Dating in your main character energy means more access to everything you want. More connection. More aliveness. More of the good stuff.

It also means more rejection.

BOO.

I hate that, and it’s true.

But here’s the thing– Rejection doesn’t have to mean anything about you. It’s a filter, getting the wrong people out of the way.

Both/and– that doesn’t make it any less painful. Especially for folks who’ve never been in a relationship (or never been in a good one), fear of rejection is LOUD. It’s is one of the top forces that I see stopping people from going after what they want.

I don’t want the fear of rejection to stop you from shooting your shot a moment longer.

So this week’s episode of The Feminist Dating Show is my rejection resilience guide. Something you can use right away, the next time you take a courageous swing and it doesn’t land. You’ll walk away with a plan to have your own back, depersonalize rejection, and keep going after what you want successfully.

Here’s what’s inside episode 267:

✨ Why we fear rejection like death (literally, biologically)

✨ The SOFT protocol: a framework to move through rejection without making it mean something about you

✨ Fierce self-compassion vs. tender self-compassion and when you need each one

✨ How to build reframes and new beliefs that actually feel true, not like toxic positivity

Work with Lily:

Read Lily’s book: Thank You, More Please

Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@datebrazen

Follow on TikTok: tiktok.com/@datebrazen

Follow on Instagram: instagram.com/datebrazen

Explore programs + resources: datebrazen.com

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Show transcript:

Lily @ Date Brazen (00:00)

Hey gorgeous friends, welcome to another episode of the Feminist Dating Show. I’m so glad that you’re here. So I have been coaching my clients in main character dating a lot on their rejection resilience plan. And we’ve been talking about it so much that I thought that y’all on the podcast might want to hear it too. I have done a couple of episodes on rejection resilience, episode 244, getting over the fear of rejection.

Episode 122, How to Feel Your Feelings When Rejected. And now I want to come at you with the quickest hitting, actionable as hell guide to creating a rejection resilience plan that I want you to put on your phone as you’re listening to this episode.

The point here is for you to live more in your main character energy, not only in dating, but everywhere. And what happens when you start living more in your main character energy is that you have more access to the things that you want in this one wild and precious life, in the words of Mary Oliver. It also means that you will experience more rejection or more

hurt or more hard moments because you are increasing your access to all of life, right? So I know that I like a plan. I know that when I fear the worst case scenario happening, which happens a lot because I struggle with anxiety, it helps me to have a plan to mitigate that fear and helps me to, when I’m looking at doing something nerve wracking or scary even, that is for my benefit.

right, that is for my desires, then I wanna have a plan, an if this, then that plan, to support me whether it goes really well or it doesn’t really go well.

The rejection resilience plan is super simple and it is going to help you become unstoppable in your dating life. Because if you didn’t fear rejection, what would you do? Who would you approach? What would you say? How would you shoot your shot? So much of feeling stuck is about the fear of rejection. And we fear rejection like we fear death. It’s really normal, right? Because our human bodies remember when we were living in caves and…

being rejected literally meant being put out of the cave and dying from exposure. It makes a lot of sense why you fear rejection. Our bodies remember that. Also socially, we want to belong. And especially if you feel like a late bloomer or you feel too late in any regard, that a dating rejection can feel like further confirmation that you are not enough, that you are too much, or that you…

aren’t desirable in some way, that rejection can feel quite heavy, You don’t want another rejection to sort of like add to the pile of rejections because those rejections in your mindset might mean something about you. A rejection resilience plan is about really neutralizing the experience of rejection.

Rejection is a filter. As cliche as it sounds, the wrong people see themselves out and the right people stick around. And rejection has so much to do with that person’s wants, needs, being, like the way they interact with the world. It doesn’t really have anything to do with you, your personhood, your worthiness.

There are so many people in the world, and if we’re talking about dating rejection, you will experience dating rejection if you’re putting yourself out there intentionally. But the trick is it doesn’t have to take you out because it doesn’t have to mean anything about you.

