It doesn’t matter how good your run has been or where you are in your career - at some point in your professional life, you are going to experience some sort of failure or rejection. You know this already, so why aren’t you preparing yourself to deal with it?
Do You Know How Your Mind Reacts To Failure?
You should. Whenever you suffer some sort of setback or frustration your mind triggers a default set of feelings and beliefs, which are often negative. The danger is that if your mind convinces you that you can’t do something and you believe it - it will make you feel helpless and you may stop trying or not even try at all. A single failure can influence you in such a way that you may think you can never succeed and to give up. Once your mind has been convinced, it’s hard to change it.
Rejection Can Actually Feel Like You Have Been Punched In The Gut
fMRI studies have showed that the same parts of the brain are activated when you experience some sort of rejection as you do when you experience physical pain. Ask a salesperson to recall a deal they won and they will be able to provide you a good story from a recent success, ask them to tell you story of rejection and they will be able to recall vividly, an experience from years ago when they first started their career. There are war stories and there are war scars - not dealing with psychological wounds from rejection can “infect” and hurt your overall wellbeing, says psychologist Guy Winch in his TEDx talk. Unchecked the fallout from feelings of rejection can lead to bursts of anger and depression that will impact your relationships both at work and at home.
Rejection hurts most because it makes us feel if we don’t belong or are help is not needed. Imagine being bombarded with rejection call after call when working in an insides sales role - many of these people avoid all social interaction after work because they feel too vulnerable and want to be disconnected. Imagine being ostracized day after day, it would destroy anyone’s self-esteem. Many sales reps I have met have said they started to blame themselves for being rejected. Rejection is also known to temporarily reduce IQ which can lead to poor decision making and forgetfulness, either of which can hurt you on the job.
STOP Chewing Things Over, and Replaying Things In Your Mind
Many of us have a habit of thinking about negative situations over in our mind, it may be the competitive nature of the job or the fact that you don’t want to fail or be rejected like that ever again. Regardless rumination as its called, or chewing things over is one of the unhealthiest things you can do. Perhaps your customer made you feel useless and responsible for a service outage that cost you a big sales deal. Now your boss is upset and blames you for a poor quarter. Ruminating, or playing back the scenario in your mind over and over, can easily become a bad habit that will take up so much of your time focussing on the negative thoughts that you put yourself at risk of developing clinical depression, eating disorders, alcoholism and even heart disease. Negative thoughts lead to negative habits, think about how much people drink in high pressure jobs like traders, salespeople and investment bankers. Our eating habits are no better - habits that people think shelter them, actually prevent them from really overcoming their rejection or failure.
A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene. - Guy Winch Ph.D, author of Emotional First Aid.
So What Can You Do?
Distract Yourself For 2 Minutes
The next time you catch yourself replaying and chewing over a rejection or failure, force yourself to concentrate on something else until the urge has passed. Step away from your desk, go for a walk, look at a photograph of a loved one or memory. You have to break the habit of getting caught up with your negative thoughts, and studies show even a 2 minute distraction can help do that. If you have ever worked at a call centre and experienced that client call where you have been yelled at for an hour straight, someone has had to have told you to log-off and take a walk.
Find Social Support
Because rejection makes us feel like we don’t belong, social support reminds us of our significant relationships which helps counteract that depleted feeling of being “voted off the island.” It could be as simple as messaging a friend or family member over Facebook or having lunch with a co-worker to get things off your chest. Sometimes getting that social support from close friends can be difficult, because they may not know how to deal with someone going through your experience of rejection, this is why it’s important to build strong networks and relationships with people in your industry or profession. They will share similar experience of failure and rejection and will better understand what you are going through.
A note for Managers here, coaching is a great way to provide social support. Often as a manager you have gone through the ranks and suffered the same type of negative experiences as your subordinates. Instead of highlighting a rejection or failure, you should branch out and offer support to your employees, because in these moments they are they most vulnerable. A kind word or two, or an opportunity to vent will help them to quickly move on from the negative emotions they are feeling, instead of letting them fester and hurt their performance even more.
Learn To Desensitize Yourself
If you are in sales or applying for a job, where people are saying no to you or you are receiving rejection email or phone calls - you mind is going to do this automatically. Desensitization is the psychological process where when you have been exposed to an uncomfortable or unpleasant experience they more you get used to is and the less it disturbs you. Just be careful here, in the short run desensitization can help reduce the emotional hurt from rejections, but in the long term it can damage your ability to empathize with others.
One of my really good friends is a trauma surgeon and he’s showed me some of the types of injuries he’s treated - for me some of the pictures were unbearable to look at, but he was unfazed when describing how he would treat this type of patient. Because he encounters so much trauma on a daily basis, his mind has had to adapt and desensitize itself so he can operate - imagine if he couldn’t get over the failure or rejection of losing a patient, others could literally die without his help.
Ali is the founder of HANALI, an agency specializing in sales enablement and business development consulting for B2B companies. You can check out more of his writing on his blog.