41. Dealing with Rejection
Ugh, rejection. Such a bummer, right? And yet, while this may not be your favorite topic, it’s something important to learn how to deal with since you often have to risk rejection in order to build a career and life that you love.
Unless you already have the exact job and life you want, you’re going to need to try some new things in order to get them, and one of the things I see stopping people from trying new things is the fear of being rejected.
Listen, I get it. Rejection is not my favorite thing either.
BUT when we build up a tolerance to rejection and we’re willing to experience it in order to have the things we want in life, then we actually become unstoppable.
In this episode, I’m sharing how I’ve developed a rejection tolerance, and how you can do the same. I’m not saying you have to fall in love with rejection, but once you can start thinking of it as something you’re willing to risk, you can start to move towards that new job, partner, or whatever else it is you want for your life.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to tolerate rejection and create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
How we make rejection an intense experience in our own minds and what we tend to make it mean about ourselves.
What you can do to reframe rejection when you feel like being rejected is a setback.
How your rejection capacity correlates to your success.
Why being rejection-averse can keep you trapped and playing small.
How to make yourself rejection-tolerant and why it’s such a superpower.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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If you’re enjoying the show, please leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about rejection.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. I hope you're doing well. I am doing well. I just got back from Seattle a few days ago. I went up just for a quick visit, took a few days off work, got to walk in one of my favorite green spaces in Seattle during the visit, which is Lake Ridge Park. Which is this tiny little pocket Park, you can do the whole trail in, I think, less than 30 minutes. It's super cute. It's in South Seattle. If you're in Seattle and want to go check it out it's a really sweet little trail.
I got to do some country dancing, which is my thing that I love. And I have a great community in Seattle. I haven't danced with them since before the pandemic, at The Cuff. Which is an amazing gay leather bar in Seattle. That's where we do our country dancing up there for the LGBTQIA plus community.
So that was amazing. Going country dancing, I’ve said before, it's like my version of church. I feel so connected to this community, I love being there. And it was really wonderful to see them again, especially since now I live in Sacramento, so I'm not going to be dancing with them on the regular.
I went pretty much every Friday for years. So, moving to Sacramento changed that and I'm a little sad about that. Although I'm also happy to live in Sacramento now. I really like it, it turns out. So that's what I've been up to. And now without further ado, let's get into what we're talking about today.
So today, we're talking about rejection. And while this may not be your favorite topic, and it might not seem like a very fun topic, I think it is such an important topic for building a career and life you love. Here's why, unless you already have the exact life and career you want, you're going to need to do some stuff to get to the place where you have the life and career you want.
And anytime we have to make changes and do new things, we're probably going to experience some failure. And we're probably going to experience some rejection. It's not like a hard and fast rule. But just think about if you want a new job, you have to apply to new jobs.
And usually, statistically, we have to apply to a bunch in order to get just the one that we want. Or if you want to stay in your current organization but get a promotion, then you have to have a conversation about that with your supervisor or whoever you need to talk to in your specific organization.
Whatever we want that we don't already have, we have to do something, usually many somethings to try to get it. And along the way we're going to face failure, which we've talked about before. And we're probably going to face rejection.
So recently I was on the Facebook, and yes, I called it the Facebook. I was on the Facebook, and I saw a post in one of the – I don't know, I'm in a bunch of groups for like women in tech, and women in business. And I saw posted one of them about how to handle rejection. And I wrote a comment back. And writing that comment back made me realize I was like, “I want to do an entire podcast on this because it's so important.”
And what the person was talking about was trying to get a new job and just how to handle the actual feeling of rejection. It wasn't a question about strategy, about how to change your cover letters. It was about how to manage the emotional experience of being rejected over and over again.
And that's interesting because sometimes, like when you really look at it, the experience of being rejected actually is an experience kind of like of nothing, right? It's like you send in 15 resumes and you hear nothing. And in our brain, we're like, “Oh, I'm being rejected. That's rejection, no one reached back out to me, so I'm rejected.”
