Finding Brave 58: 5 Ways to Use Rejection To Fuel Your Success

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Finding Brave. This is Kathy Caprino and Happy Valentine's Day. I think that's today. I hope that. I hope that our talk today is going to really help make your Valentine's Day even more special, because we are talking about five ways to use rejection to fuel your success. So how am I tying that into Valentine's Day? Well, a lot of people feel rejected on this day. A lot of people feel alone. A lot of people feel like they're not getting the love they want or the reactions they want, or the confirmation or the validation or the feedback that they want. So I want to turn that kind of on its head and talk about rejection. And one of the reasons I'm doing this today, but you know, on the podcast is it's interesting, I analyze what my course members and clients and the people I hear from on LinkedIn and social media, what they are saying and what are the common themes and issues and challenges. Because I love to look at what the big challenges are so that we can address those with eyes wide open and so that we can move forward faster and better and easier. That's kind of my focus in Finding Brave and what I've been hearing a lot about. And it's really on my radar, and I'll tell you why in a minute. But it's the idea of rejection. And I'm going to talk about two aspects of rejection. The external rejection we get when we have an idea that's been turned down, or we're rejected for an audition, or we're told that the idea or the, or the initiative that we're putting forward, or the new venture or the startup isn't good enough, isn't what needed isn't timely, isn't fresh enough. That's the external rejection. But there's also internal self rejection. There are two sides of a coin. And what I see in so many thousands of women that I hear from and work with is there's a lot of self rejection going on. So, you know, you can't even move forward to get to external rejection, to get to, you know, having the courage and confidence to put something out there. If you are so self rejecting, you don't even get out of the starting gate. So I want to talk about all of this and give you five ways to use rejection to fuel your happiness and fuel your success. Okay, so I want to start with. I had a conversation with someone about rejection and she was taking it so hard. And this is again very, very common with the professional women I work with. And she was Taking it very personally. And it was infuriating to her that she got rejected a project for hers got rejected an idea. So, you know, whenever anything hits me really hard, like personally, I know that it's probably hitting thousands of other people hard. So I thought about what have I learned about rejection? Because my goodness, I've gotten a lot of it. And I want to give you some things to think about, but one of them is the more you move forward, the more you put yourself out there, the more you believe in yourself that you have an idea or a blog or a book or a project or a screenplay or a startup that's worthy of somebody listening to or investing in, the more you're going to get rejected. I mean, that's, that's the relationship, that's the equation. The more you do, the more you get rejected. So if you're always going back to the corner and needing to lick your wounds and you're just feeling angry and devastated, you're just not going to have the life you want. You're not. So I did this quote, I'll put it under the post so you can see it, and I put it on LinkedIn and it says how you handle rejection will directly determine the degree to which you can reach your highest goals. Don't be defensive, be curious. And the thing went Viral, I think 52,000 views and 1100 likes in a day, a day or two. And so I know it had touched a nerve. So, you know, I mentioned in that post, and I want to share it with you, that when I was younger I'd get so crushed by rejection. And so, you know, I had an 18 year corporate career, I had a lot of rejection. In the end, I had the ultimate rejection, which was being laid off in a way that was just so brutal. But I've had rejection of book ideas. My first book, breakdown, Breakthrough, which I adore, I just got rejection after rejection. Agents wouldn't take it, publishers wouldn't take it, until someone did. And it's interesting, with that project, I had no doubt this was a book that needed to be out in the world. So I just thought, what's the matter with these people that they don't understand how important it was? I didn't get crushed too much by that. But there have been other things that recently that I've put out and put forward that haven't gone forward in the way they wanted. And I was crushed. But in the past I'd get demoralized and angry and defensive and in my mind I'd rail against the person who was rejecting, and literally, I think they're stupid, or I hate that word, hate it. But that's what would go through my mind. You're stupid or you just don't understand this idea, or you don't understand the audience. You know, it was all about defensiveness. And now that I'm older, I truly think about it differently. Every single rejection you get, I have learned if you listen and observe carefully without all the defensiveness and the ego getting hysterical, it can unlock amazing doors for you. It can. And it can teach you about yourself and the world and your idea that perhaps needs a tweak or fleshing out or vetting or researching. And it really shows you how you can either understand that timing is a part of it, or vet it better or present it differently, or hang on till you do find somebody who really gets it right. But what's really important is that you don't get defensive. You don't take it personally. You just get curious. And I can say, this is not easy to do, but I did did it with my second book in development, and I can't