Free Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection by Jia Jiang Page A

Jeff handed me the microphone and told me to say whatever I wanted, as if he were 100 percent confident that nothing could go wrong. I was a lot less confident; in that moment, my fear did, in fact, seem deeply biological. I could almost hear my DNA whispering to me,
Stop! You are out of line. No one wants to hear you. You are making a fool of yourself. People will reject you! Someone will think you are a terrorist
and tackle you! You are in danger!
I took the microphone from Jeff anyway, pushed the on button, and started talking.
    “Hello, everyone, welcome on board!” I said, in my best flight attendant voice. Most people were looking at their phones, reading magazines, or chatting with one another. No one was paying attention.
    “I am not a crew member,” I said. Immediately, everyone raised their heads and looked at me. I felt hundreds of eyes on me. My nervousness moved closer to panic.
    “I am just a fan of the company,” I continued, speeding up my speech and trying not to let my voice shake. “I’m a customer like you. I just want to say they are always on time, they are always friendly, and they are always awesome! So if you are like me, give a round of applause to Southwest!”
    Incredibly, everyone started clapping, just like I’d asked. As I walked back to my seat, another flight attendant pointed at me and said, “You get a free drink, man!” Another passenger blurted, “Wow…brave!”
    You have no idea
, I thought to myself as I sat back down in my seat, shaking and drenched in sweat. I’m sure fighting off lions with a stick ten thousand years ago was more difficult, but in the moment, this felt just as scary.
    There were moments when I thought about quitting my 100 Days of Rejection, and my Southwest moment was one of them. I’d been preparing for a personal rejection from the flight attendant, but I’d received an acceptance instead, which in turn had opened up a much scarier possibility—a very public rejection by 130 people at the same time. Even though I managed my way through the ordeal, I felt pushed to the limit.
    Before I learned about the biological roots of rejection, I thought I was fighting a monster through psychological warfare. But now I knew that I was fighting evolution, my own brain chemistry, and my DNA. The warfare wasn’t just psychological—it was biological!
    And that realization made me wonder: Did I really want to take on this fight? Was this a battle I was destined to lose? I began to wonder if this is what people meant when they said “ignorance is bliss.”
    But even as I worried that I didn’t have what it took to deal with more rejection, I was able to gain strength by looking back on my earlier experiments. I could clearly see that not every rejection attempt had bathed me in sweat or triggered my internal terror, especially when I allowed myself to appreciate the humor in them. When I’d asked for a burger refill, I had left chuckling. When the grocery clerk refused to give me a tour of the warehouse, instead of running away, I’d started joking around with the guy. I hadn’t walked out of those situations clutching my chest in pain—which made me think that maybe I had learned something else from my dealings with rejection without quite realizing it. Could humor be an effective way for me to neutralize rejection pain? To experiment, I staged another rejection attempt with laughter in mind.

100 DAYS OF REJECTION: A HAIR TRIM AT PETSMART
    Driving past PetSmart one day, I remembered it was time to take my dog, Jumbo, in for some grooming. (It alwaysseems like grooming time for golden retrievers; they are cute shedding machines.) As I pulled into the parking lot, an idea popped up in my head. What if I asked the dog groomers to cut
my
hair instead? The idea made me laugh—making it exactly the kind of rejection attempt that I wanted.
    When I walked into the store’s grooming area, four groomers were busily washing and trimming dogs. One of them stopped