But it is really interesting to pause and just be like, “Okay, but it's also like a lack of something.” A lot of times no one writes back at all, but we still perceive that as rejection. Which I think is really interesting. If the exact same thing was happening on a different day where no one emails us we'd be like, “Cool, no one emailed us.” But if we send out 15 resumes are brain is like, “No one emailed me, and that's a big fucking problem. And I'm terrible. And I'm never going to get a new job and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
So I think that's just a really interesting point, which is going to lead me to my next point. Which is that in a lot of ways rejection is an internal experience. Very rarely in life does someone come and say, “I reject you.” We’re like, “Hey, do you want to go on a date?” And they're like, “No.” Or we're like, “Hey, do you want to hire me?” And they're like, “No.” Or we’re like, “Do you want to go on a date?” And they don't say anything. Or we're like, “Do you want to hire me?” And they don't say anything. Right?
A lot of times, we're not actually getting rejected in a factual way. But inside our heads, we're telling ourselves this really intense narrative of rejection. That we've been rejected and what it means about us, and then we kind of go out into the future about what we think it means about like the rest of the trajectory of our life.
And usually we're like, “Oh, I've been rejected, which means I'm bad. Which means nothing good will ever happen. I'll never get the thing I want.” Whether it's a mate, or a new job, or whatever. And I've experienced this narrative cycle myself many times. So I know it feels terrible while you're in it.
But it's so interesting because, one, it's a totally optional experience. And when I say that, listen y'all, I know it probably doesn't feel optional to you right now. But go with me on this idea that if someone doesn't hire you, it's optional to say to yourself that you've been rejected and you're terrible and you'll never get a job offer.
It's optional and I think we have the correlation backwards. We're like, “Oh, I got rejected, therefore I'm more likely to get rejected later. Therefore, I'm less likely to get what I want in life.” And I'm like, “But what if the opposite is true?”
What if in reality, it's like, “Oh, I've been rejected which means I've actually tried to get what I want, which means I'm actually getting closer. Which means I'm more likely to get a new job.” Because think about it, in order to get a new job you have to, usually, apply for multiple ones and not get them and then get one or maybe get a few offers.
I saw a post on LinkedIn a few months ago, I actually screenshotted it and sent it to a friend of mine who was job searching. And the poster was writing about, I think they had applied for like 65 jobs. And they had only even heard back from like 20. And then they had only gotten interviews for like 7.
But they got one job, and it was a really fucking fantastic job. I think it was like a software development job. And they were saying like, “This is how you get hired as a software engineer, you apply to 65. 45 of whom never say anything to you.”
So think about it, what do you need to do, and have, and be like in order to allow 45 of your job applications to say nothing back to you, but you to keep going? And I do think that when we can see rejection as correlating to success, instead of correlating to failure, it's much easier to keep going.
Okay, so this has been kind of like a tangential introduction. But now that I've done that, I'm going to speak to it, I think, in a little bit more straightforward way. Okay, so how do we deal with rejection? And how do we make ourselves, what when I'm going to call rejection tolerant, so that we can purposely go towards things where we probably will get rejected? But that's part of the path to getting what we want.
Whether what we want as a new job, or whether what we want is a partner, or whether what we want is to make twice as much money per year as we're making now. Like to double our salary or to double our client rates. How do we handle rejection when it arises? How do we make ourselves rejection tolerant so we can go towards it on purpose?
And I want to say that I actually deal with rejection a lot more now that I run my own business. It is about getting clients and getting opportunities versus when I was in corporate, it would have been like getting a raise, or getting a new job, or getting to work on a project I wanted to work on.
And, of course, in my personal life there has been all kinds of rejection available to me. Whether it's romantic or even trying to be friends with someone and getting rejected. That shit happens.
But I think I used to be rejection averse, which I think a lot of people are. And I think that can seem like it's really safe and a good idea. But what it does is it keeps you stuck, and it keeps you trapped, and it keeps you small.
I mean, if you already have a big, beautiful life, maybe not. And I did have a beautiful life and it was big in many ways. But also there were so many things I was always not trying because trying them might have involved being rejected.
When I left corporate to launch my coaching business, I had to basically turn that around like 100%, or like 180 degrees, I guess. And go towards rejection all the time. Because when you're an entrepreneur, that's how you get business, right? You ask people if they want to hire you. And a lot of them say no.
