What if rejection is redirection?

We’ve all been there. You ask out that person that you can’t get out of your mind, and they say no. You apply for that dream job, and it’s a no. You apply for a loan, or make an offer on a new house, or negotiate on a car, and it’s a no. You send in a proposal, apply to the university you would love to get into, send in an article to a big publication, and they say no. Rejection. It’s stings. Sometimes, it deflates you so much that you simply want to give up.

None of us get through life without being rejected along the way. For some, the rejection may have started early in life. You may have felt rejected by your parents, or your family, or your friends. For others, you are so used to getting a yes to everything you ask for, that the first rejection floors you completely.

When I started working with my coach, she introduced me to Steve Chandler’s work. Something he says often is, “yes lives in the land of no”. Even though I understood what that means, it took me about a year to really understand it at a deeper level – at an experiential level. Basically, the premise is this: if you get rejected often enough, someone will eventually say yes. So, if you keep asking, eventually, you will get a yes. In fact, you often have to work through a number of no’s to get to that yes.

In fact, Steve Chandler doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a rejection. Here is what he says about rejection:

“That is a made-up, soap opera intensifier that we put on a very neutral event.  So, if I invite someone to enroll with me into something, I want them to be able to say yes or no.  I’m not forcing them.  I’m not going to be upset when they say no. NO is just information, just as “yes” is information.”

See, what makes us feel so “devastated” when someone says “no”, is the story we tell ourselves about the no. The no itself remains neutral, until we add our own story to it. Steve says there is an important distinction to keep in mind here. No-one can reject YOU. You can FEEL rejected, but no-one can reject you. “A simple no is not rejection.  It’s simply a human being mouthing the word “no” or e-mailing the words, “no thank you.” There is no rejection in that until I add it as a feeling.”

Then it becomes this story of rejection you tell yourself. And you make it mean something about who you are or what you’re capable of, and before you know it, you avoid asking again, in case you get rejected again.

However, if you had kept the distinction in your mind that you were not rejected. You simply received a no, then it doesn’t have to stop you from asking again. If you keep this distinction in mind, you can get as many no’s as you want without making it mean anything. And you will eventually get a yes, simply because yes is the other side of the same coin as no.

By the way, Steve Chandler also has a problem with people using the word “devastated” when they describe how it felt to them when they received a no on something. You see, the word “devastated” means to destroy or ruin; very much like an earthquake, volcano, or tornado would flatten houses to the ground and completely destroy a town. If you were truly devastated after every no you received, you would cease to exist. So again, it’s an overdramatic “soap opera intensifier” you are using, because you are still here, even after the no.

Jia Jiang’s rejection experiment is the most beautiful demonstration of this. Jiang explains that he lived most of his life in fear of rejection. It became quite debilitating to him. He was so scared of getting a no when he asked for something, that he would sometimes run away before he could even hear someone’s answer.

So, he took a bold step and decided to run a rejection experiment. He would get rejected for 100 days and blog about his experiences.

On the first day of the experiment, he asked a stranger if he could borrow $100 and he ran away when the person said no, without even answering a question the person has asked him. He had recorded this interaction and could review it. And he saw how frightened he was. So, he made a commitment to himself to not run; to simply stay engaged.

And he was amazed at what he discovered. If he stayed engaged for long enough and simply asked why the person said no to his request, he discovered that it was almost never about him. He was simply making up a story in his own head that it was bout him. Most of the time, the no came from something he couldn’t have anticipated. And sometimes if he stayed engaged long enough, he could even turn a no into a yes.

He also found that if he expressed the other person’s concerns, by for example asking, “Is that weird?”, he won their trust and people relaxed and the conversation flowed better. What was most surprising was that he often then got a yes, even when he made a weird request.

On the third day of his experiment, he got his first yes. And it blew him away, because he had expected a no and was totally surprised by the yes. He had gone into a doughnut store and asked if he could get a set of doughnuts that look like the Olympic Rings. The doughnut maker had taken his request seriously, carefully designed the Olympic Rings on paper, and then made him his set of doughnut rings as requested.

When you stay open for long enough, people might surprise you. And there is always a yes around the corner somewhere, because yes really does live in the land of no.

Something else that is important to keep in mind here, is that life doesn’t always give us what we WANT, but we always get what we NEED. So, sometimes you get a no, because what you really need in that moment, IS a no, and there is a bigger and even better yes awaiting you down the road.

