Overcoming Fear of Rejection Creates a More Fulfilling Life with Jia Jiang

Did you know that getting rejected is essential to being successful – and you should be doing it more often?

“If you are afraid of rejection, go out and look for it,” advises Jia Jiang, CEO of Rejection Therapy, a platform that provides knowledge and tools to help people overcome their fear of rejection, and Wuju Learning, a company that trains organizations and teaches individuals to become fearless through rejection training.

On this week’s episode of the Start With a Win podcast, Jiang joins RE/MAX Holdings CEO Adam Contos to explain why it’s critical for people – especially entrepreneurs – to get comfortable getting rejected and overcome the fear of failure.

“We tend to do things that are safe. We tend to do things that get approval from others,” Jiang explains. “That’s why we naturally don’t take too many risks.”

To combat this, Jiang teaches others about “rejection therapy” – the practice of getting rejected so much that the idea of it is no longer daunting. He encourages people to treat rejection like a game.

Overcoming the fundamental fear of rejection means putting yourself in situations that feel out of character. For example, Jiang laughs that during his journey of finding comfort in failure, he practiced by asking for a haircut at a pet superstore and a refill on a hamburger at a restaurant. In both scenarios, Jiang was met with rejection – and it helped desensitize him to getting turned down.

“By the end, I felt I could ask anything from anyone anywhere,” he says.

The most important aspect of accepting rejection is learning to not care so much for how others will perceive your failures. Staying on the path of least resistance, he says, isn’t the route to success.

“People don’t care about you nearly as much as you think they do … They are way too busy thinking about their own insecurities and their own dreams and fears and failures. No one cares about your failures,” Jiang says. “There’s a big discrepancy between how we perceive ourselves and our relationship with others, versus what really is happening in the world.”

Tune in to this week’s podcast episode to hear how Jiang spent 100 days getting constantly rejected – and how he’s using his experiences to inspire others.

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