Welcome to the “Inner Circle Podcast”, the place where patriot entrepreneurs create, build, and play. Each episode will help you move forward to the place where we all want to be, a place of total creative freedom, personal freedom, and financial freedom.
My name is Mike Fallat and I am your host. I’ve started a bunch of businesses, helped to write a couple of hundred books, and interviewed lots of millionaires. I will be your guide as we enter the Inner Circle.
Mike: This episode is all about reprogramming rejection response. It came to me one day when I started thinking about what makes people successful and what makes people fail in life, and really what it came down to, I believe, more than anything else, I mean, there's a lot to it, but it's basically how you handle rejection, right?
If someone were to come to you and say, You're wrong, you failed, you're awful, how would you handle it as compared to the Elon Musks or the Jeff Bezos or the people who hit it at the highest level? I guarantee, it’s how they compute or react upon rejection, and that's what this podcast is all about. Let's reprogram your rejection response starting today. [01:54.0]
Now, this idea came to me, guys, while I was on a run. To give you a little backstory, I run this lake near me. It's five miles around and I run it consistently, probably four or five times per week. What I started noticing was how I would interact with individuals. I wasn't going out thinking of this game, but I came across it and it started to work for me, and I realized I could apply this gain during this run to life, to my sales approach, to my dating life, to me being just a human being across every different industry that I'm a part of, whatever it is.
This game I believe is so powerful that you could apply it to your day-to-day life and you're going to notice results right away. The game I'm talking about is what I would see from whenever I would interact with individuals on this run. I noticed, and by the way, I used to listen to music on my runs. Now I listened to Jordan Peterson's speeches, so that has helped me out and it has probably got my mind in this direction. [03:00.2]
But how do you respond or react if you were to say hi to someone and they don't say hi back. What if you did that two times or three times, or four times, and none of these people were saying hi to you? I would assume, and this is kind of a customary approach, that you would probably stop saying hi to other people, because you would say to yourself, What is the point? Nobody's saying hi to me. Nobody cares. What if you gamify this, so you don't care about the response?
It kind of makes me think as well, as I'm talking this out loud here, about Patch Adams. If you've ever watched him in that movie, he does bring up the point of what if you just interact with people on a daily basis and say hi to them? Now, I never really thought about this in that movie, but what if you don't care about the response? Now, in that movie, he did care about the response. He cared about the effect that it would have on individuals. [04:00.4]
Now, that's great. That's fine. That's dandy. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how do you not get affected by someone else? Every day people are feeling rejected and they're feeling down and they're feeling depressed based off interactions they have with people they probably don't even know. They don't even know these people.
I know from my own standpoint, when I was running this lake—I still do it by the way, this is not like I did it and I'm done. I do this now pretty frequently—when I first started off, I wouldn't be running three, four, five miles in and I’d pass a lot of people without saying hi. When I started to think about why I wasn't doing it, I was thinking, I don't want to talk with them. I don't interact. I just want to stay in my own zone. What if this run could really do great things for me mentally, for me as a human being? All right, let me start saying hi to people because I need to just kind of use this time to be somewhat social. [05:03.8]
I know I realize a couple of different things that's happening in that and that's a pretty long talk when it comes to Jordan Peterson information, but what if I just try to be of service, right? I'm just trying to be a nice guy, being somewhat social, so I'm not in my own world the whole time.
But as I was going on these runs, I would notice that I would say hi to three, four, five people. Nobody would say hi back. I don't know what this does to you, but the average person is going to feel rejected. You're automatically going to say to yourself, What the hell is the point? I'm not going to say hi to the sixth person or the seventh because it's not working. But what if you fight through that? Okay. What if you get over that?
Let's just think about it in the sales world. You’d probably get affected emotionally if you get rejected five times in a row. Am I right? This rejection could not just take in the form of a hi, but it could be of a sale. It could be of you asking for a raise. It could be you trying to get that job. [06:05.5]
Rejection beats you down in life, and then whenever you get rejected a lot, you stop doing what you do best. You stop acting a certain way. You stop being normal because you start to morph into what the universe is or what society is turning you into and that could be turning you into a pretty disagreeable person, a pretty quiet person, someone who actually pays attention to what other people are saying about them and just plays the game quietly and away from the public eye.
