Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible

by Jia Jiang

You can’t change people—but you can select you...

To this day, I still can’t believe that things that mean so much to me could happen that fast if I just asked for them.

one of the most important lessons I learned through my 100 Days of Rejection: target the right audience.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your performance or products are, if you target the wrong audience, who don’t recognize, appreciate, or need your value, your effort will be both wasted and rejected.

LESSONS 1. Give My “Why”: By explaining the reason behind the request, one has a higher chance to be accepted. 2. Start with “I”: Starting the request with the word “I” can give the requestor more authentic control of the request. Never pretend to think in the other person’s interests without genuinely knowing them. 3. Acknowledge Doubts: By admitting obvious and possible objections in your request before the other person, one can increase the trust level between the two parties. 4. Target the Audience: By choosing a more receptive audience, one can enhance the chance of being accepted.

But because I’d gone so public with my fight with rejection—and had become a pretty vocal advocate of not being afraid to ask for things—I also found myself on the receiving end of a lot of requests.

At first, I said yes to everything that seemed doable. But as time went on, fulfilling these requests started to dominate my life. I had less and less time for my blog, my family, and myself.

Eventually, I realized that I had to start saying no to people just to restore balance to my life. And that wasn’t fun at all.

Being the person doing the rejection didn’t feel much better to me than being on its receiving end. In fact, it made me feel like a jerk. Once I got deep into my rejection journey, saying no also made me feel like a hypocrite. Here I was, teaching people to ask for what they want and then not saying yes to them. I hated it.

I always had that nagging feeling that I owed some people something, and many times I had a hard time sleeping because of it. Soon, whenever I received an e-mail from someone that contained a request, I felt dread rather than excitement.

When they asked her to put in more hours than her fair share, she didn’t know how to say no. But when she took on everything, her resentment would start to

build. Whenever she did manage to say no, it confused her coworkers because it was not consistent with what she had done in the past. This dilemma had soured her on the work she was doing—and even on her dream.

I wasn’t afraid to say no. I was afraid of people’s reactions—specifically, their disappointment and anger. Put another way, I was afraid they would reject me because of my rejection.

What amazed me was the way he’d rejected my initial request. He wasn’t dismissive, even though my request held no interest for him. He heard me out, and showed that he was taking me seriously by giving me real reasons why the request wasn’t going to work. He made me feel valued by pulling out his problem-solving skills and doing what he could to help me get what I wanted.

PATIENCE AND RESPECT

Being patient and respectful when saying no

Showing patience and respect can soften the blow of rejection, and sometimes even earn the other person’s respect and understanding.

Moral of the story: If you have to reject someone, do it nicely.

A lot of people have the tendency to give indirect, sugarcoated rejections. They usually come in two forms: big setups and yes-buts. With “big setups,” rejectors spend a long time explaining the reason for their rejection before they actually deliver it.

“Yes-buts” happen when the rejector verbally acknowledges or even validates a request, then uses the word but or unfortunately to deliver the rejection.

In his book Conversation Transformation, organizational consultant Ben E. Benjamin (that’s his actual name) discusses the danger of “yes-buts.” Not only do they send mixed messages, he says, but also they make the idea difficult for the rejectee’s brain to process and could elicit a defensive response.

Last, when a rejector starts a sentence with “Yes, it is true that …,” “Yes, I understand that …,” or “Yes, I know that …,” the rejectee already senses that a “but” or an “unfortunately” is coming. He or she then ignores everything the rejector is saying, painfully anticipating the upcoming rejection and even forming a response.

When you deliver a rejection to someone, give the bad news qu...

also taught me a great way to reject someone: by offering an alternative.

the person rejecting me was making it clear that he was rejecting my request—not rejecting me as a person.

LESSONS 1. Patience and Respect: Rejection is usually a hard message. Delivering the message with the right attitude can go a long way to soften the blow. Never belittle the rejectee. 2. Be Direct: When giving a rejection, present the reason after the rejection. Avoid long and convoluted setup and reasoning. 3. Offer Alternatives: By offering alternatives to get a yes, or even simple concessions, one can make the other person a fan even in rejection.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Everyone gets rejected countless times over the course of their lifetime. Ultimately, few if any of these rejections will prove life-threatening or fate-altering. Yet nearly every one of them offers us an opportunity to grow, to challenge ourselves, and to overcome the fears and insecurities that block us from meeting our full potential. Indeed, one of the greatest lessons of my journey was that any rejection can have hidden upsides, if only we are willing to look for them.

rejection is an experience that it is up to you to define. In other words, it means only what you choose it to mean. The relationship you have with a rejection can be negative or positive, and it all depends on which way you spin it for yourself.

