What 30 days of getting rejected taught me.
In 2018 I was a man on a mission.
At the time I was struggling with crippling social anxiety. It was holding me back significantly at work and in ways that were starting to really negatively affect my life. After trying some traditional talking therapy that didn’t seem to do much, I found a social anxiety coach online and started doing sessions with him.
During one of our early sessions, he introduced me to something called Social Freedom Exercises. Today they’ve become a popular online trend - particularly on Instagram and TikTok - as Rejection Therapy.
The concept is simple, though very uncomfortable: you deliberately seek out situations where you might face rejection, judgement, or mild embarrassment in public.
Why would anyone do this?
At the root of social anxiety - and often the fear of public speaking - is a fear of rejection or negative evaluation. These exercises gradually expose you to that fear until it starts to lose its power. In many ways it’s a form of exposure therapy, a well-established element of cognitive behavioural therapy.
With the help of my coach, I committed to a 30-day challenge I’d found online. It began with small tasks and slowly escalated into increasingly awkward territory.
My first assignment came directly from him.
I was to go into a coffee shop, order a coffee, wait while they made it, and then calmly tell them I had changed my mind about the order - without apologising.
For anyone with social anxiety, or strong people-pleasing instincts, you’ll know how uncomfortable this is. Looking back, it was actually a very difficult place to start.
He gave me a week to do it. I knew that if I had that long, I’d spend most of it procrastinating, so I decided to do it that same day and get it over with.
I walked into the nearest coffee shop, ordered a latte, and stood nervously while the barista prepared it. When he finished, he placed a lid on the cup and handed it over.
I sheepishly told him that I’d changed my mind and wanted an oat milk latte instead.
He paused very briefly and said, “Oh, OK. No problem.”
And then he immediately made me another one without questioning it at all.
Looking back, I feel slightly guilty that I effectively cost a coffee shop four pounds that day. But the knock-on effect that moment had on my life means they unknowingly did a tremendously good deed, so thank you, random coffee shop in London.
As soon as I got outside, a huge wave of relief and excitement came over me. I could barely sleep that night thinking about what possibilities lay ahead of me with my newfound feeling of freedom. That might sound dramatic, but it genuinely felt like the first step in overcoming something that had held me back for years.
Over the next month, I repeated this process, one uncomfortable task at a time.
Some of the challenges included:
Lying down on the floor in public. I did this near Piccadilly Circus in London (I put a sheet of newspaper on the pavement before lying down). A concerned passer-by stopped to ask if I was OK. I told him I was, and carried on
High-fiving five strangers
Going into a fast food restaurant and asking for something for free. (Five Guys said yes, to their credit.)
Asking someone if I could cut in front of them in a queue (painful for any British person, social anxiety or not)
Asking strangers to marry me
Asking strangers for £1,000
Asking if I could test out a joke as part of a comedy routine
Dancing in public
Singing in public
The list goes on.
Every day I hated doing it.
And every day afterwards, I felt amazingly free.
Completing the challenge didn’t magically cure my social anxiety. But it did send me down a path that eventually led me to become a facilitator, working on helping others with these kinds of fears at the School of Connection.
More importantly, the process revealed a few things about human interaction that still stay with me today.
No one cared.
Really. No one cared what I was doing. Most people barely noticed. I was ignored in the most liberating way possible. It reinforced something psychologists often say: people are far less focused on us than we imagine. Most of us are too busy managing the voice inside our own heads.
People are generally way kinder than I realised.
I did several things that I was convinced would really annoy people. One challenge involved asking a stranger if they would do ten push-ups with me. Another involved asking someone if I could take a selfie with them.
Both people said yes, and both were surprisingly cool and friendly about it.
It made me realise how much we project our own fears onto other people. Often the harsh judgement we’re anticipating is coming from us, not them.Rejection is an unavoidable part of life.
Everyone gets rejected in some form. For some of us who are more sensitive, the experience stings more sharply than for others. But when you step back and look at it objectively, it begins to feel less personal.I once heard someone say: if you knew the love of your life was one hundred rejections away, imagine how willing you’d suddenly be to experience rejection (you can swap out love for a million pounds if that motivates you more :)
Facing fear can feel surprisingly good.
Not beforehand, and certainly not in the moments leading up to the challenge. But immediately afterwards, there’s the most incredible rush of relief, adrenaline, and pride. It’s a feeling that would not be possible without the fear before.Anything meaningful tends to involve some vulnerability: interviewing for a job you really want, asking someone you have a crush on out for a date, speaking up in front of a room full of strangers. The fear is often part of what makes the experience meaningful and the good feelings you get afterwards were the most powerful motivator for me to keep pursuing freedom.
When people say they’re afraid of public speaking, it’s rarely the act of speaking itself that scares them. It’s the possibility of being judged, misunderstood, or rejected by the room.
With public speaking or rejection therapy, you’re exposing yourself to the same underlying risk: being seen by other people without knowing exactly how they’ll respond.
What the exercises showed me was that the reaction we fear is usually far worse in our imagination than it is in reality. Most audiences aren’t waiting for you to fail. Like the strangers I approached during that month, they’re usually more generous - and more interested in seeing you do well - than we expect.
When the 30 days were over, I wasn’t “fixed” from all of my fears. Healing from anxiety disorders, I’ve learned since, rarely follows a neat or linear path. My journey has involved lots of exposure work like this, but also lots of therapy, learning to look after and regulate my nervous system, and - through School of Connection - learning how to lower my guard and connect with people more openly.
The point of this article isn’t to suggest that if you spend 30 days asking strangers for strange things, your fears will disappear. It’s to be a little reminder that many of the limits we feel are maintained by the stories we tell ourselves about how others might respond.
And most of the time, those stories aren’t quite as true as we think.
Of course, knowing something intellectually is one thing - but the real change happens when your nervous system realises it’s safe to be seen. Over time, even small moments of risk paired with connection teach the body and mind that fear doesn’t always have to control us. That’s why exposure works best when it’s carefully designed within a space of support and connection - which is exactly the principle we explore in our workshops.
You can join our free ones here.
Adam x