So, I gamified this. I started going around, okay, and I would say hi to everybody that I met. I would smile and I would wave and I would say hi. Smiling. There's a couple of things I want to get into on this podcast, but I started to notice if I'm aware of my emotional state, when it comes to rejection, I could morph it into a positive. [07:11.2]
I could let it run right off my back. I could let it not bother me at all. “Hi, how you doing? How's it going?” Kept waving and kept waving. Nobody was saying anything. I wasn't caring about the response from them. I was focusing on me being me. I didn't care about the response. I led with good intention. I was doing something that's completely harmless. A lot of people ignore me. Some people said hi back. Some people smiled. Some people were caught off guard.
But here's the thing. I realized that if you are not attached to the result, then you just do you. You are just being yourself and that's what allows you to win. That's what allows you to go from interaction to interaction without any change in demeanor. [08:07.7]
I keep thinking about all these successful people that I meet. They go from failure to failure to failure to failure. They go from a bad interaction to bad interaction to bad interaction, without any change of demeanor, without any change of mood, and that's rare.
When you say start going around, just think about this today, guys, start going out and just saying hi to people and don't give a shit. Do not give a shit if they say hi back. Don't be affected. Just stay in your lane. Stay in the same mood. Can you go from failure to failure, from bad interaction to bad interaction, no hi, no hi, no hi, and not change your mood?
I promise you, guys, if you're just starting off, this is a lot harder than it seems. It's a lot more difficult to go from being ignored to another conversation where you're ignored to another conversation where you're ignored than it is … [09:08.7]
It doesn't sound that hard, but it is, because emotionally you want to be liked. You want to be praised. You want to be thought of like, Oh, this person reciprocates. Forget about reciprocation. It doesn't exist. The only thing you can control is you and that's better than you controlling them, because as Jordan Peterson says, it's better for you to be in control of you than you to be in control of the world, because there is a hell of a lot more you could do about you than you can do of the world.
So, it's almost a good thing to realize, Hey, how I respond here is not just about this one interaction. It's about me. If I feel down over not being reciprocated or appreciated, or even said hi back, fuck, I'm going to be in bad shape in this world. [10:13.7]
I'm going to let the world beat me down whenever I expect something and it doesn't happen the way it should. Over time, I would start to do this and you will. What’s funny is that you become more, I guess you could say fluid-like, you become more comfortable without being praised or said hi back, or acknowledged. Maybe that's it. You become more comfortable without being acknowledged. That gives you a freaking advantage in life. This is going to give you absolute power.
I started doing it and I started noticing more people started saying hi back and it felt good. It felt good, but it never felt bad. I mean, let me repeat that. The dopamine in my brain probably started to go up when people would respond, because I knew what I was doing. [11:04.3]
First off, nobody says high on these runs. By the way, when I started doing it, I started noticing other people doing it. Maybe I'd see them again or a couple of weeks later or whatever, but I don't know what it was, I started noticing maybe a different feeling. Maybe I started expecting a hi, hey, a hi back. Before I was expecting a rejection. Now I was expecting hi, and when it didn't happen, it didn't bother me. It's just that I was starting to notice a trend in my own abilities. That's powerful.
Man, I don't think if you guys see what you could do with this ability in sales and business, with your team, with every social interaction, your emotional state cannot be fucked with. The magic of this skill set is because it’s causing you to become unfuckable with. If you could do you, if you could lead with intention, if you could just be yourself, and nobody can fuck with your emotions, you're unstoppable. Rejection, even in the smallest form, will destroy people. [12:17.4]
Let me bring this up here, guys. There’s a couple of studies that I want to really highlight here. It says rejection doesn't happen to come from family or even people to do harm, okay. These are strangers. There are so many people out there that are being affected by rejection from people they don't even know online, in person, whatever. How is this possible? It's because human beings on average are really good people and you don't want to be ignored. You don't want to be pushed to the side. You don't want to be putting yourself out there and then someone not reciprocating it. It hurts. Okay. Nor does it have to be a particular overt event. In an insidious form, it lurks woven into the very fabric of society. [13:03.8]
This is an interview with a psychologist, Jerome Kagan, and this person is a pioneer in the development of children and personal studies. He said the best predictor today in Europe and North America of who will be depressed is not a gene and is not a measure of your brain. It's whether you're poor. Kagan’s statement echoes something researchers have long known. The poor have poor health. It’s an argument that makes intuitive sense.
