5 practical ways to build your rejection resilience (and grow your business)

What if the thing that is holding your business back and getting in the way, getting in the way of your growth is not whether you have, say, a perfectly defined niche. It's not the messaging on your website. It's not your pricing. What if it is actually your relationship with rejection? Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to other executive coaches. When it comes to coaching business, I have done it all. I've grown coaching businesses solo and in partnership and with teams of coaches working alongside me. I've been an in-house coach. I've been an associate coach. So when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know that I'm sharing from a place of experience and empathy. I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their businesses with more corporate clients. So we all have a relationship with rejection, right? And the relationships we have with rejection started generally in much more painful places than business. They started with our families, with our friends, at our schools, with our romantic partners. And as coaches, we know that those early stories, they stick with us. They become part of our narrative. They become the filters through which we see all of the experiences that we have now. And so coming into business, of course, we bring with us all of these stories. And you know what, maybe we— it's okay, we can call it our baggage. So let me tell you a little bit about my story and tell me if you relate. So drop me a line, send me a message, reply to an email, whatever. Let me know if any of this resonates for you. I think I've shared a little bit that when I grew up, I went to a lot of schools. I think maybe, maybe 7 schools. And as a consequence, my way of being okay was to try and fit in as soon as possible. And so it meant that being liked was really important. And incidentally, I think this was complicated by the fact that maybe I wasn't always good at that. Anyway, a big weighty thing that I have carried around for a lot of my life and certainly into my adult life was this need to be liked, right? That stemmed in these early days. And so My relationship with rejection in my business was that if someone didn't want to work with me, maybe a proposal was rejected or a chemistry conversation didn't go my way, it felt pretty catastrophic in my early days of business because what was that rejection if not a sign that I didn't do enough or I wasn't liked enough, enough to get the work. Phew, it's pretty heavy, hey? And, you know, well, I suspect that you might have a similar story, whether you are fully conscious of it or not. And certainly you'll have your own flavor of it, and I'll talk about a few examples. But yeah, you may or may not be fully conscious of where that story comes from or what it is. Unfortunately, being in business is going to shine a light on your relationship with rejection sooner rather than later. So today what I wanna cover is some ways of thinking and some practical tools that can help you separate the experience of a no in business from the baggage that rejection might bring for you. And just to give you some insight on what that baggage could be, the baggage really is the meaning that we make of a rejection based on our past history. So it could be that rejection equates to not being liked, like it was for me, or it could be that rejection for you brings up fears and conclusions about what it means to fail and whether it's safe to fail and whether we can come back from failure because of our story. Or it could be that it brings up stuff for you about expectations you have of yourself or that were had of you growing up, right? So an expectation that you always achieve or that you live up to your potential. And you know, I've got a fair dash of that as well. And that also probably is related to a bit of perfectionism. So as you can see, there are so many different flavors of baggage that we bring to rejection in our business. And so it is no surprise at all that we experience rejection as something very painful and to be avoided. But here's the good news. Yes, of course, go get therapy, go get a coach, work through your baggage around rejection. But my goal for you is in fact not to eliminate the feeling of discomfort with rejection, but to expand your tolerance for it. Because the coaches who grow the fastest are not the ones who never feel uncomfortable, never feel discomfort around rejection, but they're the ones who, like I have done, have learned to experience all of that deep discomfort and keep going anyway. So here are a few things to remember before I share some practical tips. So firstly, remember that we are aiming for tolerance and not enjoyment, right? It will probably never feel great. That is not the goal. The goal is to get to a place where the same stimulus, right, or the same rejection in this case, causes less discomfort and has less power over your behavior. So it no longer dictates the path of action you choose or your choice to do or not do something in your business. And that is a learnable thing. And the way you learn it is through exposure, gently and intentionally in low-stakes situations first. I'm gonna share a whole bunch of examples of how you can do that in this episode. Secondly, we must also embrace a mindset of actively inviting rejection. So if you are only putting yourself forward in situations where you are fairly sure of a yes or fairly sure of a approval, fairly sure of, of positive response, you are possibly playing too small and you will not expand your comfort with rejection and you will consequently not expose yourself to an exponentially greater opportunity that may be out there for you. So deliberately