Moment 61 - How To Handle ANY Rejection: Dr. Julie Smith

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment episode, Dr. Julie Smith offers a different way of trying to get to know your own instincts to stop bad habits in their tracks. Through the techniques she offers in this conversation, people can get through a breakup or a rough patch at work without it knocking them back. As she’ll explain, the trick is always to look for patterns in your own behaviour, and the story you tell yourself about your own behaviour, and your own past. Because it’s only when setbacks affect the narrative you tell you about yourself that they can become a trauma. Control the narrative, and your ability to direct the course of your own life comes easily. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/Sew3KrnPIqb Dr Julie - https://www.instagram.com/drjulie/?hl=en https://www.tiktok.com/@drjuliesmith?lang=en Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  What you're describing there, that scrolling through comments, looking for the bad one, is something I think we can all relate to, because I will get 99.9% like great comments, and then it'll be, as you say, the one that's either that's critical or that feels personal. It's if someone's like criticizing something that I've like done, I don't really care. It's when it's when they are criticizing who I am, I think I find it hardest. And so I wanted to understand why that was. And I started doing some reading and some writing about this topic and understanding the nature. If we go back in our like, in our history as humans of rejection and what that used to mean when I was a human, the idea of being like dispat, like kicked out of my tribe.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:40Steven Bartlett?

  And the threat that that would put me under if I was removed from my tribe and this idea of rejection. And really, like, a lot of rejection, this is kind of what I came to came to the conclusion of. When someone says something like that, it's almost like, for me, it feels like a threat of rejection, a threat of being expelled from the, from the, you know, from the tribe or whatever. Obviously not. Obviously, that is not the truth. But deep within me somewhere, that desire to fit in and be accepted by the tribe is still there. So having millions of people being able to give me feedback, and some of them seemingly rejecting me from the tribe, or saying that I don't fit, or they whatever, is difficult. Is that like, that's a lot of words, but does that make any sense?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the feeling comes before the rational thought about it. So, you know, your, your body has that reaction before you're able to consider that, you know, this isn't your, your only community, or this isn't your family, or people that are sort of, you're dependent on and that kind of thing. So I think the feeling will always be there. And it's always difficult, isn't it? But then you can override that with what comes next. So it's all, it's not about never having that feeling. And I hate it when people kind of say online, you know, just to stop caring what everybody thinks. And that is impossible, because you're built to care what people think of you. And, and you probably wouldn't function in a society that well if you didn't care what anybody thought of

• 2:05Speaker 01

  you. It's about how you then manage it. So when those thoughts come along, about, you know, negative comment, it's what do you do next with what comes up? So yeah, it's really about how you kind of respond to, to the thoughts that come up after.

• 2:22Steven Bartlett?

  In those moments of rejection, is it really like the story we tell ourselves about what that rejection means to us? I'm thinking now more broadly about romantic rejection. You know, I'm dating someone, she says, you're dumped. Like, the harm surely isn't in the separation. Surely, for me, it's always felt like, oh, well, I got to the point where I realised that it was more, Steve's subconscious brain is telling himself he's a scumbag and not beautiful and not smart because of this rejection. Is that really where the harm is done? Like, that self-inflicted self-story?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, rejection is difficult for everybody, isn't it? But certainly if rejection taps into what we call a kind of core belief. So if someone grew up with a core belief around being unlovable, for example, because maybe their parents were inconsistent in their care, for example. So they, you know, and you don't think about these beliefs consciously all the time. You know, they're not at the forefront of your thought processes, but they will influence how you feel and they'll influence how you behave and the choices that you make. Because what happens is when we have a core belief that is a sort of damaging one or detrimental one, we develop sort of rules for living around that that help us to keep it at bay. So it might be, you know, if I can just be

• 3:32Speaker 01

  the perfect business owner and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect dad, then no one will reject me and everything will be okay. And so you set yourself these rules for living that at some point, inevitably, you break or there's signs that you're not going to be able to keep up with them. And what that does is when there's signs that you're not going to keep up with those rules for living, you then, it kind of triggers that core belief to come to the forefront. And that's when you get that rush of kind of psychological distress, because it's a distressing thing to believe about yourself. And so that's when it can cause people real problems, when that sort of damaging core belief is being triggered on a regular basis, for example, maybe because it's a

• 4:14Speaker 01

  turbulent relationship or whatever the situation is. And that's when you can work not only on the present stuff, but on the core beliefs and looking at how those are playing out in relationships.

• 4:27Steven Bartlett?

  And how do you get to the heart of understanding what your core beliefs are? Because I went through life and I think I got to about 24 years old without being in a relationship. And when I asked myself what my core beliefs were as it relates to relationships, I realised that they were heavily shaped by watching my parents' toxic relationship and this belief that relationships were prison. Because I thought my dad was in prison for my entire childhood. That's what I thought. I thought he was trapped in prison because he was in a relationship with my with my mother, because they were very argumentative, shall we say. So it wasn't until I was 24, and I think because of journaling and writing, and really this podcast, that I was able to realise that I even thought that. And I was having this avoidant behavioural pattern where the minute I would pursue someone romantically

• 5:12Steven Bartlett?

  and the minute they would accept my advances, I would run for the hills and try and dissuade them out of being in a relationship with me. And I had no idea that core belief was in the back of my control centre of my mind.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And there's a really fascinating therapy called CAT therapy, actually. So it's cognitive analytic therapy, just C A T for short. But that's just a fascinating therapy where it looks at the relationships that you have when you're younger. So when you're growing up with with parents or siblings or family. And in those relationships, you learn how to behave in the world, right? You learn about, you know, who I am, what to expect from other people, and what to expect from the world at large. And then you develop kind of survival strategies or coping strategies in, for example, in a difficult relationship like that. You learn how to cope with that. And you have these kind of safety behaviours.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And as you grow up, you're in a different situation, right? You're not dependent on parents and stuff like that. But those survival strategies, all those safety behaviours, continue and they get played out in your adult relationships. And I just love that therapy. It's great for looking at the patterns and the cycles that people tend to feel stuck in, in their relationships, and how that reflects those early life experiences that are essentially outdated coping strategies. But it's really difficult. You know, if something's been a lifetime of habit, you can't just break that by telling yourself to do that. So it takes time and it takes practice. And you've literally kind of map out the cycle. So that you learn to sort of acknowledge it in hindsight, first of all. So you say,

• 6:50Speaker 01

  okay, last week that happened and that happened. And yeah, I went around the cycle. And then eventually you've done that enough that you start to recognize it when you're in it. So as you're about to do something, you think, hang on a minute, I know what this is predictable. I know what I'm doing. And in that moment, you then get this chance, this is a beauty of kind of awareness is you then get this chance to choose whether you go with it. And sometimes you will, and you'll go around the cycle again. And sometimes you'll do this other thing that you've already worked out you need to do. And you break the cycle and then you get the benefits of that. And, and so it's this really kind of long process of sometimes going around the cycle again. And then sometimes breaking it and finding this new life that you can create in your relationships and stuff like that.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  So, and it's incredible how life changing that can be for people.