How to Get Over the Pain of Rejection | Rewind

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When we begin to heal, we don't want to wake up to a life with a whole bunch of problems created by our reaction to our pain when it was at its worst. Rejection has a lot in common with heartbreak. Rejection is the crushing of an ego, our identity, and it can come from many different things in our life. It might come from the end of a relationship that wasn't our choice. It might come from being terminated from a job. It might come because we're an artist and we created something and poured ourselves into that thing, and then didn't get the reaction we wanted. Maybe you're someone who aspires to make YouTube videos or make content online and you put out that piece of content that you were really proud of, that you thought was gonna be your way to launch yourself, and then you got comments that made you feel really rejected and not seen. Maybe you went on a dating app and somebody ghosted you that you were talking to, or maybe you put out your opinion in a big way and someone rejected that opinion and that felt like a much deeper rejection. There are so many different ways we get rejected in life, but when we truly feel the pain of a rejection, at our core it can feel like a fracturing of our confidence of what we believe we're worth, of who we think we are in this life. Because at the end of rejection, through the catastrophizing that our minds do, we arrive at this terrible destination of I am worthless. I want to talk to you about two crucial phases in your rejection and in the life cycle of the emotions you feel when you get rejected and how you can use them wisely. The first phase deep, unbearable pain. Now, this is a phase where it feels like you can't get anything done, where it feels like other parts of your life are slipping because you can't focus, you can't get it together. It's a phase where you're prone to acting out because you're in heightened states of emotion, so you're liable to say the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing, to make erratic, irrational decisions, burn relationships, burn bridges. This is a time where the potential the negative externalities of your rejection are incredibly high. So, I'm not going to tell you how to transform your life in phase one. Phase one is survival. Let me, please God, let me get through this. And when we're feeling that, we want to limit the damage we could do when we're in that place. Because when we begin to heal, we don't want to wake up to a life with a whole bunch of problems created by our reaction to our pain when it was at its worst. So I think of this as limiting the downside of the rejection. Anytime you find yourself about to send a text or make a phone call or make a decision in this moment that could be damaging, say to yourself, I'm gonna delay my reaction until I can trust the person who's reacting to make the right decision. If I still want to do that thing in a month or send that text in a month or in a week or whenever, if I still want to do that thing, if it still feels like a good idea, fine, I can do it. But I'm not gonna do it now. And I guarantee nine times out of 10 with a little thought and a little clarity, you will thank yourself that you didn't act out in the ways that your emotions told you to when they were at their most despairing. The second phase is when you actually are able to create a little space between you and the rejection. Doesn't mean it's not hurting at that point. Doesn't mean it doesn't still feel like a deep wound that you're over it. Rejection is a kind of trauma at its worst, but you can get to a point where it's a little less raw And there's just enough space to create some perception around it. To decide what the meaning of the rejection is. And I think of this as finding your leverage. My dad taught me this. Every time something terrible would happen in my life, anytime there would be something that was so unbelievably disappointing or devastating, My dad would tell me, Matt, there's leverage in everything that happens. There are things that have happened in my life, whether they've happened to me or their self-imposed mistakes and pain, those moments have created incredible leverage for me in the form of my coaching. Because the reason that you're hearing from me with a different tone on this subject than the me from 10 years ago who gave three tips to overcome your pain and heartbreak is because of the pain that I've actually experienced since. So you get a different me now. I get to be a more powerful me. I get to be a me that connects more, that inspires more, that's able to reach more people, truly reach their hearts because of that pain. That's leverage. if you worked really hard on something for your work or for a passion project and it didn't go well, you got rejected, you didn't get the response that you'd hoped. What's the leverage? Think about it for a moment. What's the leverage? Sometimes the leverage is, I'll show them. You know, someone points out a weakness in it, and someone pointing out the weakness makes you develop a strength in that area that's 10 times better and more resilient than it otherwise would have been. I've been on TV shows before where someone has exposed a lack of knowledge I have in an area and that exposure made me go home and read three books on that subject so I was never in that situation again. So now I have a well of knowledge that's a result of being exposed, right? But I never would have read those three books if I didn't get exposed in that way. We can call it rejection but it was this amazing light that got shone on something that could be better. You could be on a dating app and experience the rejection of someone ghosting you and that rejection can be the thing that makes you say, you know what? I'm gonna speak to five more people on here so that this person becomes irrelevant. That's the leverage. You see, this is gonna give me a fire in my belly to go and find someone who's actually what I want. See, rejection is just energy. That's all it is. Rejection is energy and that energy can be parlayed into anything that's important to us in life. We have to find the leverage. And the leverage becomes the legacy.

Right?

The history of your rejection has already been written. Right? You... it happened. That's the history. That's the historic part. Whatever it was, it happened. But the legacy of it is for us to decide. We get to decide where the energy of that rejection goes and what it creates in our life that never would have existed if it wasn't for that rejection. Whether it's a standard, a new standard, whether it's a resilience, whether it's an actual thing that we create in our life as a result of that rejection, whether it's time spent on something more important than the thing we were spending time on, or whether it's just getting better at that very thing, getting rejected and saying to yourself, you know what? I'm gonna get a fire in my belly and I'm gonna show whoever this is or whatever this is that I can do this thing and I'm gonna get 10 times better at it because of this rejection, not in spite of it. The leverage becomes the legacy and it's in crafting the legacy of our rejections that our life becomes really, really interesting. To me, that's where the opportunities are. Before you go, I wanted to let you know that we have a program that is great for anyone in early dating right now who wants to make sure they don't keep ending up in casual situations but gets into a relationship that actually goes somewhere. It's called the Momentum Texts. It's ridiculously practical and you can get it for $7 over at momentumtexts.com.