crookedmouth

I don’t know of too many people who love being
rejected. Even the top sales people in any given
industry have simply learned to not fear rejection, but
that’s far from liking it. A psychologist at the University
of Buffalo has discovered that some people tip toe
through life, expecting that others will reject them
because of how they look. This is what psychologist
Lora Park, the assistant professor in the Department of
Psychology calls Appearance-based Rejection
Sensitivity.

Dr. Parks worked with 242 college students in her study
that was designed to measure just how much of an
expectation the students had of being rejected by
others, based on their appearance. Parks research
demonstrated that when someone’s anxiety is born out
of their fear of being rejected, based upon their
physical appearance, it can be detrimental to their
mental and emotional health. The study revealed that
those who exhibited the most sensitivity to being
rejected based on their appearance, were much more
likely to be insecure, have low self-esteem, and to build
their self worth on the foundation of their appearance.
Not too surprisingly, they were also more inclined to
rate themselves as being unattractive.

The findings of Dr. Parks indicated that there are
different routes that people use to initiate and then
maintain such behaviors as compulsive gambling,
dieting, and exercising. It looks as though some people
behave as they do because of their fear of being
rejected unless they look a certain way. There was
another group however, that appeared to have a
different motivation; they were less concerned with what
others might think of their appearance, and instead
were interested in how their appearance made them
feel.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this study occurred
when after having the participants write a report on the
things the disliked about themselves, Dr. Parks asked
the participants to do one of three tasks. One group
was asked to write a list of their greatest strengths. The
next group was asked to write the initials of someone
they had a close relationship with. Finally, yet another
group was asked to make a neutral list of objects they
saw in the room.

The results were as follows:

Both The group that was asked to write a list of their
strengths, and the group that wrote the initials of
someone they had a close relationship with were
successful in neutralizing the impact of the initial list of
things they disliked about themselves. Those who
simply wrote down the list of objects in the room
however, still suffered the consequences of the initial
list on their self –esteem.

This study only confirmed something that the
enlightened ones among us have known for centuries;
whatever you focus on increases. In the movie “Shallow
Hal” comedian Jack Black meets his friend, played by
Seinfeld co-star, Jason Alexander, at the park one
afternoon. While they were talking, a gorgeous young
lady looking as though she had just stepped off a page
in the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog approached
Alexander’s character and asked him to go to a
concert. As he looked down her long beautiful legs, he
suddenly had a look of horror and disgust come over
him; he had noticed that her second toe was longer
than her big toe, something that he obviously viewed as
a human defect.

From that point on, he was ignoring the beauty of her
face, her lean body, her flowing locks; he was ignoring
99.9 % of this woman, and by focusing solely on a very
minuscule portion of the woman before him, amplified it
to the point of having it engulf his entire experience.

What could you be choosing to focus on that would
allow you to feel an even stronger sense of self-
esteem? What are your strengths? Could you take
some time to take inventory of what those strengths
are, getting them all out in front of you at once?

Do you need more evidence of how significant this is to
your experience of life? When you think about the total
surface area of your body, something that would take
up the space of a piece of thread ¼ of an inch long is
almost laughable. How much were you laughing though,
the last time you had a splinter in your foot, or in the tip
of your finger? I thought so. That tiny foreign particle
temporarily captures, and then narrows down 100% of
your attention to one tiny area. Even with the extremely
tiny size, relative to the rest of you, once you have
placed all of your attention on it, you can count on a
rather miserable existence until you pluck it out.

Enjoy finding out just how much of a difference you can
make by choosing to focus on something that
empowers you.

© Copyright 2007- Vincent Harris- All Rights Reserved.