Rejection sucks. Revolutionary statement of the century I know. Just because it sucks, doesn’t mean it can’t be used as a catalyst for positive change. Rejection is going to happen, so you might as well make the best of it.
If you’re in any creative field, from writing to art or even programming to design, you’re going to face rejection. Anything subjective is going to carry the risk of rejection. Even a great idea at the wrong time is going to get hit with rejection. Rejection lies in wait around every corner. That doesn’t mean you need to fear it.
How To Avoid Rejection: Focusing on the Process
It’s going to happen. You have to accept that fact. You can’t stop rejection, but you can better your odds and you can control how you react. It’s all about you. You are the only variable you really have control over.
Don’t focus on the outcome and the potential for rejection; focus on doing the best that you can throughout the process. Be mindful of what you are doing as you do it. Meditation can help you clear your mind to where you can focus more on what you need to do. Don’t completely ignore the result, but do not fixate on it. Plan where you are trying to go, work on the process towards your plan, and let yourself go with a few checks to make sure the direction is right. You avoid getting lost in the process, but you also avoid obsessing over the results. You don’t study a map while driving.
Moving Past Rejection
You can’t succeed if you don’t try. You can’t grow if you don’t learn from your mistakes. Rejection is a setback, but it is also a catalyst for growth. When get rejected or otherwise fail, all I want to do is figure out why and how to prevent it from happening again if it’s in my control. Channel your frustration at failure into improving yourself.
Rejection can hurt, but remember, it isn’t always personal or even necessarily about you. Even if it is personal, if you let it affect you, it should be a wake up call to improve rather than an excuse to accept defeat. You can’t please everyone, and you won’t. Your style or your personality may just not be a good fit for what you’re doing. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t try to tailor to an audience at times, or that you never have to change, but don’t try to be someone or something you’re not unless you’re trying to grow in that direction.
Do what you can, even if it’s out of your element. Being uncomfortable and learning to cope is a great way to grow. I have a close friend who used to be deathly afraid of snakes. They got sick of the irrationality of their fear and got a snake. Now they care for multiple snakes. Confronting their fear helped them move past it.
Rejection As a Form of Fear
Rejection is a fear of failure and a fear of not fitting in. Confronting these two fears can empower you to grow as a person. You’re going to suck sometimes, and that’s okay. Just don’t let yourself be defined by your failures. Failure is just a learning experience. This is obviously easier said than done, but just a change in the mindset before you undertake a task can help temper your expectations if things go south.
Fitting in can be hard. Aside from just the mechanics of how you approach a scenario, there are also the mechanics of compatibility. Not every group of people are going to get along. Personalities clash, viewpoints differ past the point of reconciliation, and certain preexisting relationships ruin compatibility before you even meet. Don’t obsess over trying to fit a mold that doesn’t fit you, but don’t think this is a carte blanche to just stop trying to change and grow.
By dividing rejection into its baser components, it’s easier to work around the frustration of confronting the fear. There is a mix of fear of failure and fear of social awkwardness which compound into an even worse fear of rejection. The best way to get rid of a fear is to confront it. You will feel rejection. If you don’t, it means you’ve either gotten the kind of luck that makes a fourth-time lottery jackpot winner blush or you’ve just given up on trying and on interacting as a member of society. Learn from what you can, change what you need to, and accept what you can’t fix or change.
Breaking the Fear Down
Now that we know that the fear of rejection is a compound fear, we can begin addressing how to reduce it. The trick with most fears and phobias is to start small. Take baby steps. If you try to jump in the deep end without preparation, you’re just going to drown.
How I Did It
I used to have an absolutely crippling phobia or interacting with people. Most people never knew because I had no issues for any kind of fixed interactions which ran off a “script” (restaurants, school, etc.), but I could not break out of the script without freaking out. I was just the weird kid. I was able to fake enough that I wasn’t completely helpless in all social scenarios, but as soon as I got off the rails, it was game over. My social anxiety stemmed from my fear of rejection.
