Alpha Framing: Rejection

Westend61

There’s a special kind of deep-seated hatred that wells up in you when you work really hard on something, put forth your best effort, and it still doesn’t work out right. You get your best suit, meticulously plot out your strategies, go to the interview, dazzle your potential employer with the best freaking answers they’ve ever heard, and then…they don’t call back.

Or, hell, maybe you know exactly what you did to screw up your chances at that job, or with that article, or during that presentation. Maybe you froze up, choked, missed a deadline. Maybe, maybe, maybe—it feels like rejection on any level springs up a whole crock of maybes that keep haunting you for days and weeks and it eventually gets to a point where you’d rather just get smashed on vodka and Red Bull and forget what your face feels like.

You always hear that lame advice whenever something you do screws up. “This just makes you stronger,” people will say, or, “You’ll kill it next time,” or, “How did you get into my house after I changed the locks?”

The truth is, there are valuable lessons to be learned from rejection and failure. The common adage has it that you learn more from failure than you do from success, and that makes sense. When you kick ass at something, there’s nothing in the back of your mind pointing out what you can fix, or improve on, because you won! It’s time to celebrate! If you have an interview,and a week later you have a job, why would you look back on the interview looking for things to improve for next time? If you send a story or an article to a magazine, and it gets accepted, why bother checking for errors? You’re done. Victory is yours. Time to move on to the next stage.

It’s much more likely that you’re going to check yourself (before you wrickity-wreck…oh, never mind) for what to fix when your strategy doesn’t work. It’s human nature. Something doesn’t work out, you want to know why. You want to know what you should do to prevent this from happening again, because rejection sucks. It hurts. It’s humiliating. We feel like our entire lives are useless wastes of time, and why would anybody want to bother with us when we can’t even—

Stop. Stop that right now.

Here’s how you learn from failure and rejection: all those feelings of humiliation and dejection? That sense of self-loathing? Ignore it. It isn’t helping. It’s just setting you up to fail again, because your brain is the enemy and it wants to see you writhe in agony. Ever notice that when you’re in a bad mood, everything seems to go wrong? That’s your brain, reminding you of things that you’d be able to ignore if you were in a good mood.

A hypothetical: you wake up late. You’re scrambling to get out the door on time. You forget your wallet. You can’t get on the bus.  You have to call in to work and tell them you’ll be late. You forgot your phone. You have to walk back home.

After a morning like that, every slightest little thing that goes wrong for the rest of the day is going to feel like salt rubbed into an open wound, and it’s going to be the worst day ever.

A second hypothetical: you wake up on time. You grab your things. You head out the door, you show up to work on time.

After a morning like that…well. Anything could happen. It’s just a normal day. You’ll suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without noticing, because hey. Stuff like that happens sometimes. No big deal.

Once you realize that your mind is playing tricks on you, forcing you to stay in a bad mood because it’s just a sadist that way, it’s much easier to actually learn from rejection. That’s the thing. If you actually want to become a better person, and actually kill it next time, then you can’t let yourself get distracted by depression and self-deprecation.

Advice is helpful, and this is especially true if it comes from the person who’s rejected you (in the case of a magazine or interviewer). Of course, this isn’t necessarily going to be the case if we’re dealing with, say, a girl you’ve asked out or a failed relationship. But it’s certainly not a bad idea to seek out advice. Just the same, it is a bad idea to be beholden to that advice. Don’t go changing your entire lifestyle because you think that’s the reason things didn’t work out.

You hear talk of “being true to yourself,” and at the risk of sounding like a public service announcement, I’m going to mention that here: it seriously is important. And that’s one lesson you can learn through failure and rejection, because you have to evaluate, and analyze, and in that process you learn exactly what’s important to you. You learn what you’re passionate about, what makes you happy, what makes you miserable. This can lead to seriously life-changing realizations. Now, sure, those can be frightening, and uncomfortable, but they can also be invigorating and a huge relief.

Failure and rejection are inevitable. Embracing that truth doesn’t have to be a depressing admission. Rather, it can be instrumental in preparing for and learning from it. Next time an interview doesn’t go well, or a piece of your work isn’t accepted, or if a relationship doesn’t work out, don’t think of it as anything less than a learning experience. So