Rewriting rejection
Rejection. Everyone’s experienced it from time to time, and the more intentional and ambitious we are in our lives, the more we open ourselves to the vulnerability of experiencing rejection.
So how can we learn to better cope with the difficult and inevitable fact of failure? For me, I often fall back on this idea …
The failure is making you.
I have to confess that this is just an adaptation of a concept from Glennon Doyle’s fantastic book Untamed. In her book, she talks a lot about the purpose of feelings and emotions, particularly pain. The pain, she says, will make you — if you let it. If you’re brave enough to sit in it. If you think of it, the failure of rejection is a specific type of pain. Often it’s a particularly difficult one because it’s a type of pain that by default requires intimacy. It isn’t a private failure experienced by yourself alone. It’s failure with an audience. It happens when you make an offering to an individual or group, and they in some way say “no”.
But, what if we reframe this type of pain? What if we instead learn to look at it and tell ourselves a different story? That’s the invitation that leadership expert and public speaker Darryll Stinson shares in his TedTalk “Overcoming Rejection”. In his speech, Stinson talks first about how rejection is often a projection of the vulnerabilities and fears of the person who rejected you. It some ways, it says more about the state of mind of the person rejecting you, than it does about you or your work.
Ever been body-shamed by a person for something that you never thought of as a problem? As hurt as you may be in that moment, the person making that judgment about you likely turns that same lens on themselves. If you think about it that way, your perspective on the person who’s judging you shifts. They are no longer a victimizer, but a victim of their own internalized beliefs. They might have hurt you briefly, but they may be hurting constantly.
Another way we can shift our thinking about rejection is to see it as protection. A talented athlete, Stinson’s dreams of fame and fortune in the NFL were dashed when he seriously injured his back in college. At first, he refused to accept this redirection from the universe. He signed a waiver and began two years of painful physical therapy at great risk to his own health in order to regain the future he felt he’d lost.
That path led him to his lowest point. He was admitted to a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide by starvation. He lost sixty pounds in only four weeks. It was only then that he began the difficult path of reconciling himself with reality. He’s glad now that he did. His life as a motivational speaker and speech coach has brought him more joy and satisfaction than sports ever did.
What’s the most painful rejection you’ve ever had to deal with? Instead of making that rejection a story about your own inadequacy, how do you think it could be a story of the vulnerability and fear of the person who rejected you? How do you think that rejection may have protected or redirected you to something new?
Or, are you still hanging on to the pain of that experience? What would your life look like if you processed it, and it made you stronger?