And every time someone said no, if I made that mean I was never going to be successful, which listen, I did a lot in the first few years and I do sometimes still. But the more I can bring myself back to this other idea that I'm teaching today, that rejection actually correlates to success, the more I have the energy and the capacity to keep going when I've been rejected a lot.
Here is how I view rejection that makes it easier to handle, easier to go towards, and that makes me more rejection tolerant. And that can make you more rejection tolerant. And a lot of these are going to be things I already touched on, but I'm going to go through them one by one so that you have them in an organized way. Because I know that the way my brain explains things can be very tangential. And I go through things really fast.
So I want to kind of reiterate so you can get a complete picture. One, I see rejection is a step on the path towards my goal. Rejection is always moving me forward as long as the rejections I'm gathering are in the direction of where I want to go. If I'm getting rejected, that means I'm doing something, and that's good.
If you're getting rejected, the question is, are these rejections moving me towards what I want? We're not out here trying to gather up willy-nilly rejections, although that can be a great exercise too if you want to just get rejection tolerant.
I think there was this guy who wrote a book a few years ago where he just did this thing where he just started like asking people for all this random and like really interesting, intense stuff. One of them was like he asked these people if he could play soccer in their backyard.
And the point was to get rejected. But one of the things he discovered was that a lot of people actually said yes. So that can be a way to get rejection tolerant. I'm personally more a fan of pick rejections that go towards your goal. Because then you can see every rejection is getting you closer and closer to where you want to go.
Like, you can see it as like 100 steps laid out before you and maybe 10 of those steps are the thing you want. Like a new client would be the thing for me. But maybe for you it's a date with someone you think is like interesting and funny and attractive. Or it could be a job interview, whatever, a new job offer.
You get to see every rejection is a step on the path. And I think a great mathematical breakdown is be willing to do like at least 9 or 10 projections for every visible step that actually is one that you want towards your goal. That's not mathematically accurate in any way, but I think it's galvanizing and helps you keep showing up if you've had like three or four rejections to be like, “Nope, this is normal, this is fine. Just keep going.”
And for some people sometimes it's a lot more than 9 or 10, right? There's always the famous examples of authors who sent out their book like 25 times and had it rejected before the 26th time someone accepted it. And now they're like a multi- bajillionaire, right?
There's so many examples like this. So there really is no amount of rejections in which it's now time to give up. It's just a question of do you want to keep moving towards your goal or not? And are you willing to feel the pain and discomfort of rejection and keep going?
That maybe sounds kind of harsh, but I've realized I am, and I think I do have a really exceptional life now. And I think there's a lot of factors in there, right? Obviously, I also have a lot of privilege and a lot of things working in my favor.
But I think when it comes down to why my business is successful, it's also because I was willing to feel rejection over and over and over again and keep going towards what I wanted. And not in a perfectionistic way, right? Sometimes I lay on the floor and cry and then I get back to it later.
See, even when I tried to be straightforward with a list with y'all, it's all asides. Okay, so to review, number one was see rejection as a step on the path towards your goal. So the rejection is already useful. Number two is, you can ask yourself, what could you learn from that rejection to help you achieve your goal?
So let's just say you did send out 15 resumes and not hear back on any of them. That is data, that's information. What can we learn from that? Maybe the way we're sending out resumes is not the most useful way. Maybe there's some kind of other step we need to take.
These rejections are not wasted effort, we just need to get the learning out. Whatever the learning is, we need to pull the learning out of them. And sometimes we have to be a little bit like testing and learning, right? We're like, “Well, maybe it was this.” And then we try something else with the next 10 resumes and no one writes back to those. So we're like, “Okay, maybe it was this. Maybe it was this.”
And just continuing to test and learn and try new things and iterate is so useful. Because when things don't work, often when we're trying to figure out why they didn't work, we're like making hypotheses, right? So sometimes our hypotheses are wrong and that's okay.
But if you just keep testing and learning, then your effort is not wasted. Your rejection is not for nothing. It can be useful, it can help you see if you need to take a different approach. It can help you see, you know, if you have kind of a bigger system, where are people falling off?
Maybe you've made it to like the final interview 16 times, but you've never gotten the job offer like, then that's the area where we want to examine, and we want to test and learn. Like how do I need to do this differently to get what I want? What can I learn from the way that this has gone?
