Rejection, are you scared of it? Don’t feel too bad, most people are. But that doesn’t mean that it has to be that way, we can change the effect rejection has on us. It’s worth stating now, but it does take conscious effort to do though.

I think the best way to go about this today is to use a bit of my own experience from the past. We will have to go back to mid 2018, seems like a lifetime ago. So, to set the scene, I had just been accepted for the role as a Workflow Analyst for one of Australia’s biggest debt collectors; don’t look at me like that, I had just finished university and needed something. Now, I can’t really tell you what a Workflow Analyst is, still to this day I have no clue. I think it might be one of those vacuous titles that companies create when they have shit work that they want done but don’t want to scare potential unassuming job applicants.

Fast forward six months in that role and I was kind of in the mood to rotate out of the business and into something a lot less, hmmm unethical; I’m not joking, one of the tag-lines for the company was “providing a pathway to financial inclusion” and I didn’t see much of that going on. But the problem I was in, was as such, I was a recent graduate with six months of professional experience, not an easy sell as a new hire for a different company. However, I was determined to leave and I wasn’t going to quit and become unemployed, that would have made it harder. Oddly enough, it’s easier to find a new job if you are currently working as opposed to being unemployed, and it gets worse the longer you are unemployed. What a double whammy.

So, the mission I set myself was to work my job in the day, and then spend my afternoon and evenings applying for jobs online. This started an eleven month routine of applying to countless job ads, being assigned online aptitude test, potentially progressing to first round interviews and then maybe a shot at a final interview. At the height, I was probably doing anywhere from two to three interviews a week, it cost me my lunch break and sometimes I had to lie to my work about my whereabouts, just to keep things undercover. Luckily, after those eleven months I managed to secure a better job, this time working as a fraud analyst. I’ll say that I will at some point make a video about interviews and how to ace them but that won’t be for a little while as I already have a lot of videos lined up.

The point I wanted to get across was that what I did wasn’t easy and it required a sustained effort over time to get the outcome I wanted. So, we can now cover the managing of rejection. I got knocked back maybe hundreds of times, either by phone or by email. But how did I keep going? Two reasons.

Firstly, I would get excited after every rejection. I know that might sound strange but the fact is I was putting myself out there when in most cases, people would just keep their head down. That is something to be proud of, it takes guts to suspend your human instincts of avoiding rejection and negativity. But some times life is shit and the only person capable of changing that is you, and that current job was shit and worth the hassle to leave.

The second reason was that I gave myself a strong motivating purpose. I wanted to leave because I didn’t like the ethical practices going on and I wanted to be doing something less morally compromised. So, I applied for everything but it was almost like the universe read my mind, and gave me a job as an analyst trying to uncover financial defrauding of customers. But that big WHY went a long way in giving me the mental strength and will to carry on despite the constant knock backs.

Now my Hedites, this is only one example, but the general teachings can be applied in your lives, I’m sure of it. Realise when someone rejects you, not matter who they are, you aren’t going to be kicked out of the tribe and starve to death. We don’t live in jungle anymore… well a concrete jungle maybe. But you see my point.

Keep doing ya thang.