Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (6 page)

When I delivered my first client session, it was a scary experience, but sixteen years later, having worked with hundreds of clients, I’m very relaxed about doing another one.

It was the same story with public speaking. When I first did it, I was terrified. I hardly slept the night before a presentation. I would practice for hours for a talk that only lasted a few minutes, and felt a huge relief each time it was over.

But years later, having given hundreds of talks, presentations, seminars, interviews, and podcasts, as well as several best man’s speeches, I’m now very comfortable standing and talking in front of an audience. To make me nervous, something new and potentially tricky has to be introduced into the mix—such as a much bigger audience, or a potentially hostile one.

When you first encounter a potentially threatening situation—like trying to spear a stampeding woolly mammoth, or auditioning for a part in a play—your emotional brain is on high alert, pumping you up with the cocktail of chemicals, led by adrenalin, which produces the classic ‘fight or flight’ response. But the more mammoth hunts and auditions you take part in (and survive), and the better you get at dodging tusks and remembering your lines under pressure, the less fear you experience, because your emotional brain is getting the message that you can handle this kind of thing without a major panic. Familiarity breeds comfort.

The worst thing you can do is shy away from the thing you’re afraid of. This keeps it unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It turns it into A Big Deal. It means you have to work yourself up to it each time. And it makes the desensitization process take longer.

So the more mammoth hunts and auditions you go to, the more competitions or trials you enter, the more manuscripts you send out, the more jobs or funding you apply for, the more rejections you’ll get, but the less it will hurt each time.

Your next steps:

1. Remember the first time you experienced professional rejection. On a scale of 1–10 (1 = best, 10 = worst), how bad did it feel?

2. Now remember a more recent rejection. On the same scale, how bad did that one feel?

3. If you notice that you feel better about rejections as time goes by, that’s a sign that you are acclimatizing to them and treating them as a normal part of the process.

4. If you notice that rejections tend to feel
worse
as time goes by, read
Chapter 12
to see whether you are making things harder for yourself than you really need to.

5. Make a list of all the opportunities you would be applying for if you weren’t afraid of rejection. Now imagine you’ve applied for all of them—and been rejected by nearly all, but have received one or two acceptances that have made the process worthwhile.

Look at yourself in the future and see that when you reach that stage, you will not be so bothered by each rejection. The sooner you start applying for those opportunities, the sooner you get to feel like that for real.

10. Roll with the punches

When I started learning aikido, the first thing we were taught was how to fall and roll. The idea was that until you knew how to receive an attack, you weren’t ready to be attacked.

We rolled forwards and backwards, sideways to the left, and sideways to the right. We practiced single rolls and double rolls, rolls in small tight circles, and big loping ones. Sometimes a student held a wooden sword out a few inches from the ground, for us to roll over. (The higher your grade, the higher the sword was raised.) Sometimes a student knelt on the mat and we rolled over him—without touching. Sometimes there were two or three students lined up, and we had to leap over them, Evel Knievel style, landing and rolling on the other side. At that point, technique became very important!

Rolling out of the way of an attack does two things. Firstly, it protects you from the full force of the blow. If you stand and resist it, you are liable to be injured by the blow itself or to be knocked over and injured by the fall. But by accepting the force of the blow and moving with it, you have a much better chance of avoiding injury. Secondly rolling takes you away from the attacker, giving you a split-second to stand and face the next attack.

The same principles apply to rejection. If you try to resist it, by pretending you don’t care, it will hit you just as hard—only you won’t be prepared.

Remember,
it’s supposed to hurt
.

In private, allow yourself to really feel whatever emotions rise up—such as fear, anger, embarrassment, or sadness. Don’t try to rationalize them or explain them away. Roll with the punches and trust that you’ll come out the other side. And don’t keep it to yourself. Talk to someone—a friend, partner, teacher, or mentor—anyone who cares about you, understands your situation, and will listen to you (without trying to ‘fix’ the situation by offering advice).

Therapist
John Eaton
likes to point out that if you suppress your emotions, they don’t go away—they keep pushing to be released, because they have something important to teach you about your situation. But if you acknowledge the emotion and express it—in words or actions —it fades away, having done its job.

John likes to quote these lines from William Blake’s poem ‘A Poison Tree’:

“I was angry with my foe,
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
I was angry with my friend,
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.”

Bottling up your feelings just means you’ll end up carrying them around with you in the bottle, which has a tendency to break and release the contents—in the form of a temper tantrum or floods of tears—at the worst possible moment.

I remember reading an interview with one of my sporting heroes, the football (soccer) manager Martin O’Neill, where he said he allows his players 48 hours to celebrate a win or to feel sorry for themselves after a defeat. If the team has won, he doesn’t want them getting carried away. And if they have lost, he
wants
to see them sitting disconsolately on the bus home, to see that they care.

Supposing you gave yourself 48 hours after a rejection, to roll with the punch and process the emotions it brings?

During that time you’re allowed to take a break, spend time with friends, treat yourself, or have some quiet time alone—whatever it takes to deal with it. If it’s a major disappointment, 48 hours won’t be enough to recover completely, but it’s a good starting point. By disciplining yourself (that’s right, it’s a discipline) to take a break after each rejection, it will help you recover more quickly and learn more from the experience.

Your next steps:

1. Next time you’re rejected, give yourself 48 hours (or whatever time frame feels right) to roll with the punch.

Give yourself permission to take a complete break, give yourself a treat, spend time with a friend, go for a walk—whatever it takes to give yourself a breathing space and process the experience.

2. During your daily mindfulness practice (you haven’t skipped it already, have you?) pay particular attention to your feelings, and the sensations in your body. What emotions are you experiencing?