I recall many years ago when I was still eagerly trying to get my first full-time teaching job at a university. I was teaching part-time at my alma mater, and I had applied five times for a full-time position. I got rejected over and over. On the last application, they had said a partial yes with a whole lot of absurd and unreasonable requests that made it really difficult for me to say yes to their offer.

At the same time, I got invited to interview at another university. I hadn’t even considered applying somewhere else, because I had my heart set on working where I was at the time. Little did I know how that one interview would change the course of my life.

It was a daunting panel interview with senior faculty members calling in from Australia. I left there not knowing if I would get a call-back and within an hour, they phoned me with a job offer that far exceeded the job offer I had gotten from my alma mater. They saw my potential and were willing to bet on me. And it changed my life and my career trajectory in ways that I could not have anticipated at the time.

Had I become despondent or taken the rejections seriously or personally, I may have never applied for the job I eventually took. I may have quit trying to teach altogether. Somehow, life knew before I did, that there was something bigger and better waiting for me.

The benefit of working in higher education, is that you become more resilient to receiving negative feedback and to being rejected. A big part of my job involved research and writing and then submitting my articles to academic journals for publication. And there, you build the resilience for rejection, because your work gets rejected over and over and over. And there are many reworks before something is accepted for publication.

For anyone who has ever pursued a post-graduate qualification, you also know that rejection is part of the game. You submit a proposal. It gets rejected. You try again. You do your defence to obtain approval for your research. You get rejected. You try again. You write up your research and submit it for publication. And it gets rejected. And you try again.

Someone else who has been rejected many times and still managed to create huge success in her career, is Dorie Clark. When she got started and wanted to reinvent herself to be recognised as a speaker and a writer, she got rejected over an over by the publications she was reaching out to. Somehow the rejections fuelled her enthusiasm and she kept trying until they eventually said yes. No was simply not part of her vocabulary.

There are some career paths where rejection is just simply part of the job, and you learn to use the rejection and accompanying feedback to hone your craft. Stand-up comedians and actors can tell us a lot about the world of rejection. There is not an actor or comedian out there who has not faced rejection on their career path.

And the ones who eventually reach the pinnacle of their careers, are the ones who use the rejection as leverage to get better, to keep honing their skill, to keep going. And through sheer determination and persistence, they eventually get offered the role of a lifetime or they get their “lucky” break. Only they know that they had to actively participate in creating their “luck”, by not taking any of it personally, and by staying open to the feedback that would help them get better, and by being willing to stretch themselves more than they thought possible.

Something I learned from my coach, is that sometimes when you get a no, you were saved from something. So, instead of being upset about the no, be grateful that you were potentially saved from an experience that would not have served you. For me, when I think about my failed romantic relationships and the person I eventually married, I’m grateful for the rejections, because it led me to the partner I have now and the life I’ve created with him. If I didn’t get rejected along the way, my life could have been so different.

So, even if in the moment, the rejection feels so personal, remember that it is not. Over the years I’ve learnt that I’m not everyone’s flavour. It used to bother me when I was younger – as it bothers all of us between the ages of 8 and 25. You see, between the ages of 8 and 25, we care most about what others thing of us, and being rejected or not belonging hurts like hell. But over time, as we mature, we learn who our people are. We learn who we are. And we realise that we aren’t everyone’s flavour. And that is ok. You are not supposed to be everyone’s flavour. That would make life so boring.

So, it’s ok. It doesn’t matter what others think of you. It only matters what YOU think of you. Do you like who you are becoming and how you are being in the world? If not, then there might be room to work on some things. But, if you like how you are showing up, and it doesn’t rock someone else’s world, then that says more about who they are being in the world, than what it says about you.

I love what Jimmy Dean says about this: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” If I accept that rejection is merely a redirection, then it’s akin to adjusting my sails to the changing winds. There are many paths to the same destination, and sometimes things don’t happen the way you want them to, because something else is actually happening FOR you at a much deeper level. All you’ve got to do, is to learn from the feedback and to keep going.

References:

1. Chandler, S. (2011). Yes in the land of no. Mindshift. Available online at: https://www.imindshift.com/my_weblog/2011/03/yes-in-the-land-of-no.html
2. Jiang, J. (2015). What I learned from 100 days of rejection. TEDx Mount Hood, Oregon. Available online at: https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection?language=en#t-917338