Don't Let Rejection Bring You Down

Life’s very much a numbers game. If you’re getting a lot of rejections, you’re likely doing at least one thing right: you’re trying. Regardless of whether the client you’re trying to woo, the girl or guy you’re trying to ask out or the interviewer you’re trying to impress responds to you positively, it won’t matter in the long run if you keep trying.

You’ve likely heard that practice makes perfect. And if you haven’t realized it yet, you probably haven’t done enough or exposed yourself to the right experiences. We never start off big and strong. We take gradual steps up the learning curve and our preparedness becomes a function of our dedication, focus and persistence.

Too many people let failures bring them down or discourage them from moving forward. What you need to grasp is that your approach and, more importantly, what you do to prepare before you make your approach will strongly influence the result. And your approach, while being a function of your efforts, is still a variable that can be worked on to boost your result. Knowing that, you shouldn’t feel inadequate or not good enough.

Instead, you should be motivated to study your approach, isolate your areas of weakness and work on refining your approach for next time. Imagine being on your first interview or date, things may not go as well as planned, but with every new experience, you start to form a better understanding of the dynamics of interviewing or dating and with time you will become much more agile and effective. But to get to that level, you have to keep a positive attitude and stay persistent no matter what.

Allow yourself the gift of rejection and don’t take it personally. And when you’re faced with rejection, ask yourself if you didn’t do as well as you could have due to a lacking approach or if it was just that the person or opportunity wasn’t a mutual fit. Work on the former and accept the latter, but don’t get into the habit of attributing failures to issues of fit.

The difference between the successful minority and the general majority is simply that the former group keeps coming back stronger after each rejection, not letting anyone get to them and deter their efforts in any facet of life. They create no excuses or rationalizations, nor do they accept limits. Those are the people that know how to get what the want and apply the focus and discipline necessary to achieve their ends. They’re resilient, cool and collected. They end up winning.

Don’t allow rejection to make you bitter or bring you down. Allow it to make you better and bring you up. Don’t settle or give in because that’s the cowards’ way out of a game that’s played by everyone, endured by some and eventually won by a dedicated few.

You’ll find that many around you, after failing to get something or after having a bad experience, will stop going after what they want or will decide not to go through that experience again. They believe that history foretells the future, when it should be nothing more than a lesson for the future. They allow a negative experience to curtail their efforts so that they end up following the safe, familiar routes, which contribute little to nothing to their personal growth and more toward making them complacent and unwilling to take defining risks.

Don’t forget that life is about playing a bad hand exceptionally well; you’re not entitled to a good hand. Be bold, be resilient, persevere and stay positive. You’re worth investing in your self and you can achieve what you believe you can achieve. The list of requirements may get longer the bigger the dream, but the rewards, freedom and self-satisfaction you can get are worth every bead of sweat. Go get what’s yours and don’t ever let anyone or anything phase you.

Samer Sweidan | Elite.