to a career understanding human behaviour. Scientists say social rejection feels like physical pain. Evolutionary psychologists say it cuts so deeply because, back in the days of caves, rejection by the social group meant certain death. Without your clan, you simply don’t last long on your own.
With certain death on the table, the unconscious brain takes over and ensures that you go along with the group, no matter what you might think for yourself. It’s simply trying to keep you alive in a world that wasn’t built like today’s world.
Experiments show that you can change your mind to go along with the group without even realizing it, cleverly burying the truth you knew in order to accept the jointly held lie.
This reaction is so strong that when prophecy fails, the believers don’t wise up and move on; they double down on their beliefs. The more you’ve paid for a belief, the more being proven wrong can cement it.
They are laughing off deniers because they can’t afford the truth. They can’t handle the truth.
As Chase Hughes describes: “Evidence doesn’t walk into an empty room. It walks into a room already full of your identity, friends, marriage…the mind defends the furniture that it’s been protecting its whole life instead of the truth itself.”
When you think you are saving someone by telling them a truth you believe would set them free, and they respond by attacking you, understand that the price of the truth is higher than they can pay. Too much change. Too much damage and loss.
“Truth shows up like an unpaid bill, and the mind is looking at the price and starts flinching.”
Avoiding Flinches
To protect yourself, understand when you flinch. You laugh at things you know are not true, but you flinch when you are projecting something you hope is true but aren’t certain. Doubt lingers, perhaps infected by a rejection that landed before you were laughing off deniers.
For instance, if you knew you were an artist and someone said you weren’t, you’d laugh if you spent your days painting or whatever. But you flinch if you haven’t picked up that brush in a while, or maybe if you’ve never made money from your work, or maybe if you think it’s a waste of your precious time, which should be used only for productive purposes.
Flinches might reveal past rejections that no longer apply, or that you were too young when you heard them to realize they were false. Art is worthy; an artist is something you are, not something you do, and not everything is for commerce or productivity, nor should it be.
To flinch is to realize that you are covering up something you’d rather not bring into your conscious awareness, and you aren’t letting it go unnoticed. What is at stake here?
What truth do you know you know, and are doing your darndest to keep hidden?
When you stop doing that, a lot of energy currently dedicated to this mission becomes available to you. Thought you were tired and lacked energy? No wonder. That’s where it went – into lie protection, into active denying, into deliberately editing your true self.
The difference between rejection and proof. Proof is evidence. Rejection is baseless. To seek the evidence, you have to want the truth; you have to deliberately seek it. Not take what you are told by others. Not be rushed into easy explanations.
Laughing on the Inside
The good news is that your brain can rewire its response. Or rather, a rat’s brains can. They learned to fear it when subjected to a shock-and-noise combination. Removing the shock, they initially feared the noise alone. After repeated exposure, the nervous system suppresses the fear response. Laughing off deniers and unlearning lessons about pain.
Think back to the poor woman with the pin prick. If she found the courage to shake hands again, and if Claparède was so kind as not to prick her again, she could eventually overcome her fear of shaking his hand.
The truth is that pain is never as bad as you think it will be, is over far sooner than you think, and can’t really be remembered. This is necessary simply so that women will have not only that first baby, but a second one too.
Be harder to flatter, harder to rush, harder to be pushed into behaving the way someone else would want you to. What makes you flinch, and why? These thorns need to be found and removed. Be suspect of the usual explanations. Look for the exceptions, and why they exist, for they don’t make the law; they show why it isn’t one.
When it’s someone else’s cage, see the comfort that they experience in it. Show them the door, but let them take it when and if they want to.
When the costs of staying are higher than the costs of going, you will reach the tipping point and go, quietly and without looking back. What was difficult to imagine doing now becomes unimaginable not to do it.
Suddenly, the comfort zone reveals itself to be a cage; suddenly you realize you had the key all along. With laughter, you leave behind what was never working for you.
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