talk about it quite yet, but good stuff is happening with that. And it took a lot of patience and a lot of perseverance and a lot of tweaking. But rejection can and will lead to success if you approach it the right way. So let's talk about five lessons that rejection can offer you that will fuel your success rather than crushing you down. Okay, so I do want to say this. I'm talking about rejection that's based in positive criticism. I don't mean narcissistic rejection. I don't mean bias. I don't mean sexual harassment. I don't mean discrimination. I mean, you're getting feedback about something that you respect, the person who's sharing it, or at least you feel it's something to listen to, but it's not what you wanted to hear. That's the kind of rejection I'm talking about. Okay, so let's talk about the outer rejection first. Then we'll get to the self rejection. So how does this kind of rejection, this kind of feedback, actually fuel your success? First of all, it shows you how the idea or the approach might need to be tweaked. Every idea that comes flying out of us, I mean, we're very creative, we're very innovative, we're geniuses. Many, many folks that I deal with are amazingly innovative. But not every idea comes out fully baked, perfectly right. So it shows you. Let's take an idea for a book okay, you submit the proposal, you're trying to find an agent, let's say. But I think this applies to a startup or any kind of project, your master's thesis, whatever it is, you pitching to be featured in a wonderful website. So if you get feedback that no, you know, it's not there yet, what you want to do is get as much information from the rejecter as possible. Of course, don't be shy about that. Can you give me more input? What isn't working, what isn't right, what isn't at the level it needs to be? Can you be specific with me? Because what's interesting is noticed. As I've gotten rejected a lot, they don't want to tell you the truth because it's hard for them. You know, this idea wasn't good enough. This book isn't fresh enough. This. You don't have a big enough platform. When my first book was accepted, I didn't have a platform. I didn't have any followers. I think I had maybe 5,000 people on my mailing list and I had a small blog I didn't have. I didn't have it going on. So, you know, people, people might be freer to say, well, you don't have a platform. And we're looking for, you know, people who've established themselves in the media. But if the idea is just downright bad, people don't want to really give you feedback because they don't want to be hurtful. But if you demonstrate that you're tough enough to get hear it and you want it, they will give you more information about why they feel the idea doesn't hit the mark and that's what you want. Lay it on me. Not defensively. Right. You might understand how it needs to be communicated differently. You know, I've been a marketing person all my life, and even though I'm a coach and a writer and a speaker and a trainer, a lot of what I do is marketing. And I'll see very clearly how, for instance, on my Forbes blog, two words can make a headline go viral or kill it. Literally that small a tweak. So sometimes it's just how you communicate it that is going to make or break it or is a little bit off the mark for the audience and just requires two words or one sentence of change. Right. Or an image that you put up on your website, maybe not attracting the people that you want, and you're hearing from people that it's not what they want. Right. It also shows you what's missing in the idea. What part did you leave off? Like, let's say you're going to develop a new course. I'm thinking about, you know, what, what I do day to day. Well, it may be that you've got three components that work, but you're missing a fourth one. An online component, or you're missing a group component, or you're missing a live component. So just because you got rejected with this iteration doesn't mean the next iteration isn't going to get what you need. And maybe if you're putting out something in the world, maybe you're not understanding as fully as you need to the potential market for this thing, or you've marketed it to the wrong audience. So, you know, if I'm working for professional women and I put something out and it's targeting 50% men, well, that's probably not a good idea if the whole thing is for professional women. Do you understand what I'm getting at? So you may get a no, but a no doesn't mean this is terrible. A no means maybe you got to tweak it a little bit. Okay. The second thing that rejection can tell you that's going to fuel your success is, is the timing of the idea. Right. And I want to just jump to something that might sound a little woo woo to people, but I really believe this. I'll call it the universe, because that's the way I frame it sometimes the universe isn't ready for the idea. Your book, there's not a state of readiness for your book. There's not a state of readiness for your startup. You've got to wait a year and then something will have changed in the market or your new app, it might go viral next year, but right now, not when my first book came out. While it's done well for someone who didn't have a platform at all 10 years ago, it came out in 08. And that was right. As you know, the economy was imploding. We had Obama in the news. We had Sarah Palin in the news. Nobody was looking at what this book was about. Nobody. You wouldn't believe it. Ten years ago, nobody cared about professional women's challenges. That's the difference 10 years can make. Look what's in the news today. Every headline almost is about, you know, something about women. And not every headline, but you know what I mean. So sometimes the timing isn't right, but it's not going to be something you understand or you can control. But the universe sometimes pushes back on an idea and makes