Dating and finding love is about putting yourself out there and being courageous in the face of opportunity. And you will struggle to be courageous in the face of opportunity or even to put yourself out there if the fear of rejection is paralyzing you from taking action. And so that’s why I wanted to help you build a rejection resilience plan today

So here’s what I want you to put on your Rejection Resilience Plan. I want you to have it on your phone, on your Notes app. I want you to pin it to the top so that you have it. I want you to put a pretty little emoji, maybe a diamond emoji or like a sparkle emoji or whatever. Put something ⁓ sparkly and colorful that you will like looking at in front of and after saying Rejection Resilience Plan. I’m gonna get really tactical with you because I know that this works. So put a Rejection Resilience Plan in your Notes app. Have it open right now if you are not driving.

If you are driving, just wait until a little bit later. Okay, here’s what I want you to put on the rejection resilience plan. Number one, step number one, what thoughts is my brain going to, serve up to me after experiencing rejection? So part of why rejection resilience feels so hard to build is that y’all are treating your thoughts as facts and you’re avoiding the experience of rejection to avoid having hard thoughts about yourself.

But here’s the deal, thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are emotional interpretations of the world around you. They’re sentences in your brain and you have previously learned to survive and protect yourself from the experience of rejection by practicing the thought, it’s not gonna work out, so why try? By practicing the thought, means that you are not enough or you are not desirable and why would anybody wanna be with you, right? You’re practicing survival thoughts.

from middle school or even earlier than that probably starting then to protect you from rejection. That your brain doesn’t wanna be rejected. You don’t wanna be rejected. That just makes sense, right? So your brain’s gonna serve up. It’s like, sort of imagine that you have a castle and you’ve set up all these barricades You’ve set up all these like booby traps into coming around rightly. These survival thoughts are these booby traps coming up to try to protect you.

from vulnerability. But right now with this rejection resilience plan, we are leveling up your emotional maturity skills. We’re leveling up your preparedness to be courageous by preparing for your brain to have really hard human thoughts about you. Let’s not be surprised by the hard as hell thoughts that your brain is going to serve up after an experience of rejection. So think back to a rejection. Maybe you won’t have to think back very far, right? Rejection happens to us all, it sucks.

here are the thoughts that my brain probably will serve up, right? For a lot of my clients, body image stuff comes up, like old, hard and unkind thoughts about your body will come up. nobody would wanna be with me because, maybe thoughts like, I am too much. I do ask for too much. Nobody does want to be with me. Maybe thoughts like, I am broken. I am gonna die alone.

want you to be unsurprised or less surprised that your brain is a human brain next time you experience rejection after being courageous. Put these thoughts down, right? Step one, acknowledge the thoughts that your brain is gonna have about you. Step two, we’re gonna start an SOFT protocol and we’re gonna write down each of these steps as step two, three, four, five. ⁓ SOFT, I’ve talked about it before, it stands for

self-compassion, owning your needs, feeling your feelings, thoughts, facts. It’s my self-coaching acronym to help you move through any hard experience and to help you build a new neural pathway by the end. Thoughts, not facts is where we end up, where we build a new neural pathway. Notice we’re not starting with, what’s a new thought you can practice right now about you that is the opposite of the hard negative thought? We’re not gonna start there because that’s toxic positivity.

Plan for your brain to kind of be an asshole to you in order to be safe. It’s those booby traps popping up around the castle. And then,

Instead of jumping to the aggressive opposite, which is just a seesaw, right? On one side of the seesaw you have, fuck, nothing is ever gonna work out for me, whatever the default hard thought is. On the other side you have the toxic positivity, yes it is, I am okay, it’s gonna be okay, get over it, right? We don’t need that here. We don’t need that seesaw brain. Step off the seesaw brain with the next step, which is S, self-compassion. Step one, write down all the thoughts your brain’s gonna serve up, be unsurprised by your human brain. Step two, self-compassion.

