As the story goes, when Colonel Harlan Sanders left Kentucky with his pressure cooker and his recipe for cooking fried chicken, he received over 300 rejections before he found someone who shared the same passion for the recipe that he did. Novelist Stephen King got so tired of publishers rejecting his first novel
Carrie
that he tossed the manuscript into the garbage. Fortunately his wife retrieved it, and King went on to be one of the most successful authors ever. Neither Sanders nor King quit – they persevered and they became wildly successful.
How you
choose
to perceive “rejection” will dictate how you handle it.
If you see rejection as a negative, it won’t be long before you let if affect your performance. If you see it as simply an event, perhaps even a positive event, you will handle it quite differently. It’s your choice what kind of energy, positive or negative, you attach to it. Let’s say you made 25 cold calls without making an appointment. If you see it as 25 failures, you will not be very motivated to continue making calls. However, if you believe that it’s impossible to continue making calls without somebody saying, “Let’s meet,” you’ll see the activity in a different light. You’ll see it as having positively identified 25 suspects who were not, at least today, interested in meeting with you, and you’ll know that you are just that much closer to successfully making an appointment with someone who is interested. Let’s look at it in another (positive) way. When you call someone and they decline to meet with you,
your situation didn’t get any worse…it stayed the same.
You never had an appointment in the first place.
SWSWSWSW - Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting. This is a good affirmation for you to use.
Key Point:
You can’t control whether someone will give you an appointment, so don’t beat yourself up for something that is out of your control.
You can, however, control your own activity;
in this case it’s making the
attempt
to get an appointment. So for every attempt to get an appointment you should give yourself a pat on the back for the effort.
If you fall down ten times and get up ten times, that’s a success!
Self-Study Assignment:
How have you normally felt about rejection? Has it gotten you down from time to time? What have been the consequences to your ability to function at 100%? Write down your old script about rejection, then re-write a more positive script. Examples might be: “I hate being rejected” and “Every ‘rejection’ gets me that much closer to a success.”