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Rejection Therapy. The Game

Rejection Therapy™ is the real life game with one rule. The game is designed for anyone who wants to build confidence and overcome fear of rejection.

Rejection Therapy will show you how rejection can be the catalyst for personal success and business domination.

Suggestion Cards

Rejection Therapy has a Classic suggestion card deck and an Entrepreneur Edition for rejection attempts. Printable versions of the Classic suggestion cards and Entrepreneur Edition are also available for $10.  These cards are not essential to the game but handy for motivation and direction.

iPhone  and Android Apps

Rejection Therapy is available on the iPhone, for both the Classic Edition and the Blue Pill Edition.  A Rejection Therapy Android app has also been developed.

Rejection Therapy Worldwide

People all around the world are playing Rejection Therapy and enjoying personal breakthroughs.  Now it’s your turn. Take the Rejection Therapy 30 Day Challenge today!

Photo by Martin Kingsley

Think of your life as a television set with four channels. Your brain is the remote control you use to switch between these four channels. Of the four channels, there’s a nature channel, an all sports channel, a 24-hour news network, and an arts channel.

You can switch between these stations at any time, and each will give you a radically different perspective of the world.

If you are like most people, you’ll gravitate to one or two channels and stay there. The other channels you’ll click to when the show is important or you’re bored, but for the most part you’ll watch even bad TV programming because it’s habitual.

THEORY OF ATTENTION

According to a sports psychology theory designed by Robert M. Nediffer PhD, the analogy I described isn’t far from how our cognitive processes work. It’s called the Theory of Attention and it was developed to help coaches, trainers, and performers gain easier access to optimal internalized conditions like The Zone and Flow State.

The Theory of Attention is a powerful cognitive model that can help you better understand how your mind perceives life and the world around you, and how to change your reality as easy as a TV set.

The core of Nediffer’s theory is that the average person shifts between four separate and distinct states of attention in response to the changing demands of performance. These “attentional styles” shift along two dimensions: from broad to narrow (horizontal) and external and internal (vertical).

Each attentional style has specific strengths and characteristics, as you’ll see below.

Revisiting my analogy of the four TV channels, the nature station is your broad-external focus according to Nediffer’s theory. You use broad-external focus when you need to be aware of your environment and to gather situational information.

BROAD-EXTERNAL

I call broad-external focus “BuddhaVision” because the enlightened Siddhattha Gotama advocated this attentional state as a way to detach from oneself and alleviate suffering. It’s also an effective mental strategy for endurance athletes to disassociate from pain and exhaustion during competition.

Pro Tip: For best results, use broad-external when going for a potential rejection attempt.

NARROW-EXTERNAL

The sports channel is similar to narrow-external focus. The mind switches to the tight focus of narrow external whenever you perform a physical action like kick a ball or read a book.  World-class athletes have a dominant and razor sharp narrow-external focus.

BROAD-INTERNAL

I liken the 24 hour news network to broad-internal focus because it’s where information of all kinds is gathered, analyzed and/or synthesized into strategy and vision. It’s no wonder broad-external is the dominate trait of business leaders, inventors and visionaries.

NARROW-INTERNAL

Finally, the arts channel is narrow-internal focus. In the Theory of Attentional and Personal Style [PDF] Nediffer writes, “you use narrow internal focus of concentration to systematically rehearse information or to assess and manipulate your own internal state in some systematic way.”

Narrow-internal is also the ego’s lair. When being introspective or anxious, we are deep in narrow-internal territory. We hardly notice others around us. Some psychologists refer to that behaviour as “high interiority”. Obsessive personalities are dominated by internal focus of concentration.

SELECTIVE VIEWING

It’s important to remember you can switch attentional styles with your mind at any time. You decide what story to tell  by the lens you choose to look through. If at any given time your frame of mind is not useful, change the ‘channel’.

It’s your mind and it’s your life. Take control.

In the next article, we’ll go deeper into the subject of attentional styles, and expose the secrets of top athletes and thinkers on how they manage high pressure situations and achieve optimal performance states like the Zone and Flow State. Stay tuned.

For more articles, visit the complete, up-to-date listing of Rejection Therapy blog posts.

I vividly remember the moment I thought of Rejection Therapy. I was holed up in a one bedroom apartment, staring at my glowing computer monitor on a Friday night. I was in a new city, starting a new business and a new life.

I had no friends here, only two cats who watched me tap away on my keyboard for hours (I wondered if they could be trained to do light administrative work, but to this day the little furballs do nothing but lounge about).

But back to the idea of seeking rejection by strangers, in a community where I was trying to establish myself as a professional and not a nutcase.

Going through with this experiment would require bucket loads of confidence, and I had zero.

So, what does a guy do if he needs confidence but has none? He borrows it. That’s what I ended up doing.

Let me explain. At the time, I didn’t know if inducing rejections on a regular basis would battle-harden me or crush my self esteem, so I had no confidence in the process until it had proven itself.

I also didn’t think to ask a psychologist about my experiment, so I couldn’t lean on the advice of a professional.

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The only one I could turn to was God.

So after inquiring, soul searching, and getting what I felt was the green light, I went ahead with a half tank of borrowed confidence. It wasn’t self-confidence, and it wasn’t confidence in an outcome (because I didn’t know what would happen), it was confidence in God.

You probably have an idea of what happened next. Rejection Therapy opened a world of new possibilities that had been closed by fear. I felt as if I was liberated from prison. My self-confidence soared.

The experiment was such a surprising success, I considered keeping it as a secret advantage (but only for a second, honest).

Obviously, I decided against it, because Rejection Therapy is available for the benefit for everyone.

I like this quote in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind from spiritual teacher Shunryu Suzuki:

“we cannot create and own what we create for ourselves since everything was created by God“.

I get this.  Acknowledging God’s hand in my successes has helped me stay humble and somewhat unattached as Rejection Therapy gains global awareness.  People can have confidence in the game, not because of me, but because of Him.

I’ve learned a few other things as well. People are generally kind. You are stronger than you think. And if you don’t have any self-confidence, borrow some – from God, a mentor, from others who have gone before you, or try hypnosis- whatever it takes until you get some of your own.

For more articles, visit the complete, up-to-date listing of Rejection Therapy blog posts.