3. Give yourself permission to express your emotions in a safe context e.g. crying, yelling, talking to a friend, or writing an angry letter to the person who rejected you, but whatever you do, don’t send it!

4. Ask yourself: What can I learn from this experience?

What will I do differently in future?

5. When the 48 hours (or however long you’ve chosen) are up, get back on your feet and back to work.

Notes:

Thank you to Sensei Tony Ecclestone of Meridian Aikido Club for introducing me to aikido.
http://www.meridianaikido.org.uk

John Eaton’s blog about the brain, the mind, and personal change:
http://www.reversethinking.co.uk

11. Wallowing is for pigs

One more thing about rolling with the punches: you don’t just roll around on the floor, or lie there in a heap. You have to roll
straight back up again
—into a standing position, ready to defend yourself.

In the
ukemi
part of an aikido grading test (that’s the falls and rolls), the moment you stand upright again, two black belts try to push you over—so you need to recover your balance instantly. If you keel over, you fail. (The higher the grade you’re testing for, the quicker and harder the black belts push.)

When it comes to rejection, the difference between rolling down and straight back up is the difference between feeling pain and wallowing in it. Developing resilience means not flinching from or avoiding the pain—you need to feel it to learn the lesson. But it also means not adding to it and perpetuating it by going into ‘poor me’ mode—replaying the rejection over and over in your mind and telling yourself what a terrible injustice you’ve suffered.

Wallowing is for pigs, not people.

Remember O’Neill’s 48-hour limit? When the two days were up, the players had to report for training again and give 100% commitment. So when your time is up, it’s time to get back on your feet and take the next step down the road.

Your next steps:

1. Put limits on your recovery time. Forty-eight hours is a good rule of thumb, but work out what works best for you. Whatever you do, don’t carry the rejection around with you like a permanent scar.

2. Be honest with yourself. When you’re feeling down, ask yourself how much of the bad feeling is pure pain, and how much of it is wallowing? Some clients even find it helps to put a percentage on this: “I was feeling pretty down on Tuesday, but it got easier once I realized it was only 40% genuine pain and 60% wallowing!”

12. Seven guaranteed ways to make rejection worse

It’s easy to say ‘Don’t wallow,’ but not so easy to avoid doing it. When you’ve just been hit by rejection, a lot of the thoughts you experience are automatic, or semi-conscious. If you’re not alert to them, they can make you feel much worse than you need to. So here’s a handy field guide to some of the most damaging thoughts you can think in the wake of rejection and what to do about them.

1. Taking it personally

OK hands up, I said it’s natural to identify with your work and take rejection or criticism personally! And so it is. You need to put everything into your work if it is to be any good—so any rejection of your work feels like a rejection of you. And if you get turned down for a job or a place on the team, then in a very real sense it is a rejection of you.

But beware of taking any specific rejection—or even a series of rejections—as a blanket judgment on yourself and your entire career. William Golding’s best-selling novel
Lord of the Flies
was reportedly rejected by at least ten publishers before it was finally accepted. Supposing he’d said, “OK, nine rejections prove I’m not a real writer. All those experts can’t be wrong. There’s no point sending it out again.”

Remember, just because you or your work were not the right fit in any particular situation, it does NOT mean you are fundamentally incapable of achieving your ambitions. So watch out for any thoughts that suggest that this is the case!

What not to say to yourself:

• “I’m a failure.”
  
• “I’m a loser.”
  
• “I’m not a real artist/writer/footballer/whatever.”
  

What to say instead:

• “I didn’t make it this time, but I’m still a good athlete/leader/chef.”
  
• “I wasn’t the right fit for them, but there will be other people who love me and what I do.”
  
• “OK I’m not the world’s best right now, but if I keep learning from experiences like this, I can get there in future.”
  
• “Just because I screwed up this time, doesn’t mean I can’t get it right next time.”
  

2. Repetition

It’s bad enough being rejected once, but you make it much worse for yourself if you keep replaying the experience over and over in your mind. The most depressed people I have ever met were constantly running a ‘disaster movie’ in their minds, made up of all their most painful rejections and failures.

When you’ve suffered a rejection, it’s an excellent idea to sit down and review your performance, to see what you can improve in the future. But once you’ve done that, and decided how you’re going to improve, it’s time to archive the mental movie.

Your mindfulness practice will help you to do this, by focusing on what you can see, hear, feel, touch, taste, and smell in the present.

When you are present, it’s easier to stop watching the disaster movie.

What not to do:

Keep playing the mental movie of your rejection(s), complete with a doom-laden voiceover, reminding yourself how bad it was.

What to do instead:

i. Make time to review your performance. Hold yourself to high standards, and be unflinchingly honest. (If you can, get someone who knows you well to help with this.) What can you learn from the experience? What can you do differently next time?

ii. Once you’ve done this, archive the mental movie:

1. Close your eyes and visualize the DVD player and TV screen you’re using to watch it.
   
2. Then imagine pressing the ‘stop’ button, taking the DVD out of the machine, putting it back in its place, and then locking it in a secure cabinet.
   
3. Then return to your comfy armchair, and put on a DVD showing you making positive changes, improving your performance and achieving success in future. (Mental popcorn is optional—fortunately it’s very low-calorie!).
   

iii. Once you’ve done the review, and archived the movie, put it out of your mind. Use mindfulness to stay in the present and let go of it.

3. Regret

This one goes hand-in-hand with repetition. Not content with reminding yourself what an awful experience it was, you also torture yourself by thinking it could have turned out so much better—if only you’d done this or that differently. So you beat yourself up for having been so ‘stupid.’