Poverty, after all, entails a host of risk factors, child maltreatment, drug abuse, crime, unemployment, bad nutrition, inadequate health care that have been linked to various physical and mental illnesses. Okay? Poor usually comes from a lot of rejection. [14:00.20]
Let me say that again. Poor will come from a lot of rejection. Maybe people tried to get a job. It didn't work out. They gave up. They stopped going after it because of all the rejection, which led to more maybe it's not just their income level, but poor mindset, because rejection stops you from trying anymore. The emotional state will keep you in a certain spot.
Now, this is not for everybody because there are a lot of people born in a really bad situation that just have no way out, people in communist countries and all that. Unless you escape, it’s tough. Mounting evidence over the past two decades has established a low socioeconomic status as a key predictor of early mortality and poor health, including cardiovascular diseases, arthritis, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, cervical cancer, schizophrenia, substance, and anxiety.
Let me bring this down to you guys. Rejection leads to not only bad income levels, but it also leads to bad health. It’s the comprehension that how you respond to rejection will force you into a lower economic bracket and it also leads to poor health, probably because of many different reasons, but if there's any correlation, that's a fucking red flag. [15:17.5]
You have to reprogram how you respond to you rejection. Otherwise, you are not going to make a lot of money and your health is going to be a fucking mess.
If you like what you hear and you are a patriot entrepreneur, go to Mike’sInnerCircle.com. Remember, you are only as strong as your circle. We'll see you there.
Rejection here. Let's go back into this. The psychologists, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith of Brigham Young University in Utah looked at 70 studies that collectively found more than 3 million older adults for an average of seven years—this is really amazing stuff—the researchers found that social isolation increased a subject's likelihood of being dead at the end of the study by 29 percent. [16:14.5]
Okay, so those who get rejected more and comprehended in a certain way, number one, make less money. Number two, their health goes into bad shape. Number three, they die earlier. This result held true even when the researchers accounted for the participants’ initial health status. Other studies have linked social isolation to coronary heart disease, stroke, dementia, Alzheimer's, some of the leading causes of death and disability in the world today.
How you compute rejection will destroy you or create you. If you want to reprogram your body to be unaffected by rejection, you start with the little stuff that you can control. You need to start reprogramming yourself to be unaffected by rejection. [17:07.4]
Okay, I want to preface this, guys. This says this does not fall back on your moral … Just to touch base on this, I want you to know that rejection could be a sign of bad things, but it's not always. Okay? Being rejected from saying hi and being a bad person are completely different. It does come back to your moral compass. You can't be a piece of shit. You can't lead with bad intentions. The goal is to always lead with good intentions. Okay? You need to be leading with your foot forward. You need to be a good person, because obviously society is going to reject you if you're an awful, evil person. That makes sense. But rejection doesn't really mean that you're doing something bad. Rejection can be computed in a different way. [18:04.0]
If you say hi to someone, if you ask a person out, if you ask for the sale, it doesn't mean you're doing anything bad. What it does mean is that potentially you're not getting the results. That's it. And if you change the game in your mind that you are going to win by changing what a win is to you, now you have something that you can build upon.
Okay, what if you changed the game? What if you are only happy? What if you attach happiness to you being courageous enough to do something? You asking for the sale and only being happy if you get the sale is a bad way to look at life. Now, obviously you become happier. Once you get the sale, you make more money. You move the needle forward towards your goals. Yes, there's that, but you can't let it defeat you. Your ability to comprehend total failure and your emotional state, and being able to turn a loss into a win, this is what's going to separate you. [19:14.7]
If you change the game, if you reprogram your mind into being able to handle rejection, not let it get to you, you're going to win this thing. You're going to win in the long run. You're going to play this game at the highest level. I used to tell people all the time, “Are you in a shell right now?” start going out and just talking to random strangers. Are you really shy of society? Go talk to random strangers. Remember, you're not trying to get anything from them. Get out of this shell of yours. Break away from the goal-oriented mind of “I need to get something from these people.” You're not going to get shit. You're going to do it because you just want to do it, and if you could communicate with people and not expect anything in return, you're going to become way more natural in society. [20:04.5]
Something is going to click in you and you're going to say to yourself, I don't care if I get anything. This is for me. I want to go through life without being affected by random strangers. Could you imagine if you wake up today and then a random stranger can affect your mood? Could it change the course of your life? What the fuck is wrong with you? Don't let that happen.
You need to change your mind, so these people you do not look up to, you don't even know, you don't even respect, they have no bearing in your life. You're going to keep doing you. You're going to keep living. You're going to keep saying hi. Twenty people don't say hi back, 20 people don't acknowledge you, 20 people ignore you, to hell with them. You’ve got to keep doing you. This is how you separate yourself from the pack. Don't let other people's misery drag you down. [21:05.1]
I've interviewed many millionaires. They get shit on all the time. They get kicked around. They don't let other people's misery drag them down. They don't let other people's emotions drag them down. They keep doing what they do best. They win. They win with a smile on their face. They keep being positive. They keep playing their game. They keep saying hi. They keep winning. They keep asking for the sale. No matter what, they keep running and their emotional state doesn't get affected. It's truly amazing.
Gamify your ability to let life not affect you on a day-to-day basis. Be very wary of whenever you start to feel emotions start to sink. What's causing that? You can't control someone else’s actions. You can't. You can't control what they say. You can't control what they do. You can't control what they look like. You can't control them, the outside world, nothing, nada. You can control you and your response, your response to rejection, your response to negativity, your response to misery. You can control this. [22:18.0]
There's one other piece of this, guys, that will help you, I think, in your journey and what I want to talk about here is your ability to change them, your ability to affect them. Your rejection response is huge, how you respond, but what if you can look back at rejection and smile? What if you can keep going with a smile on your face? Now, do you know the power in that? Oh, my God. Do you know if someone were to say no to you, “I don't want your product. I don't want your service. I don't want you,” and you could look at them and smile? Oh-ho. [23:00.0]
Okay, now this is something that's really cool, guys. The power of your smile. There's power in it. It's real. We're doing a book for a dentist right now. I started doing all kinds of research on the power of your smile, how much you can affect your surroundings.
Let’s just get this straight here. If you could control your rejection response and you could actually turn it into fuel, and maybe spin it and then maybe make it a positive, and you could do something as small as smile back, you can change your environment and that environment may elevate and become more like you, and you can start to get the world that you want. You could get the responses that you want. Maybe not at the beginning, but eventually.
Okay, so let me just touch on a couple of facts about your smile. Now, I want you to go back to that story, me running around the lake saying hi, smiling. A lot of people would smile back. Okay, not everybody, of course. Maybe not a lot, but some that smile, okay? People would smile back. People start to say hi. I was rare. [24:00.5]
Not many people were saying hi. Not many people were smiling. This is a run around the lake. People are keeping them themselves. This is 2021. There are a lot of people who still think that this crazy pandemic has isolated everybody. It did and a lot of people just live in their own world. People are wearing masks sometimes. You cover up your smile, you're going to be fucked. You are going to be fucked in life. That smile is a powerful asset.
A couple of facts for you guys. Your smile can elevate your mood. Psychology explains that even if you have to force a smile, the very act of turning your lips upward can trick your brain into releasing certain feel-good hormones, including dopamine and serotonin. As a result, your stress levels go down. Your immune system gets a little bit of a boost and your overall mood improves. Researchers have been discovering that a smile can even lower your heart rate when you're feeling anxious. The next time you're nervous, tense, just downright grubby, please start to smile. Watch what happens. Okay? [25:07.8]
Another cool little fact here. It's the first thing people notice, your smile. Listen to this. According to a study by the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, nearly half of Americans believe that a person's smile is their most memorable feature. In fact, 48 percent of people will remember your smile. Only 25 percent will remember the first thing you said. So, you’re telling me that a smile is more memorable than the words that come out of your mouth? Do you realize you can use that to your advantage in every shape and form? It's amazing.
How about your sound in your voice? Now, I'm smiling right now. Can you tell? I want you to know this because this works. Hey, guys, even when you're just making a casual call to a friend or a client or whatever, try smiling as you speak. Researchers show that listeners can actually hear a smile over the phone and it makes them smile. [26:09.4]
Now, I don't know if you guys get this and I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about this, but if I could change someone's mood through a freaking facial expression over a phone that they can’t see, you're going to be able to change their life. Now think about that run around the lake. If you're smiling and you say hi and it sounds, so now there's the visual representation, but then there's the audio representation of positivity about happiness, your mood now can affect them.
