Four Tips to Handle Rejection
Being an entrepreneur means getting comfortable with how to handle rejection.
While sitting on the receiving end of rejection can cause some uncomfortable emotions to crop up (yeah, I know – talk about an understatement!), it doesn’t have to be an experience without a silver lining. After all, if you reframe the scenario, rejection is really actually just a milestone along the way on path toward success.
Read on and I’ll explain exactly what I mean when it comes to handling rejection.
Four Failproof Tips to Help You Handle Rejection
1. Recalculate Your Route Passed Rejection
If you’ve been an entrepreneur for any amount of time, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ve experienced the sting of not landing what you thought was the ideal client. No matter how solid your pitch was and despite your very best efforts, they decided to go with someone else – leaving you to pick up the pieces.
Here’s the thing, though: you may not have won the client, but chances are you dodged a bullet. Some things that you think are meant to be are just, well…not.
Plus, when one door closes, there’s always the opportunity for a new door to open with an opportunity that may just be more aligned with what you’re after. The very best business owners of our time regularly fail over and over again – but still get back up and give it another go. Success is always right around the corner; but sometimes, you might just need to recalculate your route in order to find it.
2. Take Your Lumps
Rejection is no fun, but at the end of the day, it keeps us humble. It ensures we stay in tune with what we truly need and want, rather than grasping at things that are not meant for us. It helps us appreciate what we do have, building up our inherent resiliency as we learn how to pick ourselves up again, ultimately making us stronger in the process.
Accept that learning doesn’t always come easy – but the silver lining of that gained knowledge sure is hard to deny.
3. Know Your Value
When someone rejects you, it’s easy to go down that self-destructive spiral of devaluating yourself. Here’s the thing about rejection, though: maybe the person who did the rejecting didn’t really appreciate the value you brought to the table. Maybe, just maybe this is the universe’s way of saying this isn’t really a good fit.
Listen to you your gut. Have faith enough in yourself to know when something isn’t working out and get comfortable with being okay when things don’t go down perfectly in line with your expectations.
When it comes down to it,, you have to be able to put yourself first – because ultimately, you’re the one who has to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of every day.
4. Handle Rejection Without Closure
While it’s true that all things (yes, even the good ones!) must come to an end, sometimes they end without closure – and that can be difficult for our human brains to process. The proverbial door gets slammed in our face and because we don’t like how things ended, it sends us spinning trying to understand why, effectively hindering us from being able to move forward.
My advice? Sometimes you just have to suck it up buttercup and move on. While this might not have been your best rodeo, it’s not your last rodeo either. Flex that faith muscle and believe that something else is just around the corner. The old adage that “When one door closes, another door opens” has always been true in my experience, so trust in the fact that much more is meant for you.
It’s this type of shake-up (the kind that forces you to pick yourself up and pivot) that inevitably leads you down a different path – one you wouldn’t have taken otherwise. Let faith in your abilities help you close those open chapters, allowing you to open yourself up to future success as a result.
Looking to pick your business back up after a bout with rejection? Contact us at The Marketing Girl to learn more about lighting the spark that will send your endeavours sky-high through marketing that truly shines – and thanks for reading!
