I was always the LAST to get picked

Dear Friend,

Like many Indian girls, I didn’t really grow up playing a lot of sports. It just wasn’t something that was encouraged in my time.

As fate would have it, right around middle school, my family and I moved to London. And I enrolled into an all-girls school that happened to be really big on sports.

I didn’t have a single athletic bone in my body, or so I thought. Not to mention how shy and self-conscious I felt even wearing shorts in P.E. class.

My awkwardness was palpable, and sure enough, whenever teams were being picked in P.E., I became that girl who would always be picked last.

Rejection is painful. You feel it almost viscerally.

Research even shows that the brain equates social pain with physical pain. In other words, rejection literally feels like a punch in the gut.

Soon, the fear of rejection became so deeply ingrained in me, I designed a whole life to completely protect myself from rejection.

It’s like the analogy Michael Singer shares in his book, The Untethered Soul:

 If you get pricked by a thorn, and that thorn is now stuck deep in your foot, you have two options –

You can either design your whole life to shield your foot from anything that might even accidentally touch that thorn and ignite sharp pain.

OR
You can be brave and pull out that thorn so that it no longer triggers you. 

For years, I chose Option One.
 I only ever tried things where there was a high probability of success.
 If there was even a remote possibility of getting No as an answer, I would not ask.
 And I bent over backwards trying to be as “perfect” as I could be so I would never experience rejection.
Until, I realized that was a painful way to live.

Years later, when I finally learned how to live more consciously, I decided it was time to pick Option Two – it was time to pull out the damn thorn!

Because if I continued to live my life afraid of rejection by others, what I am really doing is

 Rejecting myself.

 Rejecting the life that could be mine.

 Rejecting endless possibilities for my growth and evolution.

And so I started to treat asking for things like a Great Experiment, thinking…

If people say yes, great!

If they say No, I’ll treat it like one other data point, and without personalizing the outcome, I’d simply ask – what worked here, what didn’t work, and how I could try this differently next time.

 That is how I founded Shenomics, and enlisted one Fortune 500 organization after another as clients.
 That is how I started putting myself out there on LinkedIn, bracing rejection with each post, and eventually became a LinkedIn Top Voice.
 That is how I started reaching out to many celebrity Mentors, asking for guidance, and received the generosity of their time and wisdom.

So now, let me ask you – what are the possibilities awaiting you if you could simply pull out that thorn in your foot?