Press On: Rejection is Part of the Journey
Rejection Brings You One Step Closer to Your Dreams
It’s amazing to me how many people are afraid of the word “no,” especially when it comes to intimate relationships and being an entrepreneur.
I’ve seen in my own life and in the life of many of my friends that we tend to spend so much time avoiding a “no” that we waste time. Instead of marching right through our fears and on to the next, we delay, delay, delay.
The logic goes something like this:
We delay getting a “no” because if we get a “no” then we will be rejected, and if we’re rejected it means we are unlovable, unworthy and our dreams aren’t real. And feeling those feelings of rejection is almost worse than our feelings of fear surrounding death. So, our lower self does everything it can to avoid those feelings. It procrastinates. It overeats. It drinks too much. It works too much. It avoids tough conversations with loved ones. It’s passive aggressive and it runs from those who expose us to those critical deeper truths about ourselves.
But see, that way of thinking isn’t true. Getting a “no” can be painful, but it’s not final. Edison tried 10,000 times before he got it right. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, was laughed at by his business professors at Yale for his idea of FedEx and even got a C on his presentation (his net worth is now $2.1 billion). And on and on the story goes.
Invite Rejection
Because you are a seeker on your journey, your duty to your highest self, to your dreams and to those not yet on their journey, is to invite the rejection into your life and then be unfazed by it. You see, there is truly no such thing as rejection or failure. Rejection and failure are outcomes only of the mind, but not of reality. In reality, if someone says “no” it’s just a result. It’s impersonal. You take this result personally and call it “rejection” or “failure” but the journey just calls it a result.
So, if you want to live your dreams, take Edison’s approach and instead of seeing “failure,” see each attempt that didn’t work as a result and as one step closer to your goal, because you now know one more thing that didn’t work. This means you are actually smarter and wiser than you were before. This is simply part of the learning process.
Taking things personally will not help you make your dreams come true. So, know that when you produce results that do not match your expectations do not call it rejection or failure and then create some silly sob story about yourself. Just be full, learn your lessons and know that the perfect person and outcome is on the way. A delay is not a denial, my friend, and a short-term “no” does not mean a final “no.”
Press on. Press on with all your heart and get busy producing results.