Nobody is going to congratulate you for beating yourself up

Rejection is a neutral construct.

It’s like tofu, in that it takes on the flavor of whatever sauce it’s immersed in. To paraphrase the great playwright, there is nothing either good or bad, but obsessing makes it so.

Imagine the person who applies for a position as a creative director at a small company. She jumps through all the typical hiring hoops, fills out the application, comes in for an interview, meets the team, completes the test assignment, and even submits multiple references.

But after two weeks of deliberation, the company ultimately decides not to move forward with her application.

Has that ever happened to you before? How resilient was your response?

Most of us creatives, who are highly sensitive and dramatic people prone to obsessive thinking, would do the following.

We’d worry ourselves sick for two weeks, get our expectations up about the dream job, stalk our potential coworkers on social media, keep refreshing the inbox on our phone every fifteen minutes, and ultimately take the rejection as a personal affront to our value as a human being, growing more bitter and cynical.

Having done that exact routine many times before, let me just say, it’s not worth the stress. Nobody is going to congratulate you for beating yourself up about being rejected.

Prolific creators, on the other hand, would approach the situation differently.

By the time they walked out of that first job interview, they would have already moved on. In fact, by the time they received their rejection letter two weeks later, they would have forgotten all about that opportunity, as they already applied for two hundred more jobs since then.

Having done that routine many times before, let me just say, it’s way more fulfilling. When you respond to setbacks with an optimistic narrative, rejection becomes one of those things that’s neither here nor there.

Because you know that if somebody rejects you, that’s their problem, not yours. If people fail to see your worth, that doesn’t diminish your value. All it does is rob them of the opportunity to experience it.

It’s their loss. They had the chance to say yes and benefit from your unique talents, and they passed.

This narrative reinforces the idea that your true value is within you, not out there somewhere for a hiring manager to give to you. Your assessment of proper authority is moving from the outside locus back within your own right thinking mind.

What narrative are you telling yourself about failure? Are you letting disappointments knock you out of the game before you even get a chance to play it?

Just remember the tofu. Know that rejection is neutral construct.

It doesn’t suck, your feelings about it suck. What matters is the response to it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some job applications to fill out.

Do you require the support and input of strangers to sustain yourself?