Overcoming Rejection

As many times as we hear “no” throughout the course of our lives, it never gets any easier to swallow. I don’t have any data to back this up, but suspect that for most people rejection ranks fairly high on our biggest fears, somewhere close to public speaking. And why wouldn’t it? Rejection can feel very much like a personal rebuke, even when there is no malice involved or intended. Our pride is often too wrapped up in what others think of us, and every interaction, every rejection, feels like a judgment.     

Some people have been inured to rejection, exposing themselves to so much of it that the words and actions have no effect on them. Others have hampered themselves and their ambitions out of fear, preferring instead to protect what pride and ego they have at the expense of trying anything beyond their comfort zone.  

Not trying isn’t a luxury you have as an entrepreneur, and not all of us are able to develop a thick enough skin that rejection doesn’t at least sting a little in every instance. Rejection is something that you have to learn to deal with and to live with, in both your personal and professional life. And like most challenges we face, it’s not always easy to find the right way to handle such things in a way that is the best for our own frame of mind and our growth. 

There are undoubtedly plenty of articles that would preach the notion of making yourself impervious to rejection, and, candidly, there’s a lot of sense to that approach; you’re going to face plenty of people saying “no” on your way to “yes”, and even then you have to repeat the process all over again. But there’s a danger in this and other aspects of what could be termed the “ultra-driven” mindset. There is the chance that the people saying “no” don’t understand what you’re doing, or what you hope to accomplish, but there’s something to be learned from that. Perhaps your pitch isn’t conveying your message as clearly as you hoped, or maybe there’s some aspect of your model that isn’t quite right. In instantly turning our back or even spurning that rejection, we miss the opportunity to examine and possibly to learn from what others are saying when they say “no”.

Beyond just reassessing what we’re doing, there is a way in which rejection serves us better in the long term in allowing us to find the right opportunities or the right partners for what we hope to achieve. Undoubtedly we’ve all received some version of the advice that we don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with us, usually in the throes of heartache; why shouldn’t that advice carry as much weight in business as it does in love? As much as we might have in mind what we hope to happen, or the course of events that we’ve planned for our companies from the outset, much of what actually transpires is not solely of our own doing. The perfect partners or investors in our mind might not feel the same way, which renders our opinion of how ideal the match would be moot. You shouldn’t settle for anyone that makes an offer, but an offer is a prerequisite for what is ultimately the right pairing. 

Ultimately there’s no means of staving off rejection when you’re in business for yourself — it’s part and parcel of the gig. And maybe we wouldn’t want it to be, as unpleasant and discouraging as rejection can be in the moment; a success without the struggles along the way wouldn’t ultimately be as satisfying as one that feels so richly deserved and earned. But that knowledge brings little comfort when you’re dealing with a string of defeats and it feels as though your fortunes will never improve. 

We all have our ways of coping and learning from the experience, and I hope the above insight offers at least a nugget of wisdom. But the most important thing in dealing with rejection is understanding that, though it might be final for a project or even a company, it’s not definitive for our lives or our professional journeys. Rejection can only be final if we stop working, stop trying, stop learning, so however we might choose to deal with rejection, we have to keep going to the next one, and the one after that. In that way, we’re a success, no matter the outcome.#onwards.