If you're not filling your day with rejections,
that means going after and doing something,
knowing full well you're going to be liked and disliked and embrace that.
One of the basics that everybody faces in life is being rejected
at times. We may have it within our family members,
we may have it with our social interactions, even our parents, .
There's just no way you're going to go through life without being both accepted
and rejected, and people liking what you have to do or say,
and people disliking it. So the question is,
is if we're addicted to being accepted all the time and being praised all the
time, it's going to be painful if you get criticized and rejected.
So I'd like to address that topic today because I think that people sometimes
have unrealistic expectations and they torture their lives with these
unrealistic expectations. So if you have something to write with and write on,
that'd be great. I think from babyhood ,
when you're born, you're having that rejection also. Somebody,
a brother, a sister, a sibling, a kid down the street, sometimes your parents,
sometimes you're feeling unwanted. This is part of life.
And to sit there and wallow in it, I think is unfair to yourself.
And so let's just put a magnet in front of us for a second.
Imagine you got a positive pole of the magnet and a negative pole of the magnet.
And imagine the positive pole being a philia, an attraction,
and the negative pole being a phobia, a repulsion. Now,
if you try to get a philia without a phobia,
or an attraction without a repulsion,
you're probably going to have some snags. In society,
there's a spectrum of people with different value systems and they're complete
opposites. You have pro-life, pro-abortion, pro-democratic,
anti-democratic, pro capitalism, anti-capitalism, pro-gun, anti-guns.
And so as you go through life,
you're going to have somebody like what you're up to and dislike it,
accept and reject, like and dislike, support and challenge,
praise and reprimand.
To have an expectation on life that embraces both,
objectively, with a balance,
prepares you for life.
To have a fantasy of getting more one than the other will
automatically make you sacrifice your own identity and your authenticity to try
to fit into everybody, which is not going to be possible.
I'd rather have the whole world against me than my own soul, is the old proverb.
So no matter what you do, you're going to be liked and disliked .
I mean,
it doesn't matter what it is you're going to have somebody that's going to agree
and disagree with it, and like and dislike it.
And there's going to be people with similar values and different values,
and there's going to be people that are supportive and challenging in your life.
Now,
when you are living in alignment and congruent with what you value
most,
and you're inspired by what you do and you feel you have meaning and you're
fulfilled doing what it is that you love,
the medial prefrontal cortex is activated. The executive center,
the blood, glucose and oxygen goes into that area of the brain, the forebrain.
When you do, you're most objective,
which means you're most balanced in your expectations and your actions.
And you're more resilient and adaptable because of it.
Because if you're neutral in balance,
you don't fear the loss of that which you seek,
you don't fear the gain of that what you're trying to avoid.
You're just present.
But if you are not filling your day with high priority actions,
and allowing the injected values of everybody else expectations on it,
trying to please them, to come into your life,
you'll cloud the clarity of what you feel is your calling and mission in life,
the thing that's really priority and most important to you.
And you'll end up trying to do things that everybody is expecting of you and
scatter yourself with chronic fatigue syndrome in a sense.
Because anytime you're not doing high priority things, your energy goes down.
Anytime you're doing high priority things, your energy goes up.
Anytime you're doing high priority things, your self-worth goes up.
Anytime you're doing low priority things, it goes down.
So when you're doing lower priority things and not living by priority and not
delegating those lower priority things, you're unfulfilled,
and you're feeling distracted and frustrated,
and you're putting fires out and you're trying to please too many people,
and you're living by duty, not design. And what happens is the blood,
glucose and oxygen goes into the subcortical area of the brain,
the limbic brain, in the amygdala. Now, this is an emotional reacting center,
and this is where we are more likely to be wanting to avoid pain and seek
pleasure, avoid predator, seek prey, avoid challenge, seek support,
avoid criticism, seek praise.
And we want to be proud and puffed up and rewarded and praised and
supported and built up. And the more people do that,
the more we set up a fantasy and expectation of that,
the more painful the rejections become, that are inevitable.
So the more we're addicted to praise, the more painful the rejection.
The more that we're addicted to support, more painful the challenge.
But the two poles of the magnet are always there, ,
support and challenge, positive and negative,
grief and relief or relief and grief. You don't ever have a one-sided event.
I've been teaching the Breakthrough Experience,
which is my signature program for 34, 35 years almost, and
I've helped people break through their illusions, week after week after week,
breakthrough the illusions of the addiction to one side.
The amygdala is the addiction center. It's the compulsive,
impulsive and immediate gratifying addiction center.
It's looking for a one-sided thing.
It's looking for prey and trying to avoid predator. It's a survival mentality.
And the more survival we are, instead of thrival we are in our mentality,
the more likely we're looking for a one-sided world, in a two-sided world,
, and therefore we're unfulfilled because we're not getting what we want.
I learned a long time ago,
if you're not filling your day with challenges that inspire you,
it fills up with challenges that don't.
