Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Rejection and Resilience

9/4/2017

4 Comments

 
What do you mean, don’t take it personally? Putting yourself out there is a personal risk. Actors try out, singers audition, writers query, job hunters apply, politicians run for office. Where do you get the resilience to persist through rejections, defeats, and bad reviews for the sake of the risk that pans out?

“Maybe it won’t work out. But maybe seeing if it does will be the best adventure ever.” This quote’s been showing up anonymously on social media, and I love it. One source of resilience for me is a sense of curiosity, exploration, and growth. I can learn through every encounter, so none of it goes to waste.

Paradoxically, another source of resilience is to get over myself—to remember I’m one of many and none of us is perfect. As I wrote last October, belief in oneself can mean belief in one’s ability to improve, to keep honing one’s craft. Rejection can serve as a sharpening tool.

​How do you bounce back from rejection? Please comment to share what works for you.
4 Comments
Rhonda Peterson
9/4/2017 02:09:18 pm

Related to jobs and work proposals, remembering times when I was on the other side of the fence in a hiring position, and was faced with a stack or resumes in which there were more qualified candidates than I wanted to interview.

In my current work at a consulting firm, we respond to quite a few RFPs. When we don't get the contract and there's an opportunity to get feedback, I take it to learn how we were perceived. It's always useful to find out how what I thought we were communicating actually got across!

I think personal rejections are a different matter, though. I'll be interested to read any ideas for bouncing back there!

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Sarah link
9/4/2017 09:02:03 pm

It's nice to hear the other side, that rejection doesn't have to mean one didn't measure up - it's just that lots of other people measured up, too. In querying agents, the most common response is either a form letter or nothing. Any individualized feedback is a treasure, even when it's packaged with a rejection.

The line between professional and personal rejections can be thin. Criticism of one's art feels the same sort of icky as criticism of one's child. The best I can do is that personal rejections are more subjective, so (if it's not a sphere where I can take feedback and improve) I'll try to tell myself it's more about them than about me.

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Lisa
9/5/2017 05:03:14 pm

In terms of job rejection, I can only think of one potential client who didn't hire me. And when he wrote to me that he wasn't going to, I was relieved, and realized I didn't want to work for him anyway, but I had not yet formulated that in my own head, or why. He told me flat out during the interview that everything was going to be rush work anyway. So in a way maybe that was a personal rejection, because it wasn't a rejection of a creation of mine? He rejected ME before there was a creation to reject.

A creation being just a piece of me... not the whole, and he locked out any chance that I could please him and ... make a creation for him. But at any rate, I was glad. I hope he found someone else.

But as far as rejection of my creation, you know, my work creations reflect and present my CLIENT, not me. So if they reject an idea of mine, it's because I have not clearly reflected THEM, so I don't take that personally. I don't think of it as offering a piece of myself, but as reflecting them.

Regarding the quote you have above, I'm not sure these are aimed at aging baby boomers. I think they're aimed at younger people who need the push to try, and to learn how to fail. Because they have not been taught to fail or face rejection gracefully.

I dunno. I think I have some more thinking to do on this topic, if I'm going to answer any more, and more clearly, about how I view personal rejection or professional rejection.

Maybe it has something to do with having a strong sense of self, and therefore compartmentalizing the different kinds of rejection.

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Sarah link
9/5/2017 09:18:58 pm

The personal/professional distinction doesn't fit my life so much these days as in times past. Rejection of things I did as work-for-hire, or in the capacity of employee, was disappointing but rarely crushing. It belonged to the client or employer anyway, and sometimes our visions didn't match. The writing I do now is mostly by my choice, which both helps and complicates matters. In your phrasing, it represents a larger part of me.

The quote works for me, not because I've never experienced failures (who hasn't?), but because enjoying the adventure encourages me to persist and take purposeful risks.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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