Best way to handle rejection…
Is it really rejection or is it refinement? Whatever your particular field of business or work you will recognize the awful moments when what we offer is not well received. Our brain handles negative situations quite differently than positive situations, thankfully we tend to ‘forget’ negative things over time and remember good things. Were it not that way we would all be basket cases! The simple fact is that we get rejected more than we are accepted, in fact those with an entrepreneurial mindset get rejected on a daily basis! There is an old sales saying which goes something like this; ‘you are always either heading for a storm, in a storm or just leaving a storm’. Very true. Our understanding of rejection in business determines our future actions and possibly our success. Many times the same situation will be viewed differently depending upon where you sit. Take the recent French Open tennis final between Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic, Rafa won his ninth French Open in the past ten years! Novak lost to him for the third time in four years or so. Both had the same experience in the sense that they shared a tennis ball, a tennis court, an umpire and a crowd but one of them was feeling rejected by the experience and one fulfilled by it. As we hear all the time from losing sportsmen and women, ‘we have to take the positives out of today’s result’. Our challenge as business people is to recognize that a rejection is just one step closer to an acceptance and we should embrace this glorious failure because it means we are on the road to success. If we lick our wounds and harbor grudges we will only hurt ourselves, with nearly 7 billion people on the planet why ever would we get bogged down by the rejection of one person?
We all must fail in order to succeed, if we don’t fail we will never truly understand how we succeeded. I once worked with a couple of company owners who had accidently stumbled across a successful product. They became very successful and reaped great financial rewards. As time passed the novelty of the product and their total lack of understanding of how to run a business came back to bite them…… in a big way! Due to the fact that they had only slipstreamed something they did not understand they had no idea how to support the business and grow the company properly, they had not gone through the painful process of failing many times when the company was small and therefore never learned how to rationalise or protect developments as things deteriorated. The result was a failed business and much financial hardship for those who had supported them, sadly they remain resolutely arrogant about the course of events but life is like that sometimes I say,’fail often, fail happily and fail humbly’, for it is in doing so that you will ultimately succeed. Whatever your goals and dreams…chase them with a vigour and passion that they deserve, if there are those who try to push you off course by rejecting your vision ..ignore them.
There, a little bit of emotional stuff before you leave the theatre!
See you on the long and winding road……. Patrick
