Reading Barbara Corcoran’s words on LinkedIn made me thing about how one experience changed the way I know think about rejection.
This is what happened to me.
I arrived 10 minutes late to submit a bid at APIX the Senegalese investment agency. It was raining that day and it took me ages to get there. They turned me down saying the deadline was over. I explained that it was because of the rain and insisted I had been working for weeks on that offer, it was only 10 minutes late, I thought they could be flexible. Nothing worked. I left the building crying. I was so frustrated. Later on that exact same day I received a phone call to confirm a consultancy work for 6 months.
Ever since I have been rejected, I have the intimate conviction that’s because something better is coming my way. This is my way of dealing with rejection but I acknowledge that we are not all equal when it comes to overcome rejection.
Inspirations to overcome rejection in your career
Among the most recent podcasts I’ve listened to, two of them resonate with this topic. Both entrepreneurs have succeeded in not taking rejection personnaly and learned from each situation. Eventually, they have built incredibly successful businesses.
An episode of Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People with Melanie Perkins CEO of Canva. I already documented other episodes in Learnings from the Stanford prison experiment and in Favorite podcasts part 2). In this episode, Melanie Perkins mentioned how she got rejected hundreds of times when she moved from Australia to the Silicon Valley in search of investors. Each time she got rejected she refined her pitch deck based on the critics. She saw opportunities and not a dead end.
An episode of Lewis Howes’ The School of Greatness which is one of my favorite podcast as well. The title says it all How to Overcome Self-Doubt & Rejection to Build a Billion Dollar Brand w/Jamie Kern Lima.
Jamie Kern Lima, (is the) founder of IT Cosmetics, which she started in her living room and grew into the largest luxury makeup brand in the country. She sold the company to L’Oréal in a billion-dollar deal and became the first female CEO of a brand in its history.”
The most striking part is when one potential investor told Jamie that because she was the way she was (overweight and not with a perfectly looking skin) he could see any potential in the company, no customer would buy from her. Instead of quitting, this gave her more energy to prove him wrong.
For more on how to deal with rejection and specifically in the context of romantic relationships, Harvard Business Review article To Recover Faster from Rejection, Shift Your Mindset is a must read.
Everyone knows what rejection feels like. It’s a universal (and universally disliked) experience, but it’s one that we each experience differently. For the most part, people are pretty good at moving on with their lives — even better than they might guess. Sometimes, though, getting rejected hurts more than we expect, especially if our immediate response is to become self-critical.
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Just as with the first study, they found that people who endorsed more of a fixed mindset felt worse, both generally and about themselves specifically, after being rejected. Stronger beliefs about personality being fixed also predicted more fear about being rejected again and greater distress when reminiscing. These people typically didn’t take positive lessons away from the experience; they simply wished it had never happened.
Formamind is a regular newsletter published twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. It focuses on self development, innovation, creativity, team collaboration, leadership and my personal journey towards understanding how our brain works.
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