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Transcript provided by YouTube. Slightly edited with AI.
Facing the Fear of Judgment and Rejection
“My biggest worry for the future is that I will continue to hold myself back because of my paralyzing fear of judgment. So, what is that fear? I suppose it’s really a fear of latent potential. It’s a weird fear when you think about it because it suggests that we do think we have a lot of potential. If you truly think that you have no potential, that’s not really a fear; it’s just your reality. That fear is a fear that I will not become all that I can become, that I will not do in my life all the things that I am capable of doing.”
“I also think it’s a fear of rejection because what’s holding her back is a fear of judgment from other people. She feels that if she expresses her true self and her true potential, she will be rejected for it, or somebody will say, ‘You’re ridiculous. You’re not good enough. Why do you think you can do that?’ So, that is the criticism and rejection from other people. It feels like judgment, but it’s actually a fear of not being accepted.”
Unhatched Potential
“It’s this idea of the unhatched egg. If you keep telling yourself there is something special in this egg that can hatch, but if you never hatch the egg, you can keep telling yourself there is something special when this hatches. But if you break the egg open and there’s nothing there, then you don’t just lose the ending that you thought you could have; you also lose the hope. A lot of people have this terrifying fear of rejection because at least if I’m not trying, I can live with this idea that if I did try, I could be really successful. If I did try, I could make the team. I could build that business. I could find love.”
The Fantasy of Preservation
“The same is true when you go out and you see someone you’re attracted to. If you never speak to them, you can go home with this fantasy in your mind that remains intact. If you spoke to them, something could have come from that. But the closure of going over to that person and saying something, and then that person’s not interested, that’s a kind of closure that most people don’t want because now they have to relinquish the fantasy. They can’t go home and say, ‘If I spoke to that person, then you never know what could have happened.’ No, no, you found out.”
Embrace Experience and Competence
“The sad part about it is in preserving the fantasy, we kind of missed the point about what actually gives us potential. The thing that gives us potential is experience and competence, which comes from actually doing something enough times and getting in the reps. It’s like going to the gym; the thing that gives you the body is the reps. If you stay at home and dream about the body you could have, you’re not getting in the reps that are actually going to create that body. In a business, if you keep wondering whether your idea is a good one instead of going out there and exposing it to the light of day and people’s opinions, you’re not actually getting the feedback you need to turn what is probably an average idea into a good and maybe even a great idea.”
The Path to Greatness
“The difference between the good and the great is that people who are great are willing to stay good for longer. It’s such a mindset shift from greatness being something inspired and something that you keep in your head as this kind of latent potential fantasy of one day being great. No, greatness is much more boring than that. Greatness is just you’re willing to remain good for long enough that eventually you’re the last one in the room, and you end up being great because you stayed in the room long enough.”
Overcoming the Fear of Judgment
“My biggest non-insight would be that the fear of rejection is making you miss the point entirely of where your potential actually comes from. Your potential comes from going and iterating over and over and over again. If you can be the kind of person that can ignore, to a large extent, the short to medium-term results of that iterating and those reps and instead just see the trajectory that you’re on as a result of doing those reps, that allows you to kind of almost circumvent all of those short-term fears of being rejected and instead just focus on creating a trajectory in your life that makes interesting results inevitable.”
Embrace Imperfection
“I think remembering that what’s that quote which is like, ‘You would worry less about how much people thought about you if you realized how seldom they do.’ Your fear of judgment only comes from a place of you focusing on yourself to a degree that nobody else ever will. If you surround yourself with loving people who accept you, there’s actually a lot of room for you to just be yourself, explore, play, make mistakes, and people will not care about your mistakes. They will not feel your embarrassment 5% as much as you do. We make the mistake of thinking that it’s just as big in our heads as it is in other people’s, and it stops us from doing things.”
Don’t Fear Criticism
“Even the person that says, ‘I don’t like that thing you did this week, it wasn’t that good,’ is just commenting on something that’s already history to me. I’m already better than yesterday. So, we get so hung up on what someone thinks of our practice run. Every time you make something, it’s practice for the next thing you make. When you’re judging it, that’s fine. You’re judging a piece of practice, and my best is always coming.”
The Key to Potential
“So, it is as even the critics; you have to look at your critics as judging a practice, not judging the best of what you’ll ever do. Wait before YouTube sends you down the rabbit hole of watching raccoon videos or videos of large crocodiles on Florida golf courses. I have something that will help your love life more than these things, and it’s at whyhesgone.com. If you want to know why someone faded out, why they were giving you attention and all of a sudden they stopped, this guide shows you. Go to whyhesgone.com and then enjoy your baby bear videos.”
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
Blog → https://www.howtogettheguy.com/blog/ Facebook → https://facebook.com/CoachMatthewHussey Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thematthewh… Twitter → https://twitter.com/matthewhussey ▼ Connect with Stephen ▼ Youtube → https://bit.ly/StephenHusseyYoutube Instagram → http://bit.ly/StephenHusseyIG
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