How to Handle the Rejection?

It is not an easy task to handle rejection and especially when one faces it too often. Rejection can be faced on different aspects of life, like personal or professional front. Sometimes you call up your friends to meet up but the response you get is not good enough, this is a rejection in the form of non-reciprocated efforts from your friend. It is quite obvious that rejection can be a downer when one is expecting a positive outcome. We all know that nobody likes to receive a “no” when they could have got “yes” instead. Dealing with rejection in the right way can affect your life up to a great extent.

People do not understand that rejection is part of your growth, whether it is personal relationships, work or life in whole. As you move ahead in life you will realize that one cannot avoid rejection in order to make a true development rather one should learn to deal with rejection in a positive way. Rejection helps in learning more about yourself and uncovers your blind spots which ultimately lead to growth of the individual.

The only way you can avoid rejection is to get yourself tightly packed in a box and stay in your comfort zone as you might fail to breathe by default. But one should know that they are capable of much more and this is not the kind of life you wanted. If you stop taking chances the probability of succeeding is also decreased. So, if you need to succeed in life then you will have to face the rejection on the front rather just running away from it or getting depressed about it. Rejection is not easy to handle but here are few tips on how to make it a little manageable.

Do not take it personally – suppose you approach a person and open up yourself and finally getting a rejection makes you feel that they have rejected you. This makes you take rejections on the personal level. When one gets rejected for things that are important to him makes him feel bad. He wonders what might have been wrong with that they rejected me, is there anything else I could have done to please them or am I not capable enough. Things like this keep revolving in his mind. This gives him a sense of self-doubt which is not at all good for the growth of the person.

But you need to understand that these kinds of thoughts are not going to help you in any case rather they will just make you feel bad about yourself. No matter for whatever reason you have faced the rejection, it is the request which is being rejected and not you. The request you made is not a representation of yourself rather just an extension of your thoughts. You need to understand that these are completely 2 different things. Rejections are not meant to be personal. They give you a reflection about the other individual and tells you how your request does not fulfil his demands and not about you. Once you have taken out yourself from the equation you will feel a lot better and will finally realise that many of your emotional responses were unnecessary.

Expect the Rejection – anticipation of the rejection helps you in two ways. Firstly, it will put a challenge in front of you to set up a high benchmark in your respective field. As you are already expecting rejection you will put your best foot forward and will cross the boundaries. This automatically increases your chances of receiving “yes”. Secondly, as you are already prepared to face rejection, you will not go through much emotional depression after it. Things will be much better is you had already anticipated your rejection.

This method should be taken in a strict positive sense and one should not start thinking that the world is not good anymore and no one will accept my proposals. It should encourage a doom-gloom worldview. The main motto of this method is that you should be prepared for the worst while giving your best. The rejection should become your driving force to do something better and put you to procrastinating things instead.

Keep up your Focus of Control – there are basically two types of focus in life- internal and external focus. External focus refers to something which is not in our control, outside our sphere of influence, for instance society, environment, colleagues and the outside world. Internal focus refers to something which is inside our sphere of control such as our feelings, thoughts, emotions, behaviour, action etc.

An individual possessing the focus of control on the external factors will see the world as the sole controller of whole universe, one might feel that he has no say in his life and every other individual governs his life. However, on the other hand an individual possessing internal focus of control will see him as the only one determining the reality of his life. He thinks that he has the power to do whatever he wishes to do.

Most of the people adopt high external focus at the time of rejection which results into lower self-confidence. This leads them to thinking that they are lousy, incapable and even worthless. But this kind of addressing to the situation will not help you rather other people will start thinking that you are actually worthless. This also leads to relinquishment of power in the hands of others. This is not good and you do not definitely want this to happen.

The prime way to defeat rejection is to sustain your focus of control. In life you will get a lot of negative criticism but that does not mean you surrender yourself. Rather you should focus on the areas where you can improve and ultimately lead to some action. Questions like “what can you do improve the situation? What did you learn from this experience? How are you going to utilise this learning? What will be your next step in the process of growth?” should come into your mind. Increase on focus on actions will increase your power on yourself and your life.