A man walked up to a stranger and asked if he could borrow money. The man in the hotel lobby was not sure what to say. He wanted to know why he was being asked, but Jiang didn't say anything. This was Jiang's first day of rejection therapy and he was challenged to approach strangers with weird requests to build their resilience against rejection.
As a young boy, Jiang was ostracized in school. The class went silent when Jiang was invited to give a compliment to one of them. For a long time, it hurt his confidence. He was a senior marketing manager at the time, but his dream of developing mobile apps was put on hold because of fear.
Jiang searched online for help and found nothing. He found Comely's website at rejectiontherapy.com. Comely wanted to break the tyranny of social anxiety by designing a "real-life game" with just one rule: "You must be rejected by another person at least once a day." He wanted to get rejected in 30 daily challenges. The players had to ask a stranger for a ride or for a discount. They would succeed if they were denied, and if they faced it head on.
When I started, my goal was to say, ‘All right, I’ll get rejected and learn from the rejection to become tougher’
Jiang created 100 challenges for himself after liking the idea so much. He says that his goal was to get rejected and learn from it. He asked straightforward but awkward questions, such as requesting a free night's stay at a hotel or taking a selfies with a stranger.
Jiang used to work full-time helping others overcome their fear. He uses a green screen in his California home as a backdrop when he is coaching clients around the world. He says the fear of being rejected holds a lot of people back. It is something that we want to avoid, even in our genes. Jiang was awkward in the first video he posted a decade ago, but now he is confident and charismatic.
Why is it that we fear being rejected? Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman worked together on a study. She began with the question of what goes on in the brain when people feel excluded. People were brought into the machine and had a game in which they were excluded. The subjects threw a ball back and forth with two other people. The other players were supposed to stop throwing the ball to the subject at a certain point in the game.
She made an interesting discovery when she tracked what happened in the brain when subjects were excluded from a social activity. The same regions of the brain were activated when a person was left out. We wondered if there was a reason people talked about feeling rejected as feeling hurt. It might be a good idea to use physical pain words to describe social pain.
The use of the pain system is most likely a result of our reliance on caregivers when we were young. We are immature as a mammal. She says that we need to make sure we stay close to the person who is caring for us. If we are separated, it might be difficult for us to feel cared for.
Whenever we feel our connections with friends, family or social groups are in danger, this protective system kicks in. There was something beautiful about it. It shows how important our social connections are and how we use a primitive pain system to make sure that we stay connected to others.
Michael Stein likes the idea of this rejection-therapy challenge. I would recommend it for people with social anxiety. Stein has been helping clients from his private practice, Anxiety Solutions, in Denver, Colorado, for more than a decade. It is one of the most researched and supported treatments for anxiety.
Rejection therapy is fantastic. It’s exactly what I would recommend for people with social anxiety
Stein says that long-term maintenance of anxiety is caused by short-term avoidance of anxiety. If you try to make yourself feel better when you are anxious, it will make you feel worse the next time. Exposure therapy makes you feel uncomfortable. You are learning to tolerate the emotion in order to feel less anxious.
Stein suggests targeting the type of rejection you are most worried about and practicing exposure at a pace you can handle. You should remind yourself of the benefits when things get hard.
On the third day, Jiang walked into a Krispy Kreme and asked for a special doughnuts made of the Olympic rings. He was hoping for a quick no but it wasn't the case this time. The worker behind the till was confused and sketching a design. She gave them to Jiang after fifteen minutes. The interaction received millions of views after Jiang shared it online. He says that is what got him all the attention. All of that key knowledge accumulated over those 100 days is what I do now.
Jiang played football in a stranger's back garden, got Santa to sit on his lap, and then taught a class at a college campus. He realized the benefits of risk when he was fully aware of it. He says that when he finished teaching he walked out crying. I was able to fulfill my life's dream just by asking.
Jiang gained confidence in himself and others as many people said yes to his strange requests. He says that they usually expect the worst. Everyone is nicer than we think. Jiang used his newfound self-esteem to start his own business. They decided in 2016 that the SocialRejection domain should be turned over to him.
Comely told me thatJiang was the obvious successor. It was time for him to buy Rejection Therapy. I was emotional when I sold it. Comely returned to school and is now helping the homeless, while Jiang started his business and launched his mobile app. The #RejectionTherapy has had more than 23 million views.
Jiang had advice for other people. Don't take rejection personally and don't avoid it. He says that every acceptance feels like confirmation of our merit and that every rejection is an indictment of who we are. I think it's not. It's just an opinion
Jiang keeps his tolerance high by putting himself in vulnerable positions. He knows his resilience to rejection doesn't come naturally, but he thinks it's worth pursuing. He says it was more like an exercise. To maintain that muscle, you have to keep doing it.
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