And I think it's worth saying that sometimes it's not that you've done anything wrong. But you could still learn something if you're not getting what you want. I think we live in a culture that focuses a lot on blame. Whose fault is it?
So if it's someone else's fault, that we're always not getting the job, like if there's some kind of like structural oppression at play, that is worth knowing. And then you can also still ask yourself, though, “Okay, but if I'm not getting what I want and I want this thing, whether it's the new job or whatever, what can I learn? And how can I change to create that for myself, even when I live in a world with structural oppression that does come into play?”
Because I think sometimes, we get into this pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing. Where we act like you can control everything yourself. And I do see that happen a lot in the coaching community. And that's not what I'm saying here.
You can't control everything. There may be people who have sexist thoughts, or racist thoughts, and that might be coming into play. That might be interacting with your efforts, that might be a factor in your rejection. That's part of the world we live in. But I still think you have so much power to create what you want for yourself, even within a world where those things are there.
Even in a world where we're taking into account that those things are there, I still think you can learn. And so maybe you're like, “Okay, I'm applying to a different kind of organization.” Or like, “I'm looking for these key indicators from the companies I'm applying to.” Maybe that they've worked with DE&I, consultants that you really respect, whatever the thing is.
And it's not that you should have to take that on. It's just that I'm really about like, how are you going to get what you want? How could we make that happen? And then do you want to do that work? Even if it's not fair.
So for me, living in the world we live in there's so many things that aren't fair. There's so many systems I think should be different. But if I'm operating within these systems then the question is how can I create more of what I want, and hit my goals even within these systems? And how can I help my clients do the same?
How can I help them deprogram their internalized oppression, so that they're able to deal with the external oppression in a more functional way? Because they can see it as something separate from themselves and they're not experiencing it internally as well.
Again, so many asides. Okay. My third point, exposure helps. The more I experience rejection and then overcome it by continuing my efforts, the more I learn that while rejection may sting, it doesn't have to stop me. And as I said before, overcoming rejection doesn't have to mean getting back to work immediately.
You might want to do a little self-soothing break. You might need to take a day off. You might need to, like every time you send out a resume give yourself, I don't know, like 30 minutes of white space to just be kind to yourself, instead of kind of like getting right back to whatever the effort is that you're trying to get yourself to do.
Take care of yourself. Creating a life and career you want using the tools I talked about on this podcast is not a perfectionistic thing. It's not about constantly working, it is about being willing to take the steps and take the steps and take the steps. But also being willing to take the breaks and take the breaks and take the breaks, right? It's a yes and, y'all.
But seeing rejection as a piece of the whole journey rather than an upsetting dead end can be really useful and it's available to you. And when you use these three, basically mindset re-frames, it's a lot easier to do that.
So again to review them, seeing rejection as a step on the path towards your goal. Figuring out what you can learn from every rejection. And then being willing to experience rejection and become more tolerant to it all the time. Those things are going to help you become, I mean, really, I just said it rejection tolerant.
And I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. Because I do think going after most of what we want in life often does involve some rejection. I mean, maybe for some people it doesn't, for me it certainly has. And even if we don't ever experience actual rejection from other people, I think a lot of times before we even take action we're experiencing, like we're projecting in our brains. We're imagining future scenarios where we get rejected.
I'm going to use a dating example instead of a work example. If you're at a bar and there's somebody you find attractive, and you want to go up and talk to them, I don't know about for y'all, but I'm guessing and definitely for me back in the day when this was a scenario I experienced, ahead of time I would be like, “Well, what if they reject me? What if they're mean to me?”
So even if you live a life with very little actual rejection, most of us are experiencing a lot of mental rejection, whether we're imagining it or narrating it to ourselves. We're not trying to fall in love with it, you don't have to make it your favorite thing.
But just being able to tolerate it when it arises and tolerate the possibility of it is going to give you so much freedom to do whatever the fuck you want to do. And to create whatever career you want and to create whatever life you want.
When you are willing to experience rejection. You can go after anything. And when you're willing to be kind to yourself when you don't get it on the first try, you will have the capacity to keep going and get it or get something else amazing that maybe you find along the path.
