The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 61 - How To Handle ANY Rejection: Dr. Julie Smith

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

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

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. 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

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 kicked out of my tribe

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 a threat of rejection a threat of being expelled from the from the you know from the tribe or whatever um obviously not obviously that is not the truth but deep 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

whatever is difficult. Is that like, that's a lot of words, but does that make any sense? Yeah, because the feeling comes before the rational thoughts about it. So, you know, your body has that reaction before you're able to consider that, you know, this isn't 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 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 you it's about how you then manage it so when those thoughts come along um 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 and is it is it 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. 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, well, I got to the point where I realized 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? Yeah. So, I mean, rejection is difficult for everybody, isn't it? But, but certainly if, 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, 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. So 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 the perfect business owner and the perfect boyfriend and the perfect dad, then no one will reject me and everything will be OK.

And so you set yourself these rules for living that at some point, inevitably, you break or there's signs that you're not gonna 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 when that sort of damaging core belief is being triggered on a regular basis for example maybe because it's a turbulent relationship or whatever the situation is um and that's when you can work not only on the present stuff but on

the core beliefs and and looking at how those are playing out in relationships. 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 like toxic relationship and this belief that relationships were prison I because my 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 like avoidant behavioural pattern where the minute I would pursue someone romantically 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. absolutely and there's there's a really fascinating therapy called cat therapy actually so it's cognitive analytic therapy um just cat for short but that really 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, 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 behaviors and 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 or those safety behaviors continue and they get played out in your adult relationships and 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 literally kind of map out the cycle so that you learn to sort of acknowledge it in hindsight, first of all. So you say, 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,

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 so it's this really kind of long process of sometimes going around the cycle again, and then you get the benefits of that. 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. So, and it's incredible how life-changing that can be for people.