Self-compassion is a necessary step here. Y’all are probably sick of hearing me talk about self-compassion. We are six years into this podcast, and I am sure I’ve mentioned this phrase so many times. Let me tell you the tactical implications of self-compassion. In a 2014 study out of Stanford, found that self-compassion, a practice of self-compassion, which is not just a one and done, it’s a practice, imperfect practice.

reduces cortisol and increases resilience. Let me just pull back the curtain a little bit. I started recording. I’ve been doing this for six years. I was stumbling over my words. was like, I’m talking about five minutes ago. Stumbling over my words, I was feeling

like nervous, what am I gonna say? I don’t like how I said that just then. I got very self-blamey. Lily, the thoughts in my brain were like, ⁓ you’re not good at this. This is not going well. You’re not gonna get this done, right? So I was in a way rejecting myself. My brain was trying to protect me from the vulnerability of doing something vulnerable. Doing something vulnerable is vulnerable.

my brain was trying to protect me by having these like survival thoughts. And then those thoughts sparked me to have a feeling of anxiety, a feeling of fear, a feeling of like sadness, I guess, but of shame also. You’re bad. You’re bad at this. That thought was creating the feeling of shame because our thoughts spark our feelings, right? So I tried to push ahead. Like there were like three drafts of this podcast episode that I just straight up deleted.

after three minutes of stumbling over my words. And then I realized like, oh, Lily, like do your shit, do your tools. So I like put my hand on my heart. I recognized the thoughts in my head were not helping, were not serving me. They were not the truth. They were just trying to protect me. I put a hand on my heart. I took a deep breath. I practiced self-compassion. That sounded like, and it can sound like for you after a moment of rejecting yourself or a moment of being rejected can sound like.

Hey, yeah, this is really vulnerable and hard. Of course you are struggling. It makes sense. It makes sense. This is just one moment and it’s a human thing to ⁓ feel this way. You’re putting yourself out there. How courageous of you, right? Tender self-compassion is this practice and there are three components. ⁓ Kindness, which is, hey, I’m right here with you.

Mindfulness over over identification, which means don’t over identify with your thoughts as facts. Say, hey, I’m having a lot of human thoughts about this and belonging over isolation. You’re not alone, right? Those three tenants were defined by Dr. Kristin Neff. The other piece that I want to integrate that I haven’t talked about very much, but I’m really pumped about, and it’s really helping my clients as well, is that practice of fierce self-compassion. So when you’re putting this in your step two of your rejection, resilience, plan of self-compassion, you have tender self-compassion, have fear of self-compassion. Fear of self-compassion is mama bear energy.

like fierce lioness energy. Like, and I’m gonna record this podcast episode, right, for my example. And it’s gonna be great, no matter what happens, it’s gonna be great. It doesn’t have to be perfect, right? Perfectionism was creeping up in my brain ⁓ as it’s want to do. And that was the practice, using self-compassion was the practice of reducing my cortisol and increasing resilience to come connect with you. The point is connection here.

And sometimes when I’m alone in my room, looking at my camera and staring at my microphone, ⁓ I can feel really vulnerable and lose sight of the ultimate why and get caught up in the fear. The ultimate why of you dating is to connect, to live your main character energy and to connect with the right people. And you’re going to have to practice self-compassion in your rejection resilience plan and always to reduce cortisol and increase resilience. Fear self-compassion says, and we’re gonna do it. Let’s go.

We can do this. I’m right here with you. ⁓ step three, ⁓ own your needs, okay? So using rejection resilience in a dating context as an example, if you experience rejection, owning your needs, this is planning ahead. I might have the need of leaving the bar or the coffee shop or the speed dating event, whatever. I might have to leave and I have full permission to leave. Owning your needs might be like calling a friend, sending up what I call a bat signal of like texting them, hey, I really need you. Are you around for a phone call?

It might look like if you’re in a coaching container like main character dating, asking for coaching ⁓ to get even more support. It might look like laying down on the floor, jumping up and down and thrashing around a little bit. It might mean like throwing a temper tantrum by yourself a little bit of like, I this to go differently. Like you might have the need to physicalize your emotions, to scream into a pillow or to stomp your feet or to cry.

Owning your needs means saying, I’m a human animal and I have needs, let me own them. And you can create in this rejection resilience plan, a notes app of ideas. I can walk around the block, I can go on a jog, I can do a little yoga flow, I can lay on the floor on my back with a hand on my heart to support myself. Owning your needs means being more compassionate towards yourself in being human and giving yourself permission to give yourself what you need after a hard human experience.