you wait till it can be to come to fruition, because the timing wasn't right, and maybe the timing in your life isn't right. The third thing is speaking of timing, the readiness for success, you know, I have to. You know, I have to share with you when I had no platform, when I had no followers, and I think by today I'm over 900,000 followers on LinkedIn. Why is that number important? It's important because to me, because it reflects to me that something I'm saying, something I'm doing, the messages that I'm putting out there are resonating, are striking a chord with people, and that means the world to me. I don't want to sit alone in a vacuum, in a box, writing, what am I doing it for? I'm doing it so that I can hopefully be of help to people. Right? So. But I think that if somehow 10 years ago, something went viral to this degree, I'm not sure I would have the readiness. I'm not sure I would have had the personal boundaries and the understanding that, you know, speaking of getting rejected, some of the stuff that I've put out that's controversial, like, what is feminism? And why do so many men and women hate it still? Ah, wow. I got so much rejection of that idea. And also thousands of people saying, I completely agree, but the rejecting comments were so hateful. And there were swear words. Shut up, you dumb C word. That I was not really ready for that I wasn't ready. I had to take the comments down off of YouTube. And even my daughter, who was so. That was probably two years ago. I don't know. I'll check. 22 said, well, what do you think is going to happen? Mom, it's YouTube. It's not. It's not protected. You know, whereas LinkedIn and Forbes people, I think, behave more professionally because we know who they are. Do you know what I mean? But the point is, I got such rejection that I wasn't ready really to handle that kind of negative feedback. I've never received that. So sometimes there's a readiness. You may not be ready for the success that you're dreaming of with that idea. There needs to be a little buffer of time. But again, we're not aware of that. So this is where feedback can be incredibly helpful. The fourth thing rejection can tell you, or, you know, spurring you to ask is how well have you vetted the idea? You know, it's interesting. I'm a fan of research, and I've always been a fan of research, Even when I was a young kid interested in Psychology, you know, what would I be reading research reports about what affects the brain, what affects personality development. I don't love it at all when, when coaches or thought leaders throw ideas out and there's been no vetting of them. You know, I mean, on the other hand, there are people, you know, making huge differences in the world with ideas that are unlike anything that's come before. But I'm a fan of very well researched information. So even when I talk about themes and trends that I'm seeing with my clients, it's because I've literally spoken to thousands upon thousands of women around the world. So those trends are trends that I believe are evident through the numbers. You know, but one question that rejection makes us think is, have I done the research on this? You know, I've had course members and clients over the years who've said, I've put out a new product and nobody wants it. And I'll ask them, have you researched it? Have you? And sometimes they'll say, yeah, my friends, I got together a few group of friends and friends aren't your research shouldn't be your research pool. I remember. So I spent seven years in market research and one of the things I did really well was develop screeners, which is, you know, screening questions to make sure that the people you get in the room to vet your idea are actually just like the people who would be looking at it to buy it. I mean, if you get your friends or you get, if you, if your idea is for teachers and you get a group of people who aren't teachers, you're, you're not going to get the feedback you need. So did you vet it? Did you research it? You know, today there's so many ways to research thoughts and ideas and projects through SurveyMonkey, through free tools. There's kind of no excuse not to do research on your new idea, your program, your article, whatever it is. And the final way, rejection in terms of an idea or a project or an initiative can help you. Is it, can help point to, is it too limited or skewed in a way that your own success with it is going to be limited? Right. So what do I mean? So perhaps let's say you're putting out a course and the way, or a new book or a new chapter, but the way you're framing it is, is either too limited or too broad or too vague. I mean, what comes to mind is personal branding. A lot of people that I work with are new coaches and they'll say, you know, I just, I want to Help everybody feel better and be happier. That's just. Forget it. You can't help everybody. I mean, if someone said to me that's what they do as a coach, I pretty much know they're not a good coach because there's no depth to that. Right. A man's issues are not the same as a woman's issues. A woman over 50 is not the same as a woman who's 20. A divorced woman is going through different challenges from a married woman. Somebody with kids has a whole different world going on than someone who does not have kids. If it's too vague, too broad, I mean, in personal branding, we say, if you're trying to help everybody, you're helping nobody. So these are some of the things that feedback which can be rejection oriented can actually inform you, but you're not going to hear it. You're not going to understand it if you are too busy defending yourself and being angry at it. Boy, I really wish what I'm teaching now. I knew 20 years ago my life would have been very different. No regrets. I don't have a regret about that, but I can tell you it's really true. I wasted a lot of time licking my wounds