Rejection is a fact of life. We don’t get the jobs we want. Or the date with someone who seems attractive. Plenty of magazine editors reject my short stories, even when the editor says, “I liked it. It just doesn’t fit.”
Those rejections feel personal—and they are in matters of the heart. But more often, the rejection isn’t specifically personal. It’s that the other person doesn’t think we or our work will fit into the particular situation. Or, in the case of many hiring companies, their circumstances changed. They’re no longer looking for a candidate, that short story, or anything else they originally wanted.
Yet. we need to continue, to persevere, even if we choose to pivot to do so. And that requires adaptability and resilience—especially if it feels personal.
While some people refer to adaptability and resilience as the “same” idea, they are not. Adaptability means we can recognize we need a different next step. Resilience means we have the resources, including the self-esteem to choose and then take that next step. (See What’s the Difference Between Resilience and Adaptability? for more detail.)
I recommend we choose small steps. Because while that next small step might not be the “success” step, it allows us to learn and choose what to do next. Even better, more frequent small steps create more personal resilience. That’s because we prove our adaptability and resilience with each small step.
Choose Something Small to Finish
Unless you’re in danger of dying, it almost doesn’t matter which small step you take next. What does matter is how small the step is and how fast you choose it and then take it. Small steps build a stabilizing feedback loop that continues to build resilience and adaptability as in this image:
If we can commit to small step that takes less than a week (mine are almost always much less than a day) then we know we will complete some kind of small deliverable more often. That completion allows us to learn faster. That learning allows us to feel more personal satisfaction and consider even more experiments.
Personal satisfaction matters, because that satisfaction can create more resilience by building our self-esteem. And it can create more adaptability because we realized we learned something. We did not need a Big Plan to learn.
That’s right—the faster we can do something and get some feedback, the more we can increase our resilience and adaptability. We might still feel sad about the rejection, but we can use our grit and persevere to do the next thing.
We can choose how to react in the face of rejections.
Rejections Offer Us More Choices
I’m never happy when a potential client does not choose me. Or if I don’t sell a story to a specific editor. However, I then have many more choices, all because I can use my resilience and adaptability to choose my next small step. I can choose to send my story to another editor—or to publish it in my own collection. If enough clients don’t hire me, I can choose a different path for my consulting.
But the more often I choose something—that next small step—the more choices I can create for myself. That allows me to build my self-esteem and therefore, my resilience. That allows me to be more adaptable now, and in the future.
That’s the question this week: How do rejections affect your ability to be resilient and adapt?