F, feel your feelings. This is step four, right? Notice where the feeling is in your body after you’re rejected. Is it shame? Is it in your belly? And what is the shape, texture, color of it? Is it anxiety? And maybe it feels like a tight rope in your chest, like a big like anxious.

like stretching that is in your chest.

taking a deep breath and noticing after this rejection, right? This is maybe an hour after or a day after, noticing where the feeling is in your body. And instead of running away from it and saying like, oh, don’t want to feel that way, don’t want to feel that way, not gonna feel, it’s hard to feel hard feelings. Just like it’s really good to feel good feelings. But all of them are a part of the spectrum of your human experience. And the more you give yourself permission to feel your way through these feelings without making them mean that you’re wrong.

or too high maintenance, the more you will move through that emotion and not get stuck there. People fear, I’m gonna get stuck in the feeling and live there and be there forever and it’s gonna be a black hole of feelings and I’m never gonna get out of it. No, no, no, no. Feelings are like tunnels. Nagoski sisters in their book, Burnout, talked about feelings are like tunnels. We feel our way through them to get to the light at the end. Just like, remember when you were a kid, maybe in middle school or elementary school and you’ve experienced rejection.

And I talk about the two teachers a lot. One teacher came over to you and said, what’s wrong? Stood over you. What’s wrong? Tell me. Okay, that’s not a big deal. Why are you crying? Get up, get up, go play, go play. That teacher is denying your emotional experience and creating confusion, creating even more rejection, right? Maybe the teacher has good intentions. Maybe the teacher wants the kid to feel okay and go play.

That’s their intention, but the impact is that that child then feels further rejected and like that their feelings are too much. And that’s what you might be unintentionally doing to yourself when you say, get over it, stop feeling this way, right? Instead, I want you to be teacher number two, going up to that little version of yourself or the big version of yourself, whatever and saying, hey, what’s going on? Why are you crying? ⁓ I’m so sorry. Do you wanna hug? Do you wanna talk more about it?

You give a hug to that teacher, the vibe of that hug is I’ll be here as long as you need me to be.

Is there anything else you want to share? And then inevitably that kid is like, no, I hear them playing. I want to go play with another group. Okay. I’ll be right here if you need me to be. If you need me again, I’m right here. Right. That is authentically feeling your way through the feeling, getting to the other side and creating enough, creating the resilience that you need to keep playing, keep putting yourself out there. The feeling of shame, of I’m wrong.

Right, I’m bad, I’m not desirable enough, I’m somehow broken. That thought is a human thought that is not a fact, trying to protect you. The feeling that sparks from that thought might be shame, might be dread, might be hopelessness. And with the feeling your feeling step, step four in this process, you can feel your way through it. Notice where it is in your body, use emotional granularity to name it. I like to use a feelings wheel, calm.com has a code when you can just Google feelings wheel.

Pick a word that feels most resonant with your experience. Maybe you need some practice to look at a feelings wheel and pick the word that you’re experiencing. Notice where it is in your body. Notice the shape, color, texture. This is called emotional granularity, a term coined by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. And she found in her research that the more precise emotion words we have to describe our experience, the more equipped we are to move through that experience. And so that’s what you need here is like knowing where you feel the emotion.

breathing through it, it may rise and get it more intense, but eventually after a minute of doing this, I swear to God, a minute, it will shift and change and maybe even pass. Finally, step number five in the rejection resilience process is thoughts, not facts. So this is where in your notes app, you can plan ahead for what’s gonna happen in a rejection, right? Plan ahead for what your brain’s gonna serve up. Plan ahead for what a self-compassionate sentence or two would sound like.

Plan ahead for what owning your needs might be. Create a menu of options. Planning ahead for what feeling is in my body. What do I do? I notice where it is. I breathe into it. I give it a name with a feelings wheel. I notice is it changing or shifting. I’m sitting next to myself having this feeling without judgment. Moving through it for a minute. Finally, thoughts not facts. What are you going to plan to believe about yourself after moving through this self-compassionate flow? What is a useful and true thought?

that you can plan to practice after an experience of rejection to build the experience of resilience, to have your own back and to be kinder to yourself. This new thought has the power to spark a new emotion, has the power to spark new actions, like putting yourself out there even more, not letting this ⁓ stop you, this moment, this rejection moment stop you. So what is it gonna be? Some sentence starters for thoughts not facts work could be,

It might be true that, fill in the blank, it might be true that this is just a hard moment and my brain is stirring up a lot of hard thoughts about rejection that aren’t true, but they feel true because I’ve practiced them a lot. I’m gonna ride through this experience with me, right? Just sort of neutralizing like this is just a hard human moment. might not be impossible that this is just one person who wasn’t right for me and I am on my path to finding the right person for me.

