Rejecting Rejection
I’m sure anyone reading this has felt this at least once before in their lives. You’re scrolling through a job posting or an exciting new opportunity and you’re interested but suddenly your heart starts to sink. There’s no way you’re qualified or ready or good enough or a million other negative adjectives. Alternatively, you pushed yourself and applied to that job you had your eye on. You waited for the decision email to land in your inbox, clicked on it with shaky hands only to see that you didn’t get the job.
An inherent part of pushing yourself to be the best you can be is facing rejection, the hard thing about this is that rejection is kind of terrifying.
Putting Yourself Out There
The fear of rejection can result in people taking themselves out of the running and being paralyzed by fear. There is a propensity to feel underqualified or underprepared especially when making the tricky transition from student to employee. Remember that everything you’ve learned in classes, clubs and conversations with friends or strangers is supporting you on your journey to learn, grow and achieve further. Having confidence in your skills, knowledge, and ability is not the same as being overconfident or arrogant. Especially for young women entering the workforce or even just taking on a position of leadership there is a great deal of conditioning that tells us to minimize our strengths and opinions in favor of coming across as humble and palatable. There is nothing wrong with assessing your strengths and coming up with positives and hope that you will do great at a job or other opportunity. Marketing yourself, networking, and applying yourself is intimidating but the goal is to be able to speak to your experience and your value. A great way to remind yourself of those things can be to try journaling or making a list of your valuable experiences and strengths for yourself, this removes the pressure of making a list for an application or an interview. It is simply to bolster your confidence and reject the fear of rejection.
Dealing With Rejection
So you’ve gathered your strength, applied, and interviewed but it didn’t work out. It can be a terrible feeling. There is a massive stigma around being rejected so rejection comes with a lot of shame and isolation. It is very normal to talk about acceptances and achievements but not so much attempts at the former that didn’t end the way you wanted them to. Something that can help alleviate the hurt of rejection is finding comfort in your support system and talking about failure and rejection. The most important thing to remember here is that there is nothing wrong with trying and failing. You have worked hard to gain the skills you have and can grow at any opportunity, even through rejection. If you didn’t get a position you worked really hard for you can figure out what you learned in the process of application whether it be through creating a resume or going through the interview process.