When you're pursuing challenges that inspire you,
you automatically have eustress,
which is wellness promoting and balances out the cytokines and pro-inflammatory,
anti-inflammatory responses in the autonomic nervous system.
But if you are not living by your highest value and you're not pursuing
challenges that are inspiring to you that you want to solve,
and being creative and solution-oriented,
you're going to be problem oriented and you're going to be basically wanting to
avoid the problems and look for easy pathways. And in the process of doing,
you're going to attract the challenges that you're not wanting.
And then you're going to have distress, which is illness promoting. So
if you're not filling your day with challenges that inspire you,
it fills up with challenges that don't.
If you're not filling your day with rejections,
that means going after and doing something, knowing full well,
you're going to be liked and disliked and embrace that and be willing to embrace
the ridicule, the violent opposition,
until you're self-evident pursuing something meaningful,
then you're going to be sitting there wallowing in this pity party,
trauma-drama, ho hum, doldrum,
scars state of mind because you're basically sitting there looking for a
one sided world and the other side hurts. Now,
the benefit of rejection is that the rejection makes you more independent
. In fact, if we're challenged and rejected,
we become precociously independent, we start thinking autonomously and you know,
we all want to make a difference in life,
and we don't make a difference fitting in, we make a difference standing out.
So it's the challengers and the people that criticize and the people that reject
sometimes that make you more autonomous,
more authentic and more creative and more solution oriented.
And it teaches you how to communicate what you value more effectively in the
terms of other people's values.
And it gives you more of a spectrum to be able to communicate with,
without being attached. We're here to learn to love and be inclusive.
And by being rejected and challenged,
we get to learn how to communicate more effectively in all the variety of
people's values. We don't have to fix them,
we don't have to get them to be in our values,
but we can communicate effectively what we value in terms of their values if we
want to learn how to calm down the rejection and use it to our advantage.
I'm a firm believer that if you ask the question,
how didd this rejection serve me?
You'll find out at the exact moment somebody's rejecting you,
there's also somebody that's wanting you and accepting you.
And when you realize that,
you realize that your hierarchy of values is dictating the form.
The hierarchy of values is automatically with your pulmonary nuclei in your
thalamus,
scanning out information from your environment and automatically filtering it
and gating information to try to go and get what you want.
So the more you're seeking what you want that supports your values,
the more you attract that which challenges it to keep you in balance. See,
if you've got nothing but support,
you'd be juveniley dependent on that which supports you. You'd be disabled.
If you get nothing but challenge, you get precociously independent.
But if you get a balance of support and challenge,
which is the objective pursuit, you get growth, maximum growth.
Maximum growth and development occurs at the border of support and challenge,
the border of acceptance and rejections,
assimilation and accommodation we call it in learning.
The things that build you and the things that try to destroy you are necessary
to transform your life and help you evolve.
So you want to ask this question, how specifically is whatever's happening,
in this rejection, how's it helping me? How's it on the way, not in the way?
How's it strengthening me? And if they were to do the opposite and support me,
what would be the drawbacks? We are assuming that when somebody supports us,
that's got a benefit without a drawback, but it's got drawbacks too.
Sometimes people support you and may make you disabled and make you dependent
and make you less resourceful, less creative,
and end up people that are overprotected and supported most of their life,
they end up working for other people.
People that are challenged and rejected many times become entrepreneurs and
stand on their own two feet and figure it out themselves and make decisions and
command the world. So I think that you need a little bit of both.
I think that if a person's not getting both and seeing both
and recognizing both simultaneously and in a balanced way,
I think they don't maximize their growth. So you want to ask yourself,
how specifically is whatever's happening,
this challenging criticism or rejection or whatever it's called that you want to
call it, is serving you?
And if you can take that and find out how it serves you,
you'll find out it's opening up doorways.
It's helping you streamline your communications.
It's helping you prioritize your life.
It's helping you stand on your own two feet, making you less dependent,
making you less obligated. But at the same time,
it's also helping you become you. .
When things challenge our values and challenge us,
we tend to go up on our highest values. When things support us,
we tend to go to lower ones.
In other words when you are really infatuated somebody and they really support
your values,
you tend to minimize yourself to them and sacrifice what's important to you and
your highest values to fit into them for fear of loss of them.
So the supportive side actually makes you go down the value hierarchy and the
challenging side makes you become more independent, more capable,
and makes you go back up the hierarchy.
So the value of rejection is it makes you go up your hierarchy of values and
goes back and makes you build up yourself and strengthen yourself.
It makes you more resilient and adaptable. Literally,
because as you go up your values, you go more resilience,
you become more objective, more executive functioned.
So it's the challengers, , the rejection that helps us grow actually.
So I'm not, if I look back in my life,
I've had a perfect balance of those all my life. I don't have this fantasy,
I don't even waste my time searching for support without challenge.
If you're not being crucified, you're probably not on purpose, as I say.
And I think that that's the gift. That's why in the Breakthrough Experience,
which I've been teaching 34 plus years, almost 35 years,
I help people take the things that they think are challenging and transform them
into something that they can say thank you for,
and help them re-spin it in a way and re cognitively appraise it in a way that
they just go, wow, I'm not frightened of it.
