Mental Health
How to Turn Rejections into Blessings in Three Steps
A three-pronged approach to handling rejections and keeping sane in this crazy world.
Some types of rejections might hurt more than others. For example, rejections from our loved ones might touch our hearts and crush our souls. Their impact causes us to lose the meaning of life.
The pain gets so intense that it traumatizes some people. Sadly, those who cannot cope with the pain and suffering choose to take their lives due to rejection. Thus, rejections appear to be a matter of survival affecting our physical and mental health.
Rejections, as part of life, are natural and inevitable. All of us experience them in various amounts and intensities. So, instinctively, most of us don’t like it, and some even hate it.
However, on the contrary, some people use rejections as a character-building and self-development tool. Thus, even though rejections can hurt badly, we can get out of the victim mode, reduce the adverse effects, and make them powerful tools to grow by reframing them.
This article shows three powerful tips to achieve this goal.
Acknowledging rejections are undesirable and not fun, we may empower ourselves to reduce their impact and prevent harm from them. Some rejections might sound harsh, some mild, and some neutral.
Therefore, their intensity determines the way we create our solutions. Intense rejections can be more difficult to manage as they require unique skills and mastery of our emotions, and flexibility of our cognitions.
People with sound strategies and demonstrated capabilities can cope with rejections well. However, those who lack such capabilities struggle with the negative effects of rejections and might suffer by allowing them to ruin their lives.
Tasting rejections over five decades intensely and learning the mechanisms to deal with them, I offer a three-pronged approach to dealing with rejections productively. Each heading covers several techniques, explains the situation, and offers practical tips.
My goal is to make this piece helpful, giving valuable insights and compelling solutions to deal with rejections effectively at a high level.
1 — Ask Powerful Questions for Self-Awareness
The common issue with rejections is taking them personally. Therefore, personal offenses affect us significantly, cause undesirable stress, and lead to unnecessary suffering.
Nevertheless, in reality, many rejections might have nothing to do with our identity, self, capability, or performance. They may relate to factors beyond our control.
Therefore, we need to understand the nature of rejection by asking powerful and timely questions when we perceive a situation as a rejection.
Over the years, I developed a set of questions that helped me reduce the effects of rejections, neutralize them, and turn them into opportunities.
1 — What does this rejection mean to me?
2 — Who is rejecting for what purpose?
3 — Is this rejection related to my behavior, work, or identity?
4 — What do I really lose because of this rejection?
5 — How important is this rejection in the big scheme of things?
6 — How intense is it? For example, is it the end of the world?
7 — What is the worst-case scenario for the ramifications of this rejection?
8 — Does it worth worrying about it now?
9 — Instead of worrying, what options do I have?
10 — How can I turn this rejection into a better outcome?
Answering these questions can activate the neo-cortex and reduce the negative effects of signals from the reptilian and emotional brain. The questions might increase our cognitive flexibility and allow us to regulate our negative emotions.
Rejections are all about emotions. The viable solution is to regulate those emotions with the power of our thinking brain.
When I asked these questions after each rejection, the impact of rejections substantially decreased. In some cases, they disappeared. Thus, I did not see them as rejection anymore.
2 — Increase Adversity Quotient with Constant Reframing
AQ (Intelligence of adversity), like IQ (mental intelligence) or EQ (emotional intelligence), is also a skill that we can develop and gain mastery of.
AQ is a vital skill as we all face adversity in life. Facing rejection is one of them. Thus, I propose increasing AQ to deal with them effectively and sustainably.
Increasing AQ requires two fundamental skills. The first one is cognitive flexibility which I explained in an article. The second one is emotional regulation which I also discussed in another article.
Therefore, I will not repeat them due to the scope of this article. Furthermore, stoic principles such as negative visualization can also increase AQ, making us calmer and more composed when adverse conditions occur.
However, I’d like to emphasize that expressing emotions rather than suppressing them can help us regulate our emotions, increase our emotional intelligence, and make us emotionally mature person.
Emotional regulation also contributes to our cognitive flexibility. For example, seeing rejections as blessings in disguise increased my adversity quotient.
My journey to developing AQ started during my academic tenure. Academia is full of rejections. I felt adversity in the very fabric of my soul.
For example, submitting a paper after months of intense research that produced valuable outcomes was rejected by peer reviewers who couldn’t understand them. Of course, they were doing their job, but the rejection hurt me deeply.
The critical point in building my AQ was keeping my expectations low. For example, rather than expecting to be accepted by a specific peer-reviewed journal, I assumed it might not be taken, so I prepared alternative solutions such as submitting them to other journals or repurposing my content as a book or educational material.
Instead of relying on a single platform or publication, we can diversify content and publish it on multiple platforms. Platforms might come and go as individuals or corporations own them for business reasons.