Jordan methodically listed every personal rejection he’d ever experienced in his career and explained how much it had fueled him—from his high school coach not picking him for the varsity team to his college roommate being named Carolina Player of the Year instead of him; from the opponent’s coach who prohibited his team from fraternizing with Jordan to the media naysayers who claimed he wasn’t as talented as Magic Johnson or Larry Bird. Jordan’s speech revealed a side of him that his carefully crafted PR image had successfully hidden from the world—how he consistently used rejection as motivation during his career and even into retirement.

Jordan said that each rejection had “put so much wood on that fire that it kept me, each and every day, trying to get better as a basketball player…. For someone like me, who achieved a lot over the course of my career, you look for any kind of messages that people may say or do to get you motivated to play the game of basketball at the highest level, because that is when I feel like I excel at my best.”

The more I looked into it, the more I was astonished by how many—and how often—successful people convert...

the sting of rejection is not the only thing driving the work and the ambition of these and other highly successful people. Sooner or later, other intrinsic motivations such as “the love of the game” or the desire to “put a dent in the universe” need to take over to sustain excellence.

But the biggest lesson of all was how to use rejection as a tool to learn, adapt, and improve. Instead of sulking, just hanging on, or simply giving up after the first fifteen minutes, I treated the experience as a feedback tool, and quickly changed my tactics without abandoning the cause altogether.

in a job search, if you applied one hundred times with the same résumé and were rejected for an interview each time, instead of seeing the rejections as a sign that you are not qualified for the job and should lower your expectations, you could improve your résumé,

When we think of rejection, we automatically assume it’s a setback, a source of pain, and something we have to overcome. We rarely investigate the possibility that rejection, in some cases, is a result of being ahead of a curve.

society as a whole universally praise creativity and thinking outside of the box. However, when creativity actually happens, it is often met with rejection, because it frequently disrupts order and rules.

The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen argued that companies often fail to innovate because they focus on currently profitable projects and reject internal innovations. As a result, they fall victim to disruptive innovation by outsiders, who are often small start-ups and don’t have to worry about the status quo.

Jennifer Mueller is called The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas. Mueller found that no matter how much we say we love creativity on a conscious level, we subconsciously despise and fear it because it presents a level of uncertainty. As human beings, we crave certain and predictable outcomes. And we have tendencies to cling onto traditions and conventional wisdom. That’...

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” And Mahatma Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

if someone thinks your idea is “incredibly stupid,” consider the possibility that you might be onto something.

Perhaps the question we should ask about an idea is not “How do I avoid rejection?” but “Is my idea worthy of rejection?”

“Rejection is like chicken. It’s yummy or yucky depending on how you cook it. We cannot let the fear of rejection cripple us.”

A sense of pride and satisfaction filled my heart. I had fought through my fear, stuck with my goal despite being rejected by countless passersby, and gone on with my speech anyway.

“You’ll be fine. You are the rejection guy.” His comment cut through my nervousness and grabbed my attention. Hmm … that’s right! I am the freaking rejection guy! While other people run away from rejection, I looked for it 100 times! If I’d managed to give my

Turning rejection into a positive requires courage. It requires looking rejection in the face and seeing it for what it really is—an experience that can either hurt you or help you, depending on how you look at it. The difference is attitude. By default, rejection is painful. If you treat it as a setback, a soul crusher, or a reason to quit, then that’s what it will be. But if you can find the courage to step back and look at it differently, what you’ll find is remarkable. Because what you’ll find is that there is no bad rejection anymore. If you look carefully, you will find your willow, and a lovely new village.

1. Motivation: Rejection can be used as one of the strongest motivations to fuel someone’s fire for achievement. 2. Self-Improvement: By taking the motion out of rejection, one can use it as an effective way to improve an idea or product. 3. Worthiness: Sometimes it is good to be rejected, especially if public opinion is heavily influenced by group and conventional thinking, and if the idea is radically creative. 4. Character Building: By seeking rejection in tough environments, one can build up the mental toughness to take on greater goals.

“We are protesting against unhappiness,” I added. All three of them laughed, picked up signs, and started waving them to the traffic. I’m not sure why they agreed to join, but they really got into it. We had doubled our team in size again, and it was a blast.

From a pure economics standpoint, I told him, Make DC Smile made no sense at all. “You can’t buy happiness,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

But he had found meaning in the Make DC Smile project, and that sense of purpose seemed to inoculate him against the fact that he was constantly being rejected by strangers. “Rejection is a terrible feeling, especially when the weather is cold,” he explained. “But I’ve gotten used to it. Not everyone smiles or acknowledges me. Gradually, as I made others happy, I became happier myself.”