Bonus Episode: Three Great Tips for Handling Rejection Like a Boss

Bree: This is a bonus episode of pause to go. And I'm actually going to delve into something that we tangentially brought up in recent episodes with Jocelyn Johnson. And that is rejection. Jocelyn talked about how she had a long journey to getting published. Her book, My Monticello wasn't published until she was 50 years old and that's after years of writing and writing and writing, writing really good work, it just didn't come together. And all of that time. writing also means that there was a lot of rejection-- and we don't spend a lot of time really exploring rejection.

We have all of these, inspirational speakers and masterminds and workshops that really teach so much about how to put yourself out there, how to have a good mindset, but then what happens when you put your stuff out there? And it's like crickets, because that's a form of rejection, right?

Or you hear just flat out  "No." 
Or you get even, like some nasty messages on your DMS, those things happen.
 A danger of putting yourself out there is that you can be rejected. 

You know, it's a tough thing. It's tough to deal with rejection. 

Well, we're going to talk today about a couple of strategies that may help you as a creative or someone who's making a big leap in life to really channel rejection so that it can be useful for you -- or at the very least to just make it a little more bearable because we got to go through it. You got to risk rejection, and honestly, rejection can be really useful and powerful and helpful. And I say this from a place, I don't know how many of you know this. I used to be a theater director. Oh man. I had to give out far more rejections than I gave out yeses.

Bree: And that was really hard. It was the hardest part of the job. And before that, I was an actor. And so as a director that helped me know even more, how utterly devastating it can be to be rejected. It can just wear on a psyche as I used to say, but here are some strategies to make it better. Number one is this, sometimes it just flipping hurts.

 That's it, it just hurts. And we get scared. I mean, it rejection plays on our most primal fear, which is of abandonment. We are so afraid of being rejected because it feels like we're being cast out. That's a terrible feeling, but it's only a feeling of rejection, a rejection.

Isn't a casting out from society. You're still going to be able to breathe. You're still going to survive.

But one thing we can do when w e have that fear response. And often it happens. I think of when you know that an answer is coming and you get the email in your inbox and then you sit there and you see. That they've written to you and it's in your inbox and you can't open it because your heart is pounding and your palms are sweaty and your head feels lightheaded and you can't think, and you kind of feel like you're gonna throw up -- if any of those feelings, sound familiar, then you know what I'm talking about.

 Fear of rejection. You can even happen when you just like, you don't even want to open your inbox, to see if you've gotten an email, because the fear of not getting one is almost as great as the fear of getting one. Ah, it's so hard. So yes. Calm down your nervous system.

So how do you do that? There are lots of ways. There's so many ways, a couple that I like are going for a long walk. Looking at the horizon, really feeling air on my skin. I try to do it during the day when I can see sunlight, get a little more sunlight into my eyes. getting myself out of my head a little bit, even if I'm still thinking about it, my body is engaged and I'm getting sensory experiences that are. Helping to calm down my nervous system, forest bathing forest bathing is a great way to calm down your nervous system. Another thing that you can do is to meditate. I mean, oh, you know, I'm going to say it, you know, I'm going to say it 

now I've talked to several people lately who say, I really can't meditate. I can't do it. I can't stop my mind. Well, that's a, you don't stop your mind. but I also understand that and I think it can be really helpful to have another strategy and one that I really like that I use, particularly when I'm that . Energized around fear. a strategy that I use is tapping EFT, tapping. Some of you may have seen my tapping meditations. I posted a bunch of last year. I do them with my clients fairly regularly, and I use tapping myself a lot, especially when I know that I'm taking a lot of risks. And so it can be helpful before you're putting yourself out there to kind of make sure that you're in a calm, grounded place to take action. And it can be helpful to prepare for an answer or a non-answer as it often is, or to prepare for or to respond to a negative.

It can calm down your body. Calm down that panic response, that fight flight freeze or faun response that often happens so that you can think a little more clearly so that you can see your way through and so that you can do the next thing that I'm going to recommend, which is. To really use every rejection.

And that is rejection by omission. Meaning someone who just doesn't get back to you or outright rejection, a flat out, noto Use them as an opportunity to collect data, data, data, whatever you want to say. I love this approach. Well, I love, hate this approach. I'm going to be really honest. I love, hate this approach, but it has been really helpful for me to use it because you can get a lot of information from rejections and the information I mostly see is coming in one of two ways.

One is. Really, what are the opportunities for improvement? What are things that you can do better, how you can prepare better, how you can present yourself better, how you can frame things better, how you can do something better. They're performance-based how can you up your game and level up? And so if you get a rejection, please take advantage of that.

To see if there's any feedback that they give to you on how you can have a greater performance that might've made a difference. And I'm going to say this too, so it's really great. When you can ask the person who is rejecting, who, who gave the rejection, who gave the no, or who didn't get.

