How to Deal With Rejection and Stay Positive During Your Job Hunt

Tweet 36 in my book Success Tweets says…

“Don’t be afraid to fail.  You fail only if you don’t learn something from the experience.  Treat every failure as an opportunity to grow.”

Over the years several members of my career mentoring site have told me that they have lost out on jobs that were probably a great fit for them because they didn’t have the confidence to pursue them.  That’s really a shame — losing out to fear.  Fear is the enemy of self-confidence – and career success.  Most people fear failure, criticism and rejection.  It’s only normal.  We all want to feel good about ourselves.  Failure, criticism and rejection are not pleasant experiences — and the job hunting experience can be full of failure criticism and rejection.  They lower our self-esteem and make us feel bad about ourselves, so we often avoid doing things that we think might lead to failure, criticism or rejection.  However, if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you have to have the courage to do things that might result in failure, criticism or rejection.

Failure, criticism and rejection provide you with the opportunity to grow and develop – to succeed.  You can’t take failure, criticism and rejection personally.  Failure, criticism and rejection are outcomes.  They are a result of things you have done.  They are not who you are.  We all make mistakes and fail.  We all do things that cause others to criticize or reject us.  This doesn’t mean that we are failures.  It means that we have made some poor choices and done some not-so-smart things.

Failure, criticism and rejection provide the opportunity to start over – hopefully a little smarter.  Buckminster Fuller once said, “Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence of trial and error experience.  Humans have learned only through mistakes.”

That’s why fear is the enemy of self-confidence and career success.  If your fear of failure, criticism and rejection paralyzes you to the point where you aren’t willing to take calculated risks, you’ll never learn anything or accomplish any of your goals.

Don’t be too hard on yourself when you fail, or when others criticize or reject you, or when you don’t get the job you want.  My best advice is to put your energy into figuring out why you failed and then do something different.  Here are four career success coach questions to ask yourself the next time you fail, or get criticized or rejected.

1. Why did I fail?  Why did I get criticized or rejected?  What did I do to cause the failure, criticism or rejection?
2. What could I have done to prevent the failure, criticism or rejection?
3. What have I learned from this situation?
4. What will I do differently the next time?

By asking the first question, you’ll get some idea of the skills you need to be able to avoid failure, criticism and rejection the next time.  If you’re having trouble landing a new job, you can pick up great job search skills by checking out the courses published by my friends at Careerealism.  These courses will help you answer questions 2, 3 and 4.

If you’re proactive, if you seek out the resources that can help you,  you’ll be using failure, criticism and rejection to your advantage.  In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says, “Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.”  I know it’s hard to see the benefit or opportunity in failure, criticism and rejection.  But it’s there – you just have to look hard enough.  But it all begins by facing your fear and acting.  The less you fear failure, the more career success you’ll create.

Your career mentor,

Bud

Want to Succeed? Be Kind, Respect Others