Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection Read Online Free
Author: Mark McGuinness
Tags: Psychology, Business, Stress Management
is threatened by criticism. So Maslow’s pyramid seems to confirm that rejection and criticism are not life-threatening.
Since you’re reading this book, the chances are your goal falls into the category of self-actualization: you’re not looking for mere survival or acceptance, you want to realize your potential and make a contribution to the world. Now I have a lot of respect for Maslow’s work, but if we take his pyramid at face value, this kind of goal can look a bit like a luxury item—something you pursue if you can afford it, once your other needs are being met.
But this doesn’t quite add up when you consider all the people who have prioritized self-actualization over ‘lower level’ needs such as survival or social acceptance. For example, the stereotypical starving artist; or charity/public sector workers who accept a reduced income in pursuit of a cause in which they believe. An extreme example is someone like Gandhi, who put his life on the line many times, including going on hunger strike in protest at violence, demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his own survival for the greater good. Even if you haven’t gone to this extreme, I’m sure you can think of times when you chose to sacrifice some of your own needs in pursuit of higher principles or ambitions.
Another challenge to Maslow’s hierarchy comes from psychological research that suggests we experience social exclusion with the same intensity as a threat to our survival. In Your Brain at Work , a superb book about applying the findings of neuroscience to everyday challenges, David Rock highlights the research findings that the same neural networks are used to process both social and survival needs. So whether we feel hungry or cast out from the tribe, we experience the same terrifying sense of threat.
Humans have survived and evolved by collaborating. How else did we outwit the proverbial saber-toothed tiger? We certainly didn’t out-muscle, out-run, or out-bite it. But we found safety in numbers, and in our combined ingenuity. So for most of human history, membership of the tribe was a matter of life and death. If you were excluded for any reason, your chances of survival dropped dramatically.
And what is rejection but exclusion from your chosen tribe? If you want to be a sports player, not making this year’s team means you’re out of the tribe—and you may never get back in. It’s the same story if your book manuscript is rejected—it feels like another nail in the coffin of your ambitions to join the tribe of writers. Ditto failing to land a job: excluded from the tribe of [insert name of your desired profession], you start to wonder whether you should go back to waiting tables, sweeping chimneys, or whatever is your personal definition of the job you’d least like to have.
In each of these scenarios, rejection feels like being cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and grinding of teeth. (And licking of lips by saber-toothed tigers.)
How does this relate to criticism?
Just recall the difference between someone criticizing you in a private conversation versus bawling you out in front of the whole group. Or between receiving a scathing comment about your work in a private email and in a review in the biggest newspaper in the land.
Public criticism can lower your status in the eyes of the tribe. And the people who tell you not to worry about other people’s opinion obviously don’t know about the research into the effects of social status on monkeys.
Like humans, monkeys organize their society hierarchically—every member of a monkey tribe knows his or her place in the hierarchy, and it’s possible for outsiders (human or monkey) to identify an individual monkey’s status from its body language.
Researchers have discovered that when a monkey moves up or down the social ladder, this has direct, measurable, physiological effects—including the release of hormones, gene activity, white blood cell count, and
Since you’re reading this book, the chances are your goal falls into the category of self-actualization: you’re not looking for mere survival or acceptance, you want to realize your potential and make a contribution to the world. Now I have a lot of respect for Maslow’s work, but if we take his pyramid at face value, this kind of goal can look a bit like a luxury item—something you pursue if you can afford it, once your other needs are being met.
But this doesn’t quite add up when you consider all the people who have prioritized self-actualization over ‘lower level’ needs such as survival or social acceptance. For example, the stereotypical starving artist; or charity/public sector workers who accept a reduced income in pursuit of a cause in which they believe. An extreme example is someone like Gandhi, who put his life on the line many times, including going on hunger strike in protest at violence, demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his own survival for the greater good. Even if you haven’t gone to this extreme, I’m sure you can think of times when you chose to sacrifice some of your own needs in pursuit of higher principles or ambitions.
Another challenge to Maslow’s hierarchy comes from psychological research that suggests we experience social exclusion with the same intensity as a threat to our survival. In Your Brain at Work , a superb book about applying the findings of neuroscience to everyday challenges, David Rock highlights the research findings that the same neural networks are used to process both social and survival needs. So whether we feel hungry or cast out from the tribe, we experience the same terrifying sense of threat.
Humans have survived and evolved by collaborating. How else did we outwit the proverbial saber-toothed tiger? We certainly didn’t out-muscle, out-run, or out-bite it. But we found safety in numbers, and in our combined ingenuity. So for most of human history, membership of the tribe was a matter of life and death. If you were excluded for any reason, your chances of survival dropped dramatically.
And what is rejection but exclusion from your chosen tribe? If you want to be a sports player, not making this year’s team means you’re out of the tribe—and you may never get back in. It’s the same story if your book manuscript is rejected—it feels like another nail in the coffin of your ambitions to join the tribe of writers. Ditto failing to land a job: excluded from the tribe of [insert name of your desired profession], you start to wonder whether you should go back to waiting tables, sweeping chimneys, or whatever is your personal definition of the job you’d least like to have.
In each of these scenarios, rejection feels like being cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and grinding of teeth. (And licking of lips by saber-toothed tigers.)
How does this relate to criticism?
Just recall the difference between someone criticizing you in a private conversation versus bawling you out in front of the whole group. Or between receiving a scathing comment about your work in a private email and in a review in the biggest newspaper in the land.
Public criticism can lower your status in the eyes of the tribe. And the people who tell you not to worry about other people’s opinion obviously don’t know about the research into the effects of social status on monkeys.
Like humans, monkeys organize their society hierarchically—every member of a monkey tribe knows his or her place in the hierarchy, and it’s possible for outsiders (human or monkey) to identify an individual monkey’s status from its body language.
Researchers have discovered that when a monkey moves up or down the social ladder, this has direct, measurable, physiological effects—including the release of hormones, gene activity, white blood cell count, and
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