If you can ask them directly, if they offer to give feedback, please take them up on it. But even if not look back on it yourself and think about it, put yourself into their shoes. Think about opportunities for you to up your game. You can give yourself a self critique. In fact, I recommend that you do both.

If you can, on the other side of, this is a clarification, because sometimes the fit just isn't right. It's like, you can get the most expensive pair of jeans. You can get like a $500 pair of jeans and they can be incredible and they can be up cycled vintage jeans that were all American organic designed by some phenomenal designer.

But if they're the wrong size, they're just not going to work. And so you have to look at some of the rejections is that there are real opportunity for you to make sure that you're finding the right fit and for you to say, Ooh, that was good. That wasn't the right fit. I'm going to move on. I'm going to find the right fit.

And I'm going to look in these ways to find the right fit. You can hone your strategy a little more clearly to do that. It's like Jocelyn saying that she got very stubborn by the time she got to her third agent she knew what she wanted and she knew how she wanted it to happen.

And I think that that takes the knowledge that you get from rejections to have that kind of. Courage and fortitude. Knowing who you are and self-advocating in the way that you need to. So that's number two. So number one, calm down your nervous system. Number two, use every rejection as an opportunity to collect more data and number three.

Is to gamify it. So I love gamifying things. I loved video games, particularly kind of mindless video games, things like candy crush, that absolutely have no positive impact on my life at all, which is why I don't have any video games on my phone anymore. I don't. But I do like to gamify useful things because it makes it fun. And one of the things that I've seen a lot of people doing is creating a challenge for themselves. Now I'm going to say this about challenges. There's recent evidence that challenges do not do a great job of actually changing habitual behavior challenges are.

Sort of great to do something in a certain amount of time, but they don't necessarily convey beyond that time. However, I think that this kind of challenge could be helpful and this kind of challenge is, getting 100 rejections in a year.

And I can just see how powerful that can be. Cause you're flipping, the feeling of, of, of losing, because it feels like losing, right. You're flipping that to a winning. You're flipping that to something that can actually give you a little bit of a dopamine rush.

It's that's not scientific by the way. That is not. scientific statement. I just want that to be clear. I am not making a scientific statement about dopamine and rejection here, maybe another time, but anyway, I don't even know where it was.

 If you have a calendar, every time you get a rejection, you can put a gold star on that calendar. And like, when you get to 25, you can do something. You can treat yourself. You can go to a cafe and sit in the cafe, be cool. Or at 50, maybe you go to the movies, maybe you, connect with a friend.

You can tell the things that I like to do to treat myself coffee, movies, friends. But what it also does is it, can give you permission to take greater risks and that's important because that's also how we up our game. 

I know I'm also going to be using the tools a lot in the coming month, because I want to tell you all about something that I'm actually pretty excited about. I'm not taking any more clients coaching clients. This February, my quota is full, but in March I will be taking four new clients, but I'm going to do it a little bit differently because.

Most coaches set a price and that price can be anywhere from $110 for a session to like $10,000 for 12 weeks of working with a coach. But I know that evidence shows that we invest in. Habits and in change and then doing work towards a goal when we feel like we have some skin in the game, but what skin in the game looks like is different to everyone.

So for one person, $10,000 might not even be that much to invest. And for another person, a hundred dollars is a whole lot of money to pay for an hour. With a coach. 

So starting February 20th. 

Bree: I'm going to be accepting applications for four new clients in March. And this is what the application is going to look like. I have a written application, it will be on my website. It will also be in the show notes. It will also be in my bio on Instagram 

it'll be pretty much everywhere you can find me. And that will have a pretty detailed list of questions because what I care most about is that the next four clients I work with are really ready to invest in their own process of change. They're very hungry to make changes at work at home, to start a new business, to write a screenplay.

I don't care what it is. It can be any kind of project larger, small. What I care about is the dedication to doing the dang thing. So you're going to fill out the application. And it's a written application. So if a written application is challenging for you,

 Just DME send me a message, call me on the pause to go hotline., if you would like a non-written applicant. And then from those, I will select the people who feel like they might be good fits we'll move on to an hour long coaching interview where we will really get to know each other and you'll tell me more about what you want to do and we'll see if it's a good fit. And then the next step in it is. For you to decide what feels like an investment that shows that you have some real skin in the game that you're respecting the process in a way that makes sense to you. And that really feels like it would be a motivator without, you know, creating more stress and strain in your life.

So that's, what's coming up for me and I'm excited because it's a real experiment. I don't know anybody else who is creating a business model quite like this, but I will say this when I used to run a theater, we had pay what you can evenings not free, but pay what you can. And what we found was that often because of the support of an incredible community, our pay, what you can shows brought in just as much as the other shows. Not always but often. And I just feel like I believe in you all, that's all.