I grew up all over the place. If we didn’t move in a given year, it was abnormal. By the time we really settled, I burned my bridges early and my few friends ditched me for popularity because we were all the pariahs at the school. I was so used to leaving I didn’t know how to maintain long-term relationships with peers or how to fit in. I never had to care. If I screwed up, we were going to leave anyway. If I got attached or succeeded, well, we were still going to leave. I didn’t even try and just accepted that I would never really stay anywhere so making friends and learning those skills didn’t matter. We often lived in places where I was a bit of an outsider, so I was the friendless, awkward new kid. Naturally, I got picked on a lot.
It took me years, but I eventually overcame my social anxiety and my fear of rejection. I broke the fear down and began analyzing and addressing it. My issue was that I had a stunted set of social skills and I was afraid of failing socially, which led to my fear of rejection. I knew what was wrong, but fixing it was much harder. I addressed my social skills by reading things like How to Win Friends & Influence People. Obviously, you can’t just learn social skills from a book, but it can give a scaffolding to make you better able to learn from practice. It’s a low impact way to give tools and confidence to expand from the rails of fixed conversation into more natural conversation. By doing this, I was able to grow my social anxiety bubble safely to where I could take the plunge on just throwing myself out there which addressed both.
The old me died when I moved years ago, and no one has been the wiser that at one point, I was completely incapable of talking to someone without it being a fixed social function. I forced myself to confront my fears and forced myself to grow to where I could change myself entirely. I’m no longer weird, I’m just eccentric.
How You Can Do It
Analyze what composes your fear. Break down each fear into its constituent parts for further analyses. This is an iterative process you have to continue going through as you make each breakthrough. As you break down the fear and understand each part, you further understand every other part and how they all relate. As you address each part of the fear and confront it, you further develop your resilience to the others. This kind of compound fear is composed of multiple interrelated pieces. Each piece affects each other piece as they are all parts of the same whole.
Slowly growing your tolerance to a given fear helps you prevent being overwhelmed. I approached my fears in very controlled jumps which helped me avoid failing, and helped me advance quicker. Each subsequent small jump was easier and required less preparation, and induced less anxiety in practice. The big jumps were scary and push one further back into their fears. Smaller jumps are safer and faster.
Break down all of your fears and slowly address each component. If you move slowly but surely, you won’t lose your footing and get set back. Each minute bit of progress affects every other aspect of your fear.
Rebounding
Address your fear and harness its strength to turn rejection into success. Don’t be afraid of it, but let it push you. Turn its impact into your power. You’re facing a massive wave, don’t fight it, embrace it and go with the flow.
When you fall flat on your face and you get back up, you just harden your resolve. You have chosen to fight defeat and to push yourself harder. Hardheadedness is useless without introspection though. Is it the delivery, the product, or just the timing? You have full control to fix two of these elements, but learning to recognize the third helps you reduce it. By learning when the timing is good and when it is not, you reduce the amount of rejection you face. You’re not going to get anything positive out of asking someone to go on a date when you’re at their own wedding.
If it’s the delivery, you need to work on your confidence or knowing your audience. If it’s the product, or the skill based component, you need to work on improving. If you’re a great singer, but you get nervous and breakdown on stage, the result will be about the same as someone who isn’t a good singer, but is relaxed, though the root causes are completely different. Singing lessons proper aren’t going to help the great singer get over their stage fright. Confidence won’t help the bad singer either. Rectifying these elements means you are no longer afraid of rejection in the same way, and as long as you don’t mess up the timing, you will most likely succeed. You no longer focus on the result (rejection) and instead focus on the process. The result doesn’t mean anything without substance to it, and the process is useless without a plan.
Conclusion
You’re going to face rejection. Learn how to break up the fear into its constituent parts and how to address each one. By staging your growth and aiming for small, iterative improvements, you can overcome your fear. Use the force of the fear to propel yourself to new heights and further this process. It’s not hard, but it is difficult. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and face uncomfortable situations, but it creates real growth. Even if you do the best job possible, you’re going to face rejection, so you might as well learn to make it work for you.
Featured image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay