Back in my student days I took a job selling insurance. It was a simple gig to make calls and sell policies. However, for every policy I sold there were countless refusals, and each one was like a tiny dagger. After some time, the rejections stopped feeling like verdicts on me. They became more like weather, something that happens and passes. The more of them I collected, the less each one stung. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was repeating an old experiment.
Summer, 1933, a botanical garden
Albert Ellis, long before he became one of the most influential psychotherapists of the century, was a nineteen-year-old who could not talk to women. He lived near the Bronx Botanical Gardens and would sit on a bench a few feet from a woman on another bench, tell himself the moment was right, and then walk away furious with himself. So in the July before his final year of college he gave himself a homework assignment. Every day it wasn’t raining, he would go to the gardens, and every time he found a woman sitting alone, he would sit down next to her and give himself one minute to speak. To get through the panic he repeated a line to himself that he quoted for the rest of his life: “If I die, I die. Screw it, so I die.”
He didn’t die. He found 130 women alone on benches that month. Thirty stood up and left the moment he sat down. He talked with the other hundred, about birds, flowers, books, whatever arrived. Out of a hundred conversations he got one date. She never showed up.
As results go, that’s a catastrophe. Except the fear was gone. He had met the thing he dreaded well over a hundred times, and it had failed, every single time, to do anything to him. Ellis said later that the month changed his life, and it arguably changed therapy too. What he did on those benches now has a name, exposure, and it is still one of the most reliable tools psychology has for fear.
What a no is made of
Here’s the thing his experiment showed, and mine confirmed on a smaller scale. A no from a stranger is not bad as such. What hurts is the meaning we attach to it, the suspicion that each refusal is a measurement of our worth. Enough volume breaks that suspicion, because after a hundred refusals you are still there, still yourself, and the theory that a no can diminish you has run out of evidence. Most refusals turn out to be about timing, or the other person’s day.
Writing this is a small practice in the same thing. Some readers will scroll past, while some will disagree.
I still don’t like rejection. I doubt Ellis did either, even after his hundred. I’ve just stopped treating a no as a problem. Usually it’s the gateway.