In all those studies where they talk to people who are on their deathbeds, they usually talk about how they wish they'd taken more risks. They wish they had been who they are. They wish they had been more authentic. They wish they had tried to do more of what they wanted to do.
Being willing to feel rejection and becoming rejection tolerant is a tool that you can use to take more risks, to try more things, to be more of yourself, and to create a life you love. And I want that to be something that you can have.
So use the tools in this week's podcast and then come find me on Instagram and tell me how it's going. And listen, if you want to supercharge your capacity to tolerate rejection and create a life that blows your fucking mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. So send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and let's talk about it. All right y'all, have a great day.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, happy Wednesday. I hope you're doing well. I am doing well. I just got back from Seattle a few days ago. I went up just for a quick visit, took a few days off work, got to walk in one of my favorite green spaces in Seattle during the visit, which is Lake Ridge Park. Which is this tiny little pocket Park, you can do the whole trail in, I think, less than 30 minutes. It's super cute. It's in South Seattle. If you're in Seattle and want to go check it out it's a really sweet little trail.
I got to do some country dancing, which is my thing that I love. And I have a great community in Seattle. I haven't danced with them since before the pandemic, at The Cuff. Which is an amazing gay leather bar in Seattle. That's where we do our country dancing up there for the LGBTQIA plus community.
So that was amazing. Going country dancing, I’ve said before, it's like my version of church. I feel so connected to this community, I love being there. And it was really wonderful to see them again, especially since now I live in Sacramento, so I'm not going to be dancing with them on the regular.
I went pretty much every Friday for years. So, moving to Sacramento changed that and I'm a little sad about that. Although I'm also happy to live in Sacramento now. I really like it, it turns out. So that's what I've been up to. And now without further ado, let's get into what we're talking about today.
So today, we're talking about rejection. And while this may not be your favorite topic, and it might not seem like a very fun topic, I think it is such an important topic for building a career and life you love. Here's why, unless you already have the exact life and career you want, you're going to need to do some stuff to get to the place where you have the life and career you want.
And anytime we have to make changes and do new things, we're probably going to experience some failure. And we're probably going to experience some rejection. It's not like a hard and fast rule. But just think about if you want a new job, you have to apply to new jobs.
And usually, statistically, we have to apply to a bunch in order to get just the one that we want. Or if you want to stay in your current organization but get a promotion, then you have to have a conversation about that with your supervisor or whoever you need to talk to in your specific organization.
Whatever we want that we don't already have, we have to do something, usually many somethings to try to get it. And along the way we're going to face failure, which we've talked about before. And we're probably going to face rejection.
So recently I was on the Facebook, and yes, I called it the Facebook. I was on the Facebook, and I saw a post in one of the – I don't know, I'm in a bunch of groups for like women in tech, and women in business. And I saw posted one of them about how to handle rejection. And I wrote a comment back. And writing that comment back made me realize I was like, “I want to do an entire podcast on this because it's so important.”
And what the person was talking about was trying to get a new job and just how to handle the actual feeling of rejection. It wasn't a question about strategy, about how to change your cover letters. It was about how to manage the emotional experience of being rejected over and over again.
And that's interesting because sometimes, like when you really look at it, the experience of being rejected actually is an experience kind of like of nothing, right? It's like you send in 15 resumes and you hear nothing. And in our brain, we're like, “Oh, I'm being rejected. That's rejection, no one reached back out to me, so I'm rejected.”
But it is really interesting to pause and just be like, “Okay, but it's also like a lack of something.” A lot of times no one writes back at all, but we still perceive that as rejection. Which I think is really interesting. If the exact same thing was happening on a different day where no one emails us we'd be like, “Cool, no one emailed us.” But if we send out 15 resumes are brain is like, “No one emailed me, and that's a big fucking problem. And I'm terrible. And I'm never going to get a new job and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
So I think that's just a really interesting point, which is going to lead me to my next point. Which is that in a lot of ways rejection is an internal experience. Very rarely in life does someone come and say, “I reject you.” We’re like, “Hey, do you want to go on a date?” And they're like, “No.” Or we're like, “Hey, do you want to hire me?” And they're like, “No.” Or we’re like, “Do you want to go on a date?” And they don't say anything. Or we're like, “Do you want to hire me?” And they don't say anything. Right?
