Rejection is harsh, how we cope with it depends on our personality type and also why we were rejected. I was amazed today when I looked up the word "rejection" and found all these different meanings for one word:
- Social rejection, in psychology, an interpersonal situation that occurs when a person or group of people exclude an individual from a social relationship
- Transplant rejection, in medicine, the immune reaction of a host organism to a foreign biological tissue, such as in a transplantation
- In telecommunications, rejection is the receiving of the desired signal without interference from another undesired one.
- In basketball, rejection is a slang term for a block
- In mathematics, the rejection of a vector a from a vector b is the component of a perpendicular to b, as opposed to its projection, which is parallel to b.
- In statistics, rejection sampling is a technique used to generate observations from a distribution
- In zoology, the shunning of one or more animals in a litter
I can remember when I was rejected to speak at a conference in my early days of building Motivational Steps. My thoughts were:
- Don't they think I am good enough?
- What was wrong with the information I gave on the form?
- I am useless, no one will ever book me to speak at their event.
- How can I get over this?
The above list is a few of the jumbled thoughts I had when I was rejected to speak at an event, and those thoughts continued to bog me down, hold me back and make me feel inadequate. That is until one of my friends who had turned into a mentor as if by magic gave me some advice. He suggested that I did not think of being turned down as being rejected. He asked me to imagine if every time I walked into a shoe store ( I love to buy shoes) and I browsed the shoe racks, but did not purchase anything, and then I walked out of the store and into a different store, what I would feel like if I was one of the sales assistants. I was for all intents and purposes window shopping, and may not decide to buy anything at that time or may decide one style of shoe at a store is to my liking and make a purchase. If all the sales assistants at the shoe stores felt rejected they would spend most of their time crying, feeling sad, unwanted and rejected and never make another sale!
Being rejected should not have impacted my life to the extent I was left with no confidence or believed in myself, especially as I had not lost anything, because I did not have the offer to speak in the first place, so I should move on. I took my friends advice and from that moment I never looked back. Possible clients can tell if you are confident, if you do believe in yourself and last but not least if you are desperate for the work
Whether you are rejected for a sports team, a committee, a job, whatever, deal with it in a professional way and always believe in yourself and know that the possible client has done what you would do in the same place, they have chosen someone that fits in with what they want, not what you think they should have. But it does not mean your offering is sub-standard or your true worth is not valued, and it does not mean you have to go through life feeling useless. Believe in yourself and others will believe in you.
In fact, down the line, I have had organizations who have not chosen me to speak at their events, but they have referred me to clients who have chosen me so that speaks for itself.
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