These entities can change their mind and policies anytime based on their mission and business goals. Users have no right or capability to revert the changes. It is beyond their control.
So, my point is being rejected by a platform or an organization does not reflect the inadequacy of our capability.
3 — Stay Mindful at All Times
Observation, awareness, acceptance, corrective action, empathy, and compassion are the key ingredients of mindfulness. We achieve a mindful life by using our neocortex (thinking brain) deliberately and diligently.
Focus, attention, memory, task switching, and problem-solving are the capabilities of the thinking brain. Moreover, the thinking brain can empower us to deal with the ego efficiently by taming the emotional and survival parts of the brain.
We can start observing the situations and our behavior when we feel a rejection. The next step is to accept it unconditionally, even if it hurts badly. We need to feel the pain rather than suppress and numb it.
The next step is to have empathy and compassion for the person who rejects us by asking the questions I proposed. They might have their reasons for rejection. It might not have anything to do with our personality, behavior, capability, or outcome.
Let’s take the writing platforms as an example. Some writers, editors, and bloggers pointed out that their accounts, blogs, content, and publications disappeared for no apparent reason and no notifications. Creators felt rejected due to these circumstances. They perceive them as setbacks.
But if we think a platform had to do these due to a financial situation, our perspective can lead to empathy and compassion.
Another example is the employment situation. For instance, companies make very successful and diligent workers redundant due to the economic climate.
This redundancy has nothing to do with the performance of those hard-working employees who lose their job. We know that sometimes thousands of people apply for a single role. Selecting one candidate and rejecting the rest does not reflect the incompetence of others.
Besides, when we look at a situation from the rejectors’ point of view, we are also guilty of this situation. For example, some writers complain about their content being rejected by a platform or a publication.
However, when they become editors or gatekeepers for those organizations, they also reject content for various reasons to do their job. After becoming a manager, some employees reject applicants for job openings in their organizations.
Such observation and awareness of conditional situations can increase our empathy and compassion for rejectors.
Rather than seeing ourselves as victims, we can reframe the situation as a business necessity or reality of life. It gives us thinking space and instant relief.
The key point in a mindful approach to rejections is not to eat baits. For example, some situations might provoke us. Thus, we feel the urge to react instantly.
Sometimes, a rejection might be a request for more information or clarity. Rather than taking the rejection personally, we need to understand the reason behind the rejection. Rather than reacting immediately, we can focus on corrective actions.
If our actions do not work, the solution is acceptance and letting go. People with a growth mindset know that many more doors are opened when one door is closed. One’s trash can be another person’s treasure.
Furthermore, who knows, a rejection might be a blessing in disguise.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Like many people, I have faced countless rejections in my life. However, by using these three steps diligently and persistently, I re-wired my brain and managed to turn rejections into blessings.
Asking powerful questions helped me to activate my cognitive brain and regulate my emotions timely. Cognitive flexibility and emotional regulations significantly increased my tolerance for adversity.
Rejections are prevalent in the modern world. They come in various forms and different sources. For example, social media turned out to be a rejection machine for many people. Some platforms act like bullies.
We face rejection at home, at work, and in our communities for various reasons. Sometimes rejections are caused by our behavior or capability. Sometimes, they are beyond our control, such as fierce competition in the market.
By remaining mindful at all times, we can deal with rejections more effectively and sustainably. By observing carefully, being aware, accepting situations neutrally, taking corrective actions, and showing empathy and compassion, we can significantly reduce the harmful effects of rejections.
Rather than suppressing and numbing emotions, we need to feel the pain, which paradoxically can remove the pain sustainably, preventing the formation of traumatic memories.
Fear is a powerful emotion that we constantly feel due to our survival mechanism trying to protect us from real or perceived threats. Living with constant fear and chronic anxiety can damage our mental health. Moreover, it can adversely affect our creativity and productivity.
However, by acting bold, we can face rejections with equanimity. Whenever I feel fear, I always remember the famous quote of Marie Currie: “There is nothing to be feared in this life — just things to be understood” or Franklin’s favorite quote, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
In addition, sometimes, we live with the fear of future rejections. We never know what will happen in the future. Things might change at any moment. The future is not in our control.
Rather than worrying about things beyond our control, a better approach is to take calculated risks and channel worries into positive actions despite the fear.
Rather than wasting our energy on resisting or fighting against rejections, understanding “what we can control and cannot” in life and taking corrective actions with acceptance might motivate us to produce better outcomes in the long run. Moreover, dealing with rejections amicably might contribute to our karmic bank.
I write about various hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.
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As part of my creative non-fiction writing goals, I’d like to share a few stories that might warm our hearts with a bit of humor into weighty topics.
Sample Humorous Stories
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