A lot of times, we're not actually getting rejected in a factual way. But inside our heads, we're telling ourselves this really intense narrative of rejection. That we've been rejected and what it means about us, and then we kind of go out into the future about what we think it means about like the rest of the trajectory of our life.
And usually we're like, “Oh, I've been rejected, which means I'm bad. Which means nothing good will ever happen. I'll never get the thing I want.” Whether it's a mate, or a new job, or whatever. And I've experienced this narrative cycle myself many times. So I know it feels terrible while you're in it.
But it's so interesting because, one, it's a totally optional experience. And when I say that, listen y'all, I know it probably doesn't feel optional to you right now. But go with me on this idea that if someone doesn't hire you, it's optional to say to yourself that you've been rejected and you're terrible and you'll never get a job offer.
It's optional and I think we have the correlation backwards. We're like, “Oh, I got rejected, therefore I'm more likely to get rejected later. Therefore, I'm less likely to get what I want in life.” And I'm like, “But what if the opposite is true?”
What if in reality, it's like, “Oh, I've been rejected which means I've actually tried to get what I want, which means I'm actually getting closer. Which means I'm more likely to get a new job.” Because think about it, in order to get a new job you have to, usually, apply for multiple ones and not get them and then get one or maybe get a few offers.
I saw a post on LinkedIn a few months ago, I actually screenshotted it and sent it to a friend of mine who was job searching. And the poster was writing about, I think they had applied for like 65 jobs. And they had only even heard back from like 20. And then they had only gotten interviews for like 7.
But they got one job, and it was a really fucking fantastic job. I think it was like a software development job. And they were saying like, “This is how you get hired as a software engineer, you apply to 65. 45 of whom never say anything to you.”
So think about it, what do you need to do, and have, and be like in order to allow 45 of your job applications to say nothing back to you, but you to keep going? And I do think that when we can see rejection as correlating to success, instead of correlating to failure, it's much easier to keep going.
Okay, so this has been kind of like a tangential introduction. But now that I've done that, I'm going to speak to it, I think, in a little bit more straightforward way. Okay, so how do we deal with rejection? And how do we make ourselves, what when I'm going to call rejection tolerant, so that we can purposely go towards things where we probably will get rejected? But that's part of the path to getting what we want.
Whether what we want as a new job, or whether what we want is a partner, or whether what we want is to make twice as much money per year as we're making now. Like to double our salary or to double our client rates. How do we handle rejection when it arises? How do we make ourselves rejection tolerant so we can go towards it on purpose?
And I want to say that I actually deal with rejection a lot more now that I run my own business. It is about getting clients and getting opportunities versus when I was in corporate, it would have been like getting a raise, or getting a new job, or getting to work on a project I wanted to work on.
And, of course, in my personal life there has been all kinds of rejection available to me. Whether it's romantic or even trying to be friends with someone and getting rejected. That shit happens.
But I think I used to be rejection averse, which I think a lot of people are. And I think that can seem like it's really safe and a good idea. But what it does is it keeps you stuck, and it keeps you trapped, and it keeps you small.
I mean, if you already have a big, beautiful life, maybe not. And I did have a beautiful life and it was big in many ways. But also there were so many things I was always not trying because trying them might have involved being rejected.
When I left corporate to launch my coaching business, I had to basically turn that around like 100%, or like 180 degrees, I guess. And go towards rejection all the time. Because when you're an entrepreneur, that's how you get business, right? You ask people if they want to hire you. And a lot of them say no.
And every time someone said no, if I made that mean I was never going to be successful, which listen, I did a lot in the first few years and I do sometimes still. But the more I can bring myself back to this other idea that I'm teaching today, that rejection actually correlates to success, the more I have the energy and the capacity to keep going when I've been rejected a lot.
Here is how I view rejection that makes it easier to handle, easier to go towards, and that makes me more rejection tolerant. And that can make you more rejection tolerant. And a lot of these are going to be things I already touched on, but I'm going to go through them one by one so that you have them in an organized way. Because I know that the way my brain explains things can be very tangential. And I go through things really fast.
So I want to kind of reiterate so you can get a complete picture. One, I see rejection is a step on the path towards my goal. Rejection is always moving me forward as long as the rejections I'm gathering are in the direction of where I want to go. If I'm getting rejected, that means I'm doing something, and that's good.
