by Tina Cherpes, Featured Contributor
Group Therapy: Lessons From The Couch – #27
…and at first I’ll admit I wasn’t too thrilled about the whole idea but when they actually made it to the playoffs, Chris thought it’d be fun to drive up for the weekend and take the kids to see the Hall of Fame. It was really kind of interesting and I guess baseball must be harder than it looks cause even the best players that were in there only got hits maybe three out of ten times they were up. So the other seven times I guess they made outs or whatever and still got into the Hall of Fame; weird huh.”
IN BASEBALL a player’s batting average is calculated by dividing the total number of hits by the total number of times the player 
batted. Baseball historians consider a .330 batting average to be outstanding and, historically speaking, is relatively rare. In fact, in the history of Major League Baseball, less than three dozen players (who batted at least 3,000 times) have had career batting averages of .330 or higher.
While we can interpret this data in a multitude of ways, it can be generally resolved that this renowned group of baseball professionals experienced rejection in roughly seventy percent of their attempts to land safely on base.
Regardless of our individual ambitions, rejection (in one form or another) is a universal experience. Whether our goal is to get a date for the Homecoming dance, land a leading role in a Broadway musical, or perform a successful heart transplant, the simple fact of the matter is that the outcomes we envision, aren’t necessarily the ones we’ll create and experience. And while on an individual level our experiences can differ dramatically, persistence, resilience, and an openness to change are techniques routinely shared by those focused and determined to attain long-term success.
As children, the quality of continuing steadily, recovering quickly, and allowing people, things, and ideas to pass and flow freely around/through us was part of our constitution. Gradually, our life blueprint evolved and these behaviors were commonly replaced with a different set of behaviors as we learned to perfect the ability to rationalize and defend our actions. Yet as we slowly learned to repress the resilient behaviors we routinely displayed as children, so too can we learn to express these behaviors again as adults.
In nearly aspect of life, there exists a potential to experience rejection. And while this potential is unlikely to disappear from our life’s landscape, learning how to effectively handle rejection is possible with persistence, resilience, and an openness to change; fortunately these are all behaviors that can be learned (again).
