I'm Rejected, I Think

Yesterday I was sitting at home, listening to my wife, Sheila, who is a clinical psychologist working on her doctoral dissertation. She was talking about various things and mentioned 'Rejection Sensitivity'. I immediately started to pay a little more attention and thought that it had a lot of relevance for corporate interactions as well.

How do we act when we sense we are rejected – rejected by a group of people, rejected at the office? It may or may not be true. It could be that we are just hypersensitive to the people around us. And that's what rejection sensitivity is – to be overly sensitive to rejection. The whole idea is that it's something that is not really happening, but it's a perception that we have because of various ways in which we have been exposed to things during our childhood, our upbringing and so on. It has to do with nurture more than anything else. Rejection sensitivity could play a part in the way we interact with people in our office spaces as well.

Ditch That Negativity

I came across a quote by Shannon Alder that set me thinking. "Relationships with negative people are simply tedious encounters with porcupines. You don't have the remote knowledge how to be close to them without quills being shot in your direction." That's a statement that I read and re-read and then thought, "Wow! You really need to be careful if that is how negativity works itself out that people begin to be wary of you. Unconsciously you are poking people or pushing them away from you because of a negative attitude."

It begged the question – Am I negative? Am I a negative person who has quills out and whom people would avoid? As I talk to you, I can maybe ask the question – Are you? Sometimes we can allow our environment to create who we are, to make us into who we are if we are not careful, if we are not really secure in the kind of people we are or we are prone to having other things shape and mold us. Either that, or we've always been a negative person and then, we might be able to know it. But sometimes if it's the environment or maybe the workplace that has shaped you, then it's something that has happened subtly.  It hasn't happened overnight but over a period of time. It could be that you've had people in your team who've been prone to be heavy spenders, who buck the budget every time and you have to rein them in. so, every time they come up with a huge idea, you've had to be the one who had to pull it down and bring it back to a place where you can deal with it. Or maybe you just have people who love to ideate on your team and you felt the need to be ale to be pragmatic, to be able to say "Okay, how can this happen?" rather than let something just get too airy out there.