If you're getting rejected, the question is, are these rejections moving me towards what I want? We're not out here trying to gather up willy-nilly rejections, although that can be a great exercise too if you want to just get rejection tolerant.
I think there was this guy who wrote a book a few years ago where he just did this thing where he just started like asking people for all this random and like really interesting, intense stuff. One of them was like he asked these people if he could play soccer in their backyard.
And the point was to get rejected. But one of the things he discovered was that a lot of people actually said yes. So that can be a way to get rejection tolerant. I'm personally more a fan of pick rejections that go towards your goal. Because then you can see every rejection is getting you closer and closer to where you want to go.
Like, you can see it as like 100 steps laid out before you and maybe 10 of those steps are the thing you want. Like a new client would be the thing for me. But maybe for you it's a date with someone you think is like interesting and funny and attractive. Or it could be a job interview, whatever, a new job offer.
You get to see every rejection is a step on the path. And I think a great mathematical breakdown is be willing to do like at least 9 or 10 projections for every visible step that actually is one that you want towards your goal. That's not mathematically accurate in any way, but I think it's galvanizing and helps you keep showing up if you've had like three or four rejections to be like, “Nope, this is normal, this is fine. Just keep going.”
And for some people sometimes it's a lot more than 9 or 10, right? There's always the famous examples of authors who sent out their book like 25 times and had it rejected before the 26th time someone accepted it. And now they're like a multi- bajillionaire, right?
There's so many examples like this. So there really is no amount of rejections in which it's now time to give up. It's just a question of do you want to keep moving towards your goal or not? And are you willing to feel the pain and discomfort of rejection and keep going?
That maybe sounds kind of harsh, but I've realized I am, and I think I do have a really exceptional life now. And I think there's a lot of factors in there, right? Obviously, I also have a lot of privilege and a lot of things working in my favor.
But I think when it comes down to why my business is successful, it's also because I was willing to feel rejection over and over and over again and keep going towards what I wanted. And not in a perfectionistic way, right? Sometimes I lay on the floor and cry and then I get back to it later.
See, even when I tried to be straightforward with a list with y'all, it's all asides. Okay, so to review, number one was see rejection as a step on the path towards your goal. So the rejection is already useful. Number two is, you can ask yourself, what could you learn from that rejection to help you achieve your goal?
So let's just say you did send out 15 resumes and not hear back on any of them. That is data, that's information. What can we learn from that? Maybe the way we're sending out resumes is not the most useful way. Maybe there's some kind of other step we need to take.
These rejections are not wasted effort, we just need to get the learning out. Whatever the learning is, we need to pull the learning out of them. And sometimes we have to be a little bit like testing and learning, right? We're like, “Well, maybe it was this.” And then we try something else with the next 10 resumes and no one writes back to those. So we're like, “Okay, maybe it was this. Maybe it was this.”
And just continuing to test and learn and try new things and iterate is so useful. Because when things don't work, often when we're trying to figure out why they didn't work, we're like making hypotheses, right? So sometimes our hypotheses are wrong and that's okay.
But if you just keep testing and learning, then your effort is not wasted. Your rejection is not for nothing. It can be useful, it can help you see if you need to take a different approach. It can help you see, you know, if you have kind of a bigger system, where are people falling off?
Maybe you've made it to like the final interview 16 times, but you've never gotten the job offer like, then that's the area where we want to examine, and we want to test and learn. Like how do I need to do this differently to get what I want? What can I learn from the way that this has gone?
And I think it's worth saying that sometimes it's not that you've done anything wrong. But you could still learn something if you're not getting what you want. I think we live in a culture that focuses a lot on blame. Whose fault is it?
So if it's someone else's fault, that we're always not getting the job, like if there's some kind of like structural oppression at play, that is worth knowing. And then you can also still ask yourself, though, “Okay, but if I'm not getting what I want and I want this thing, whether it's the new job or whatever, what can I learn? And how can I change to create that for myself, even when I live in a world with structural oppression that does come into play?”
Because I think sometimes, we get into this pull yourself up by your bootstraps thing. Where we act like you can control everything yourself. And I do see that happen a lot in the coaching community. And that's not what I'm saying here.