stretching so that you experience more nos is good strategy. It is not failure. And it's good strategy in two ways. You, you expand your tolerance for discomfort. And you give yourself this opportunity for tremendous upside to occur. And I see the positive results of these, this stretching of our comfort zone all the time. Thirdly, we must remember that rejection is the cost of entry into business ownership. It is not optional. It is not personal, even though our interpretation of it may feel deeply, deeply personal. It is just the price you pay for being in the game. Every proposal that does not convert, every connection request that goes unanswered, every post that gets crickets, these are not verdicts on you or your work. They are just the numbers working themselves out. And that is why I love thinking about our sales funnel as a numbers game. It helps us to remember that part of getting a yes is the nos along the way. Now, if you're interested in talking about how to build sales funnels, how you work out that numbers game, book a call with me if you want to talk about what we do inside the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, because that is a big piece of it. But I'll tell you a little bit more about that later. Okay, so let me share 5 ways you can practically and progressively expose yourself to more rejection so that you expand your tolerance and almost certainly grow your business alongside that expanded tolerance. You can think of these as a ladder from lowest stakes to highest. But you don't necessarily need to take them sequentially like a ladder, right? They can all happen at the same time. But what I would say is pick and choose what makes sense for you, what works with your comfort zone, right? If you are already more comfortable, then maybe you need a bigger challenge. But just remember that all of them build this muscle and each one also happens to move your business forward. Okay, here is number 1, and you can think of these as like an experiment. In some ways. Your first challenge, number one way of getting exposure to rejection, is to send more connection requests on LinkedIn. This is the gentlest entry point. Start low and build up to sending up to 15 or so connection requests a day to people who are in your ideal client sectors. Now you have to go slow so that you don't, uh, you know, challenge the, the LinkedIn algorithm. So start with a few and then build up to 15 or so. I think LinkedIn has got limits around 100 a week or 400 a month. Um, so definitely don't go too quickly to that number. Take your time, uh, to build up to that and do check whether that is still the latest numbers, um, if you're listening to this later. And just remember, so why does this help us to expose to rejection? Well, the truth is you're not going to get 100% acceptance, right? Some people are going to ignore you. Some people will decline. Some people will connect and then ignore you. And some though, some will engage. Some will become warm connections. The rejection here is almost invisible, which is exactly why it's the right place to start if you aren't already doing this. Number 2 is to start posting your unpolished, imperfect posts on LinkedIn. Hit publish before you feel entirely ready. Now you need to give yourself time boundaries and you need to post what you have written in that time. Or I mean, and here's why it's good business sense, because otherwise you are going to spend so much time some might say wasting time trying to perfect something that is already really good. So the post that took you 5 minutes and makes you cringe a little will often land better than the one you agonized over for a week. The selfie of you doing something you love will get much more traction and connection than anything else you can post on LinkedIn. And incidentally, the worse the selfie, the better. Trust me, I've tried it. And honestly, the rejection here, right? It's the post that gets no likes or no comments or tumbleweeds. That rejection is so survivable. It is so gentle. You will be fine. And then you'll post again and you'll post again and you will build a pattern of consistency and connection that draws people to you and builds up the evidence for your credibility, right? So you can see the upside. You can see the exposure to rejection, and that's what makes it such a great thing to do, to not just show up and build visibility and all of those things, but also to build your resilience to rejection. Number 3, right? Okay, let's step it up a little bit to also post on LinkedIn, but post on LinkedIn where you make an offer. So every now and then, your content should explicitly invite people to work with you. Now, not every post, absolutely, but maybe Maybe 1 in 5 posts, right? Maybe 1 in 6 posts, maybe once a week, maybe once a fortnight. So not every post, but some of them. And this is where coaches often miss a huge opportunity and they go quiet because putting yourself out there, telling people what you do, what your services are, how they can work with you feels vulnerable. It can feel pushy. It is neither. It is just visibility. It is letting people know what you do., and some people will scroll past. In fact, most people will just scroll past most of the time, but a small number will reach out, right? And that ratio is absolutely fine. It is worth it. It is normal, right? And beyond that, there is the flow on that even people who don't engage, they will now know what you do. So when an opportunity comes up, when they see someone else who needs someone like you, you will come to mind. And again, this is so survivable as an example of rejection, right? People don't engage. Like, if I think like the absolute worst case scenario for posting what you do, sharing your