Rejection is your friend... Really?

I was myself a job seeker once and I have been consistently involved with applying for and securing short-term contracts ever since I started my own venture. I call it ‘hands-on job searching’ and it’s quite rewarding sharing my experience with professionals who have hired me as their mentor. No matter at what stage of your career you are on, I can easily conclude that searching a job is a full-time job in itself unless that is if you have skills that are highly sought after or you are one of the few people in an industry where workers are always in demand.

Getting a job is never easy especially when you are trying for that first break in a new work environment. As a job seeker, you are constantly riddled by job descriptions, employers’ cultures, the skills gap and inaccessible recruiters (some of them love playing god) adding up to making job hunting an often unpleasant and frustrating experience.

It’s easy for anyone to relate to the emotions of fear, anger, shame, confusion and dejection. Every job seeker including me has felt these emotions in isolation or in a combination of more than one at different stages of the hiring process when faced with a rejection. Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant – it always hurts and usually hurts more than we expect it to.

Rejection makes us feel sad and disappointed but there’s a unique ‘coping mechanism’ in us human beings! Every time we fail or when we are rejected or when we lose, we tend to rerun the whole situation in our heads again and again with a different result. With a result of being the WINNER every time.

“Oh, I could’ve done this” or “I should’ve said that”.

On an average, we would run and rerun the situation 7-10 times in our heads with us being the winner every time. For a situation that you lost and were rejected for, you end up having 3-4 different answers and alternatives that you could’ve used to be a winner.

We tend to remember these 3-4 answers and we feel, if we come across the situation again, we are READY!! It’s surprising how we feel more confident after winning the battle in our heads and we charge ourselves up for the next encounter.

With confidence, you enter the next interaction/interview thinking you have answers for what went wrong the last time and you’re prepared to unleash your winning answers.

Lo and behold, this time you get rejected for an altogether new reason that you didn’t prepare for. This reason for rejection is completely different from the last time.

You come back home and again rerun the situation in your mind and become a winner. In this process, you have other 3-4 answers ready in your mind.

In other words, every rejection is equipping you with answers and slowly you reach a level of confidence where you either have a readymade answer or you can spontaneously create an answer based on 15-20 answers you have in your repository.

Be conscious and be aware of your feelings when you’re getting rejected and how are you turning yourself into a winner while you are running and rerunning that situation in your head. Soon you will realise, rejection is your friend. It’s not something you should fear. 

No, I am not suggesting you should go searching for rejection but if it happens, which it will; embrace it and be open to learning from it, like you would treat your friend.