The reason we are scared of getting rejected or hearing “no” isn’t actually because of the other person’s dismissal, it is the additional story that we layer on top of it. This is the story we tell ourselves when we hear “no”—the one that perpetuates the internal meme of “yet another reason why I’m really not good enough” and the self-talk of “yet another thing that proves I’m not okay.”
When we get locked in our stories then we begin to live an extremely narrow view of what is possible and we become more afraid of the perceived sting of rejection than we are of the real source: our own set of myths and beliefs about ourselves.