offers, which is something that is very frequently neglected by coaches, by the way, worst case scenario is that someone says, whoa, that's really pushy selling. Now firstly, they aren't going to do that, I promise. But also, It isn't. Putting out there what you do, right, how you do it, how you work with people, is information and it is an invitation, right? But if someone was to post something negative, and that might be one of your fears around why you're not doing it, delete the comment, right? Easy. Hey, block the person too. You don't need that energy. We want to focus on people who are interested. But just remember, this is like you know, putting ourselves out there just a little bit more. And so you can see how it exposes you to the possibility of more rejection, but it also exposes you to the possibility of more opportunity. And that's why all of these are so powerful, not just to build your confidence and your exposure to rejection, but also because of the very strong upside associated with them. Okay, number 4, let's step it up a bit. Number 4 is starting to invite a more active no, and that is, I would suggest that you try pitching to be a guest on relevant podcasts that talk to your ideal clients. And just to be clear, I mean industry or sector-related functional or technical podcasts, not coaching and leadership podcasts. Now, this one feels scarier because you're putting your hand up and saying, I have something worth saying, and it is certainly inviting visibility, right? Here's the deal though, most pitches won't convert, right? You'll probably pitch, unless you know the people, you know, you're going to have a very predictable that a portion of them will convert and most of them won't. You can of course do things to get a higher hit rate, but there will be nos involved, and that is fine, and that is expected. And of course, every no gets you closer to a yes, and the yeses, they will build your credibility, they will expand your audience, they will get you in front of people you couldn't have reached otherwise, right? You can get help to write the pitches from Canva, you can use AI as your first draft. You just have to tailor them and make sure that you know what the podcast tone is so that you can pitch it right. And then get your voice out there. So a little bit more I guess, direct rejection, so much upside, and really starts to show us that we can cope with the nos and the nos are worth it for the potential of the yeses. Now, number 5, our last one. Yes, I am so predictable. It is warm outreach. Now, you already know how I feel about warm outreach if you have listened to this podcast for any time. It is the single most impactful activity that you can do to convert your professional network into a pipeline of potential clients. But I include it here deliberately because the fear of rejection is the number one reason coaches avoid it, whether they know it or not, right? So you may experience it as procrastination, as avoidance, but the likelihood is that it is fear of rejection and your particular flavor of that will of course be a reflection of your story and your baggage. And that is why you may be finding yourself paralyzed from doing the outreach., but the conversion rate on warm outreach is so much higher than any other activity you will do. Yes, some people will not reply. Some will say it's not the right time. Some might say, don't contact me again. This is the game, right? This is a numbers game, and this is where we see the numbers game at play. And again, like you've seen all of the other suggestions, the yeses we get from this make it entirely worth it. So it's a numbers game, but it's a numbers game that stacks up in the end. And this is where you can really get momentum and growth from your ability to withstand the discomfort of rejection, right? And so this will ultimately grow your business because this resilience to withstand the discomfort of rejection lets you do more of the actions that matter and that work when it comes to growing your business. So just to wrap up, growing your business requires a version of you who is comfortable being uncomfortable. Not fearless. You don't have to be fearless. Just a little more seasoned and accustomed to sitting in the discomfort and taking kind of relentless action anyway. These 5 things that I've suggested, done consistently and gently, will build that version of you faster than almost anything else. And they will also, not at all coincidentally, build your business. My challenge to you is to pick one of these to do this week, start small, and notice that you survived and think how you might then grow and expand into some of those other examples. If you would like to explore a coaching program that will support you with tools and curriculum and coaching and community to do all of these things, expand your comfort zone, grow your business with more corporate clients, I have just the thing. The Corporate to Coach Accelerator is my signature program for executive and leadership coaches, many of whom are experiencing this very same thing. If this has resonated with you, you can check it out at www.elliescarf.com/cca. And if you'd like to have a chat and discuss whether the Accelerator could be a good fit for you, I would love that very much. You can find a time that works for you. You at elliescarf.com/bookacall. And don't forget to connect with me over on LinkedIn if we haven't already connected. And of course, if you found value in this episode, please take a few seconds to rate and review the podcast. It really helps me to reach more coaches and help them to grow even better businesses, which I truly think is my way of changing the world through the extraordinary work that coaches do. I'll be back with more next week.