and being so just. What's the word? Just so confused and angry as to why people weren't accepting my idea or project or whatever it was. Now let's talk about self rejection. Okay, so I did just write last week an article on three key steps to moving from self rejection to self love. So on Valentine's Day, let's love you up. Hugging you up. Let me. There's a lot to talk about here, but. And I'm linking to the article below, but there, there are five stages of going from I totally reject myself to hey, I love myself. And you can read that in the article. What I want to talk about are three steps you can take to move away from self rejection, to move towards self love. And you know, there's just. Oh, there's so much to talk about. But the first step is just begin to recognize how amazing you are. Take time this week. Shut everything off, go to a room where you can be quiet, turn off your devices, unplug and think about what you have already done, how you are in the world, who you've helped, the needles you've moved, the things that you've done that have mattered. You know, I say this a lot. If you've listened to five podcasts, you probably heard me say this, five episodes. But because I have seen thousands of my document, my career path, self Assessment, which I give every client, and thousands of thousands of people have taken it, and I've seen thousands of them. I can tell you with just 100% surety that everybody is amazing in some way. Everybody. It doesn't matter their background, it doesn't matter their education, it doesn't matter their training. What these people are writing about, things they've gone through and things they've done, it makes my head explode, it's so amazing. But they don't see themselves as amazing or unique or special or valuable. Invariably, if people are coming to me, they're having a problem seeing how fantastically valuable they are. So if you're a professional, you'll want to download my career path assessment. I'll link to that, and you'll want to answer it. And it's 11 pages of questions I wish someone had asked me 30 years ago. And if I had answered them honestly, by gum, I wouldn't have made the mistakes I made in terms of my career and in terms of devaluing myself. Not, you know, what I did was take the very first job that was offered to me out of school, and it stunk and it wasn't the right direction because I didn't love myself, I didn't value myself. I thought I had to go with the first crappy job that was given to me. So take time to understand how am I of value in the world? And, you know, your sphere of influence doesn't have to be enormous. It doesn't have to be, you know, Gandhi, our mother Teresa, my two of my favorite, favorite inspiring role models in the world. You can, you can be influencing two people, your kids, but what are you doing that is amazing? Please take time to recognize it and watch my TEDX talk. Time to brave up about how to articulate the 20 facts of you. Okay, I want you to start saying, I am amazing now. That goes to the next one. A lot of women can't even say that. They kind of cough up a hairball when they say anything close to that. So the second step to moving away from self rejection, which you've got to do if you want to live a happy, wonderful life and career, is identify your biggest fears in the way of sharing a more authentic, amazing self in the world. So, you know, a lot of women are going to hear this and read this and go, you know, I just. I don't love myself, so how can I even fake it? And I don't feel comfortable even saying I love myself. And that's because society and our parents and a lot of people have told women, don't act like you love yourself. Don't act arrogant. Don't act self absorbed. Don't act, smuggle. My gosh, my goodness. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm saying love yourself. So love yourself the way a mother loves a child. You know, a healthy, loving mother. Love yourself. And you're not self absorbed and you're not narcissistic because you love yourself. You're not. But we have to undo a lot of the messages that we were told. And another challenge is, my gosh, I am so floored by the number of people that come to me who are not having the careers they want. And we can tie it back to childhood messages they got that were traumatizing or damaging. Some of them had narcissistic parents. And I'm linking below to how narcissism. How being raised by a narcissism. Sorry. How being raised by a narcissist damages your self esteem. I'm starting to be more of an expert on this than I ever thought I would be. And it's sad stuff, but if you were raised with messages that you are not good enough or you need to be a certain way or look a certain way and be thin and beautiful and smart and get straight A's and go to Harvard and be number one on the tennis team or, you know, go to the States in soccer, or you're nothing. You. That is affecting you right now. That is affecting your career, it's affecting your relationships, it's affecting how you're parenting, it's affecting your health. So many of us are given damaging messages that keep us from loving ourselves. But I do believe that even if you had a very happy, healthy upbringing, society doesn't like it when women seem too confident. Women seem to assure, Assure self assured. Well, we have to. We can't cave on this. Society's got to get good with this. I don't really care that society doesn't like it. And you know women. The research shows women are punished and perceived as less competent, less valuable if they're forceful or strident or emotional or confident. We got to work through that and push through that. We can't let that stand. So what I'm asking you to do is look at the biggest fears you have about loving yourself and sharing yourself more with the world. The real you, the real, unadulterated, not the Facebook selfie you. The real you. Okay? The