Choose Yourself! Read Online Free PDF Page A

for fear of being rejected?
    I understand this. I’ve been rejected more than I care to remember; to the point where some days feel like enough is enough. When you put yourself out there on a daily basis, that’s going to happen (whether you deserve it or not): you get hate mail, you get rejected for opportunities (even if accepted for others), you get people who don’t understand you, who are upset with you, angry with you, don’t respect what you’ve done for them.
    You can’t hate the people who reject you. You can’t let them get the best of you. Nor can you bless the people who love you. Everyone is acting out of his or her own self-interest.
    What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
    This is not some new-age, self-helpy jargon. “Be kind to people and all will be well.” This is a book on how you can achieve success for yourself , and these are the building blocks. The phrase financial freedom includes the word financial but it also includes the word freedom : freedom to explore the blessings that surround us. Freedom to help ourselves so that we can help others. Freedom to live the life we choose to lead, instead of having to live the life that has been chosen for us.
    This book will help you build the house where your freedom resides. Just know that the house does not exist in the past. It cannot be built where you are standing right now. It is out there .
    Since the beginning of humanity, we’ve looked for frontiers. It is only a myth that we have evolved to a point as a civilization where we can count on safety. The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.
    How we deal with rejection is a combination of several factors. It’s not just about how healthy we are mentally. Or how healthy we are psychologically and emotionally. There’s the saying “Time heals all wounds.” This is true. But we can control to some extent how much time it takes. It takes a different amount of time for each person, depending on the number of factors we allow to affect us.
    We will see those factors repeatedly throughout this book when I describe in greater detail what I have referred to in previous books as the “Daily Practice,” and when we analyze the stories of many others who have chosen themselves. Not because they wanted to, but often because they had to.
    The key is building the foundation underneath. And then taking a positive action: to choose yourself.
    Those with high levels of social anxiety about rejection are shown to have lower levels of a hormone called oxytocin. We are all born with different levels of this and other hormones that help modulate our reactions to different external stimuli relating to things from social anxiety to money to happiness to loss.
    Oxytocin levels can be boosted by the foods we eat, how we exercise our mind, how we associate with others, and even is partly responsible for how we cultivate an attitude of gratitude toward both the positive and negative events in our lives.
    The point is not that chemicals rule our lives. Quite the opposite. But in order to have a fully functioning life, we need a functioning body, a healthy brain, a functioning social life, a functioning idea muscle, and a very fundamental sense that there are some things we can’t control. For instance, I couldn’t force someone to give me a million dollars in 2002. Any more than I could force that girl to like me when I was twelve.
    And obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless. It takes us out of the game. We have to choose to be in the game.
    Therapists might say, analyze the past to see where your current negativity comes from. Perhaps a parent rejected you as a young person and now you feel particularly