You can't control everything. There may be people who have sexist thoughts, or racist thoughts, and that might be coming into play. That might be interacting with your efforts, that might be a factor in your rejection. That's part of the world we live in. But I still think you have so much power to create what you want for yourself, even within a world where those things are there.
Even in a world where we're taking into account that those things are there, I still think you can learn. And so maybe you're like, “Okay, I'm applying to a different kind of organization.” Or like, “I'm looking for these key indicators from the companies I'm applying to.” Maybe that they've worked with DE&I, consultants that you really respect, whatever the thing is.
And it's not that you should have to take that on. It's just that I'm really about like, how are you going to get what you want? How could we make that happen? And then do you want to do that work? Even if it's not fair.
So for me, living in the world we live in there's so many things that aren't fair. There's so many systems I think should be different. But if I'm operating within these systems then the question is how can I create more of what I want, and hit my goals even within these systems? And how can I help my clients do the same?
How can I help them deprogram their internalized oppression, so that they're able to deal with the external oppression in a more functional way? Because they can see it as something separate from themselves and they're not experiencing it internally as well.
Again, so many asides. Okay. My third point, exposure helps. The more I experience rejection and then overcome it by continuing my efforts, the more I learn that while rejection may sting, it doesn't have to stop me. And as I said before, overcoming rejection doesn't have to mean getting back to work immediately.
You might want to do a little self-soothing break. You might need to take a day off. You might need to, like every time you send out a resume give yourself, I don't know, like 30 minutes of white space to just be kind to yourself, instead of kind of like getting right back to whatever the effort is that you're trying to get yourself to do.
Take care of yourself. Creating a life and career you want using the tools I talked about on this podcast is not a perfectionistic thing. It's not about constantly working, it is about being willing to take the steps and take the steps and take the steps. But also being willing to take the breaks and take the breaks and take the breaks, right? It's a yes and, y'all.
But seeing rejection as a piece of the whole journey rather than an upsetting dead end can be really useful and it's available to you. And when you use these three, basically mindset re-frames, it's a lot easier to do that.
So again to review them, seeing rejection as a step on the path towards your goal. Figuring out what you can learn from every rejection. And then being willing to experience rejection and become more tolerant to it all the time. Those things are going to help you become, I mean, really, I just said it rejection tolerant.
And I think that's a worthwhile endeavor. Because I do think going after most of what we want in life often does involve some rejection. I mean, maybe for some people it doesn't, for me it certainly has. And even if we don't ever experience actual rejection from other people, I think a lot of times before we even take action we're experiencing, like we're projecting in our brains. We're imagining future scenarios where we get rejected.
I'm going to use a dating example instead of a work example. If you're at a bar and there's somebody you find attractive, and you want to go up and talk to them, I don't know about for y'all, but I'm guessing and definitely for me back in the day when this was a scenario I experienced, ahead of time I would be like, “Well, what if they reject me? What if they're mean to me?”
So even if you live a life with very little actual rejection, most of us are experiencing a lot of mental rejection, whether we're imagining it or narrating it to ourselves. We're not trying to fall in love with it, you don't have to make it your favorite thing.
But just being able to tolerate it when it arises and tolerate the possibility of it is going to give you so much freedom to do whatever the fuck you want to do. And to create whatever career you want and to create whatever life you want.
When you are willing to experience rejection. You can go after anything. And when you're willing to be kind to yourself when you don't get it on the first try, you will have the capacity to keep going and get it or get something else amazing that maybe you find along the path.
In all those studies where they talk to people who are on their deathbeds, they usually talk about how they wish they'd taken more risks. They wish they had been who they are. They wish they had been more authentic. They wish they had tried to do more of what they wanted to do.
Being willing to feel rejection and becoming rejection tolerant is a tool that you can use to take more risks, to try more things, to be more of yourself, and to create a life you love. And I want that to be something that you can have.
So use the tools in this week's podcast and then come find me on Instagram and tell me how it's going. And listen, if you want to supercharge your capacity to tolerate rejection and create a life that blows your fucking mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. So send me an email at hello@korilinn.com and let's talk about it. All right y'all, have a great day.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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