How to deal with the pain of rejection

Regardless of what it is you’ve been rejected from the answer is almost always the same. If you’re having trouble dealing with the emotional pain of rejection it’s because you were invested. If you weren’t invested you wouldn’t care right? So the question is, is dealing with rejection just simply about not caring?

Probably not. Because if you’re going to enter employment or start a relationship with someone, at some point you must’ve thought about what it would be like in that future with them. And if you did, and you weren’t turned off by it, you started to build investment. The more you think about this future the more you invest. And the more you invest, the more it’s going to hurt if it doesn’t work out.

But this is kind of necessary. Because if you weren’t invested what would be the point? You’re just fooling yourself if you’re trying for something that you don’t actually want. That doesn’t really make sense. So that means if you’re invested, the pain that will follow when you’re rejected is inevitable.

So we need to find a way to soften the blow.

We can do that by dividing our investment back into ourselves.

If you invest in yourself, you’re saying you will improve and invest in your future. Because no matter where your future lies as long as you are a better version of yourself in that future you’ll probably be ok. It will still sting to get rejected but damn you will be fine as long as you bring it back to you.

And anyway if you improve, the people around you will respond differently in that future and it’ll be different again. Who knows, maybe something even better will pop up because now the better version of you is worth that much more but that’s what you should invest in.

So the best answer to dealing with rejection is to use the pain of rejection to motivate you to self improve.