Smiling can help you live longer. Did you know that laughing and smiling can strengthen your immune system, like I said before? People who smile more live longer. Remember what I said about rejection? The people who take it to heart and can't really comprehend it the right way, they die earlier. [26:09.4]
What if your rejection response is an automatic smile? And if you can create that over and over and over, you can live longer. Your quality of life goes up, but your quantity in life goes up. It can lower your blood pressure, guys. Your body releases cortisol and endorphins, and when you smile, it will lower your blood pressure and relax your heart rate.
A smile can reduce pain. There's one reason we tend to grimace when we're in the throes of intense pain. Scientists believe a forced smile can even alleviate discomfort. They’ve found that those who smiled reported up to 40 percent less pain than those who didn't. [27:53.6]
A smile is contagious, guys. You didn’t even think about this. Like a sneeze, smiling around someone can encourage them to do the same. In one study, scientists show participants pictures of faces expressing several different emotions, including joy, fear, anger, and surprise. They also show people smiling and with a super happy face. Then they ask each participant to frown as they look at each picture. When shown the smiling face, they had a hard time not smiling back.
Let's go back to that lake, guys. It gets harder to reject you, it gets harder to say no when you're smiling. Do you realize how much power you have when you're in your smile? If rejection comes into your life and you don't comprehend it the right way, you're not going to smile. What's that going to do? It's going to put out an emotion or an energy that's going to not lift up the people around you. It's going to put them in a down state or keep them right where they're at. [29:13.3]
If you smile, if you reject response, no matter what comes your way, this is all about comprehending in a way that it doesn't affect you negatively, you can always keep smiling. Even if it's a fake smile, it'll eventually become a muscle that gets stronger and stronger and stronger. I think there are 19 muscles, I don't know exactly, but that are required to be moved to smile. If you strengthen those muscles to smile easier, you're going to make it harder on your environment to be negative. You’ve got to bring up the people around you. Your smile can change your environment. It's contagious.
Now, here's another cool thing. Did you know that the average kid smiles 400 times per day? The average adult smiles only 20. There are people out there who say that they are happier around kids. Now, I want you to know that I don't know if there's any research out here, there probably is, but in my mind I'm just connecting two dots. [30:12.7]
If kids are smiling more, and there are the grandparents and the kids and all this, they get around the kids and the kids are smiling more. It's going to make the adults and the grandparents, and the parents and the friends and all that smile more. This is what makes people around kids probably feel more youthful, because they're smiling more. The kids are actually increasing the emotions of those around them because of the power of the smile.
A kid could feel rejection over and over and over and over and over, which they do, but it doesn't beat them down. Their smile can affect a person and eventually probably wear on them and bring them up. The key is to be very wary, guys, of who's affecting your mood. [31:00.2]
You can reprogram your brain. You can reprogram it on such a low level that it becomes such a habitual piece and it's a right-side part of your brain, they say, if it's something that takes a little bit of work to get good at, over time, it becomes part of your core habits, your DNA. I think that's considered deep in the core of your right side of your brain.
Eventually all that automated response is transferred over to your left side of your brain, where it's just automatic. This automatic response of being able to handle rejection and smile back eventually changes your environment, eventually starts to get the results that you want, eventually puts you in a better mood, so you now are expecting the win.
You're not expecting people to ignore you, and your brain and your muscles and all this, and all your strength and all this incredible backbone and all this, now you're not being brought down by the people around you. You're unaffected. It’s how you respond. [32:01.2]
Start saying hi a lot more. Start smiling a lot more. Start being very, very, very attentive to what affects you on a day-to-day basis. Who's affecting you? Who are you listening to? People, I'm assuming, that you don't even look up to, are affecting your life.
I'm assuming probably people you don't even know, probably just an emoji person on Instagram, someone who is leaving a comment that you've never even met in person who probably doesn't even have a bio picture. How about those assholes? People who don't even have a bio picture. You don't even know what they look like. They're leaving comments on your wall and you're getting affected by it.
Don't let this shit happen. Reprogram your rejection response and, God … I was going to say some swear word with that, but God bless America. You will be a whole different person. You could do this starting today when you go for a run, and I'm telling you, your life is going to be different. The Inner Circle is full of people who refuse to let outside influence destroy them. [33:13.6]
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