Because as long as you have a wound and you assume a negative without a positive
associated with a rejection,
then what's going to happen is you're going to end up having in your
subconscious mind this wound and anything that reminds you of that,
you're going to be anxious over it and you're going to live with anxiety.
But if you can see how it serves you and be resourceful,
and I call it resourcefulness,
means bring you back to the source of your energy,
then you're actually inspired by it. And , I think the,
if you can handle it, you're not going to grow.
You know I always say that you're both supported and challenged and you only
grow to the level of whatever you can handle.
So if you can handle a lot of support,
but you can't handle the challenge that comes with it,
you're only going to grow to the level of what challenge you can handle.
And that's really the test of your accomplishments. You know,
you can't go out and create something new, I mean, if you look at it, Cantor,
the mathematician who came up with set theory, when he said that,
I mean the church went after him and other scientists went after him and he said
there can't be the infinite within the finite, but he found out that within,
between zero and one, an infinite number of fractions,
there was an infinite within the finite. So he got attacked, he got ridiculed,
he was opposed, he was somewhat depressed by it.
But the reality is that great people automatically get ridiculed along the way
and rejected along the way. As
Emerson said, to be misunderstood, right?
To to be rejected like that and to be misunderstood is an honor.
You know, I think that that's the key of the mastery of life is to be able to
do something so extraordinary that people can't comprehend it,
you're ahead of your time. Create something original and watch the rejections.
I've developed a method in the Breakthrough Experience,
the Demartini Method that I've been teaching,
and it shatters the paradigm in psychology,
the victim psychology that's out there, you know, the idea of a perpetrator,
an innocent victim, and the predator preys on this individual.
It's a very zoological animal psychology out there.
And I don't find that to be true. My research does not point to that outcome.
We sometimes create false attributions and false biases onto somebody,
they did this to us,
instead of realizing that our perceptions and our decisions and our actions are
what determine what our life is about. It's not out there what happens.
It's our perception of what out there and how we use it.
So if you take rejection and use it to your advantage,
you can do it and empower yourself with it.
And that's what I teach in the Breakthrough Experience.
I show people how to be resourceful and take no matter what they've been
through,
nothing their mortal body can experience that they can't turn into something
that's an opportunity.
I've had people from almost every imaginable thing you can have happen.
I'm not going to give all the list,
but there's a long list of things that people have faced financially, sexually,
you name it, beatings, bullying, all that stuff, rejection,
legal issues.
There's nothing your body can experience that your immortal soul can't love.
The immortal soul is your state of unconditional love of your authentic self
can't turn that into an opportunity of transforming your life.
So rejection is just part of the game. That's just,
the way you handle it is the way you perceive it.
If you perceive it in the way instead of on the way,
it's going to hold you back.
If you perceive it on the way and see it as a strengthening process,
it's going to give you a great gift.
That's why I want people to come to the Breakthrough Experience and learn the
Demartini Method and learn how to identify their values so they live by their
highest values where they're most resilient and they're less affected by it.
When you're living by priority, you're less affected by rejection,
you're confident in yourself. But when you're not,
then you're more affected by it. And then if you do,
you got baggage and then stored in the subconscious mind.
And I show people in the Breakthrough Experience with the Demartini Method how
to dissolve all that. So there's nothing there except thank you.
Anything you can't say thank you for is baggage.
Anything you can say thank you for is fuel.
So it's going to a new level of thinking and not sitting there and let the
external world determine your destiny. You know,
it's not the world on the outside that determines what's going on.
It's the world on the inside.
Now there's people out there that want you to believe in a zeitgeist idea that
you're a product of all that out there. And okay,
I'm not saying that people aren't,
but that's because they don't know how to transform what's out there into
something that's inspiring to them.
There's always somebody out there that came from poverty and went on to wealth,
or somebody that went from handicap that went on to Olympic medals or something.
And so what is it that they did different? I'm interested in that.
I'm not interested in what the average is.
I'm interested in what the extraordinary is. So you can transform the average,
an ordinary into extraordinary. So rejection's part of the cool thing. I mean,
how to handle it is simply a perception.
And that's what I teach in the Breakthrough Experience.
That's why I want people to come to the Breakthrough Experience,
'cause they can then be resourceful and they can transform whatever happens in
their life into opportunity and do something extraordinary. So,
just wanted to spend a few moments on how to handle rejection because
there's absolutely no reason why you have to have that in any way distract you
from doing something extraordinary with your life.
You can see it on the way or in the way.
You can be a victim of your history or a master of your destiny.
I'm interested in helping people in the Breakthrough Experience be a master of
their destiny and no longer be a victim of their history. So until next week,
just think about what I just shared,
let that sink in and contemplate that and come to the Breakthrough Experience
so I can show you how to actually transform those things so you don't have to
have anything stop you in your life and I'll see you next week.