Embrace rejections

Embrace rejections because they make your life more interesting. Thanks to them you will become a better and stronger person. Use it, embrace it, and learn from it.

Let the rejection be your fuel, to get wherever you need to be. How many times as kids we were rejected for second ice cream, or piece of cake. I can’t even remember how many times my job applications were been rejected through my life. Rejection exist everywhere.

Each one of us was rejected at some point. Take Billy Joel for example, he built his whole career by singing about the rejections. What to say about Walt Disney’s rejection story that everyone knows. He was fired from a Missouri newspaper for “not being creative enough.” He failed many times, but at the end he met the biggest success a man can achieve.

The truth is that rejection can really cause us actual physical pain. Being excluded from society can be hurtful. But it is not all about the rejections, it is all about how we react on it. How it makes us feel. Rejection can make us feel humiliated, defeated or even worthless.

After being rejected it is very important to build up your self-esteem or self-respect, some call it dignity as well. It is important to try to look at your situation from the logical perspective and not from the emotional one. You need to understand that you can not define yourself just from a few events in your life. Concentrate your attention on the things you accomplished so far, and be guided by that.

Don’t take rejections personally. Even though someone pointed out at you and your personal abilities it says nothing about you. It can only improve your abilities and skills and make you a better person.

Try to take every rejection like a case study, analyze it, learn from it. Through this process you will learn a lot about yourself and how to read other people. You will become more comfortable later on and take it easy on any other upcoming rejections.

Success in general is not to get yes every time when we ask for something, but also to overcome the rejections, and to learn from them. There is also another side of rejection, as hard it was for me to be rejected it was also much harder for me to reject someone else, and I found myself in that position many times. It was hard for me because I know very well how much the word ”no” can hurt. It is not easy to be responsible for hurting somebody.

Unfortunately we are living in the world where being compliant is priced over being objective. So, when I say yes, people call me a sweetheart, and when I say no people call me a bitch. But just think about it if you say yes to something that you really don’t want to do you will end up being miserable.

I know it is hard to say no, especially when it comes to people we care about, but try to look at the consequences. It is important to say no sometimes, and to respect someone else’s no. No is not an insult. Try to see no from the aspect of respect and consideration. Would you rather receive an honest and respective two seconds no, or experience hours of dishonest and disrespectful yes? I don’t know about you, but personally I prefer the honesty even if it is hurtful sometimes.

Honesty is important. The actual line between respect and insult lies in the delivery. The key to a good delivery is empathy. Whether you are receiving or delivering rejection don’t forget that you are dealing with human beings. Treat them with politeness and respect. When we don’t take or make things personal and when we’re kind with our words it will be much easier to accept or deliver any kind of rejection.

Take good care of yourself, during the emotional stress after rejection and don’t take it personally. Take a good night sleep. Exercise at least 30 minutes per day. Eat healthy. All of this will release endorphins in your brain. These endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that reduce your perception of pain. Endorphins also trigger a positive feeling in the body, similar to that of morphine.

Please don’t feel like a victim. Be honest with yourself. Be open to new opportunities. Rejection is not a monster. It is just an answer to a question or request, unless you decide to define it differently.

Take my blog for example. I like to write. I have my followers and the people who like to read my posts, people that attend my workshops and they really like me, but there are also people who will never read my posts, and never attend my workshops. I would never base my value on those facts.

So just because there are people who doesn’t like the work I do, it doesn’t mean that I am not a good writer or public speaker, and that I don’t have good things to say and share. We have to understand and to accept that not everyone will like us, in fact, some might even hate us. So what? It is not something that should concern us personally. It is their right to have they own opinion.

For the end I will repeat the sentence from my previous blog post ”Respect and walk‘‘ as a message. It was a sentence that my mom constantly repeated to me when I was a kid: ”Respect yourself and others and stay away from troubles.”