The right person makes themselves a parent, the wrong person makes themselves a parent. And then I also like the thought like, this is just a moment and my love story is bigger than this one moment.

Period. What thought feels useful and true that you can put in your pocket and practice it? Must feel useful and true. If it feels a little too out of reach, a little too aspirational, then just back it up a little bit with another maybe or another it’s possible that. It’s not impossible that maybe just maybe, right? Make it accessible for your brain to catch onto and then you practice it out loud and often. Accessibility in building new beliefs about yourself to support new feelings and actions and results.

That’s why so much personal development, I think, ⁓ doesn’t feel resonant for people or doesn’t work because it feels inaccessible. It feels like too pie in the sky or too positive. It doesn’t feel true yet. So make it more accessible for yourself. It might be true that this is just a hard human moment and it may not mean anything about me.

It might be true that I am going to breathe through this feeling and it will pass soon. It might be true that maybe just maybe, perhaps this rejection isn’t a personal, doesn’t mean anything about me personally. It might just be that I wasn’t right for this person and that kind of sucks or really sucks. And it may not mean anything about me as a person. They just weren’t the right person for me.

So step one is dump the thoughts. What is your brain gonna serve up? Be unsurprised, be unbothered by your human brain being a human brain. When rejection happens, you can look at those notes up and be like, yeah, there’s that thought. Okay, it sucks, ouch, it feels true, gross, I hate this. Then step two, S, self-compassion. You’re not alone, kindness towards yourself, mindfulness over over identification. Your thoughts are not facts.

O own your needs, S own your needs. What do you need? Write it down. Make a menu of sorts. F feel your feelings. This is where you use emotional granularity to tune in with your body. Where are you feeling that emotion? What is a name for it from a feelings wheel? Is it growing? Is it changing? Be willing to metaphorically sit with yourself through that experience like a younger version of you needed and didn’t get. Right. T thoughts, facts. Really work on a couple of

baby step reframes, teeny tiny reframes that feel useful and true that you might lean upon in a hard moment after rejection. And there you have your rejection resilience plan that I want you to put in your notes app and use rinse repeat as This rejection resilience plan makes you unstoppable in your dating life because rejection is not a deal breaker to finding what you want. It’s just a byproduct of living a more courageous life.

It sucks and it’s not gonna kill you. It sucks and you will be able to move through it more swiftly and not make it mean so much about yourself with this rejection resilience plan. And if you want to start really owning what you want and start going after it.

Because you’ve built this projection resilience plan, I think it’s time to build your essence-based preferences so you can claim what you want and start going after it to become even more unstoppable in your dating life, to start attracting the kind of people that make you come alive across the table. So you can go to datebrazen.com slash workbook to get my free 14 page essence-based preferences guide. Inside this guide, I’m gonna give you so many prompts on claiming the kind of relationship that you want. This will help you be even more unbothered by rejection eventually.

because you will see that the right person chooses you, they make you feel the way you want to feel, that you feel alive in their presence. And the essence-based preferences process will allow you to create your own definition of like what that looks and feels like so that you can have something really clear to share with people about what you’re looking for, so that you can vet people more effectively and quickly, so that you can know whether or not someone’s right or wrong for you with the essence-based preferences framework by using how you feel as a metric.

of whether or not somebody’s right or wrong for you. So go to datebracson.com slash workbook to get your hands on this free 14 page essence-based preferences guide. And also do this rejection resilience plan. Put it in your phone, pin it to the top. I’m serious, it’s really gonna help as you continue to put yourself out there courageously in your dating life. You’ve got this and I’ve got your back. Talk to you next week.