Self-Care Tip: Anticipate rejections and some in-between times, you will be chosen.
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.
-Thomas A. Edison
In today’s economic climate, we are given more opportunities to seek employment elsewhere. Of course, “opportunity” is loosely used here and it might sound like I was playing Mad-Libs, a super game in fact so I’m okay with that.
But whether we are applying for employment or asking to be someone’s friend, or like Edison, playing – these various arenas of rejections are normal. They may feel particularly personal, but that’s a distortion. They’re part of the human condition. They come to us who do what we love, who do for well-evaluated intentions, who put out with courage and who put in 10,ooo hours. They come to us who haven’t found what we love, who work for a martyrs salary or who do not have the privilege to go toward their temperament.
Rejections are. They are like the surface tension, the space between water and air and they hold us together.
We love success and too often are like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. We forget from sunset to sunrise what a day’s labor brought us before. We forget easily.
But with Magic and Love, we can lose ourselves once again in the experience of doing what we love to do despite it. We can remember better with the help of rejections. Remember all sorts of things. And without turning this into a script from Cheers, we can still say that rejections become the best parts of our life’s experience.
Those darn personalizations though, those distorted perceptions, those rejection-clots that cut off circulation – if it becomes that the space between water and air gets too thick, if rejections seem life defining, tell your physician about it. It’s not “just the stress.” It’s from the brain and might be a symptom of brain illness, much like achy joints and arthritis go together.
Questions: How are you able to use the rejections you received to be friendly to yourself? Please tell us your story.
Related articles
- In The Morning (yahwehssong.com)
- Failure in the Workplace – Why It’s Good for Innovation (themarlincompany.com)