third step to moving away from self rejection is stop holding back and start doing the things you really want to do so. You know, the long and the short of it is you will develop more self love the more you put yourself out there. It's interesting, I interviewed another role model of mine, Harriet Lerner, who's the best selling, she's a renowned therapist and multiple million million copy best selling book, best selling author and the book I think she might be most known for is the Dance of Anger. Every, every trained therapist has read her books. She's amazing. What she has to say and how she says it is so inspiring. But she writes this. In truth, there's only one way to escape the pain of rejection and that's to sit mute in a corner and take no risks. If we live courageously, we will experience many rejections and that will make us want to fold up in a corner and never put ourselves out there again. Don't let yourself stay in that dark corner too long. Get out and accumulate more rejections. There you go, get out and accumulate more rejections. You can take some time out, but don't ever let a rejection stop you. I just find that so beautiful. And I think that literally, you know, I say this a lot. The more you spread your wings, the more you're going to bump into things, new things, new challenges. It's not going to go away. You're suddenly not going to never have a rejection. It doesn't work like that. What happens is the more you put yourself out there, the more you say I'm worthy of that thing that I want. I'm worthy of having my second book published the way I wanted to, with an AMAZ publisher with an amazing agent and I am not going to settle. Well, the more you put yourself out there, the more you're going to open the door to new experiences that are going to let you have the readiness and the skill and the talent and the confidence to have those ideas be met with great, great acceptance. But that will require you getting good with rejection. So I hope this is helpful to you. I hope that, that you can see the connection between the more we stop rejecting ourselves. And you know, I write in this piece I'm linking to below about perfectionistic over functioning, which I've talked about a lot. It's a concept I learned in therapy, but I've kind of tweaked it for non therapeutic work. But if you are a perfectionist, meaning you're killing yourself doing more than is necessary, healthy and appropriate and you're trying to get an A in it, and if you're over functioning, if you, you know, in some ways that means you think you're in control of everything. You're not. And if you're a perfectionistic over functioning, you're just exhausting yourself and it's, it's a miserably unhappy way to live. And I know you know who you are, folks, and I'm a recovering perfectionistic over function. I still have those traits. They still rear their ugly head, but I'm aware of them. And greater awareness equals greater choice, for sure. And so you can choose to change, but if you insist on, number one, thinking you're in control of everything, you're going to miss a lot of the juice and the richness of life. We're not in control of everything. There is timing, there are things going on that we can't see. There is a readiness or a lack of readiness perhaps in you. And so it also requires some faith and some trust that I did the best with this idea. I did the best with this book, with this course, with this startup, with this thesis, with this online dating profile, whatever you're putting out there. I did my best. I did my best with every piece of information I have available to me and it got rejected. So what am I going to learn? How am I going to love myself up and keep going? And yeah, maybe I have to take a week off or a month off or go to Aruba and swim in the ocean before I can come back and address this, but how can I look at what I'm getting back as a way to fuel me being more of who I really am in the world? Because that is the point that, you know, we're finding Brave, we're closing our power gaps so that we can actually live the life we're meant to live here and live it joyfully and thrive in the process. So I hope that's helpful, folks. I would love to hear from you. I would love it. You know, so wherever I, wherever I put this podcast, which, and I hope you'll connect with me on social media, I'm turning into a big fan of Instagram. I hope you'll follow me on Instagram. I'm new to it. I don't know, I'm learning how to do a story and you can all give me advice. Yeah, that one worked. That one didn't. I won't call it rejection. I'm on Athy Caprino at Instagram. Follow me there. Follow me on beloved LinkedIn, which is just my happy place. I love LinkedIn, but I'm also on Facebook at Alia Communications. That's my business name. And on Twitter, which I love, and on Pinterest. So follow me, will you? And please share, Please share. You know what was a rejection that you're still struggling in getting over? Because I know there are some. And if I can ever be of help to you, I would love to. Towards that end, I want to tell you I launched just recently a new four session private coaching program, Closure Power Gaps. And this is not just for women, and this is not just for professionals. It's for men and women who have any kind of challenge or a power gap where they don't feel powerful, they don't feel confident, they don't feel worthy. I would love to help you close that power gap and start moving forward again to share with the world who you really are. Because that's what we need to see and experience and learn from. Okay, everyone, so I'll see you on social media and I would love to hear your thoughts and I hope this is helpful. Happy Valentine's Day. I'm sending bushels of love to you and so much appreciation and gratitude for you being here. Okay, have a wonderful brave day and week. See you next time. Bye bye now.