How to Deal with Rejection: 11 Ways to Bounce Back Quickly

Rejection is a fact of the writing life. But getting beaten down by it doesn’t have to be.

By Natasha Khullar Relph

---

As an award-winning journalist, I’ve written 1,000+ articles for publications such as The New York Times, TIME magazine, CNN, BBC, and more. I’ve also created content or done content strategy for clients including Facebook, Buffer, HP, and Helen Keller International. I’ve written eight books, many of them Amazon bestsellers. And oh, I run this website you’re on, The Wordling.

All these successes could lead an inexperienced writer to assume I’ve rarely faced rejection in my writing career.

In fact, the opposite is true.

I can almost guarantee that I’ve faced more rejection than any writer reading this.

Why?

Because I put my work out every single day. And the more I put out there, the more rejections—and successes—it leads to.

The old saying is true—a writer’s path is paved with rejection. The more you see someone succeeding, the more you can assume they’ve faced rejection. It isn’t how many rejections or setbacks you experience in your writing life that determines your success, it’s how you deal with them.

The best thing you can do is to learn coping skills, so that the impact of rejection is both swift and painless, allowing you to move on quickly to the next thing.

This can take time, but more than that, it will take intention and determination.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Know that rejection is a part of the creative life

Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected 30 times before being picked up by Doubleday, selling over a million copies, and becoming a successful film.

John Le Carré was told he didn’t have a future as a writer.

And Lisa Genova couldn’t find an agent for Still Alice, so she self-published it. Nine months later, it caught the attention of an agent who sold it for six-figures. It went on to become a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Academy-award-winning movie.

As a writer, it’s important to remember that it’s not if you will be rejected but when and how often.

And here’s a counterintuitive thought: The more often you’re rejected, the better.

Getting rejected means you’re putting your work out there. It means you’re getting over your fear of rejection. And most importantly, it means you’re improving your odds for success.

Listen, rejection is a part of life. You’ll experience it in romantic relationships, in your career, and, with all of us being on social media so much, as social rejection.

But what a lot of people don’t realize is that when it comes to the creative life, rejection is not just a part of the process, but the part of every day. If you’re doing it right, every single day. And if you’re really crushing it, multiple times a day.

Writers who don’t learn how to deal with rejection quickly don’t last long in this business. Their self-protective mechanism simply won’t allow them to. When you’ve conditioned your mind to perceive rejection as an attack, your subconscious will do whatever it can to protect you from being attacked again. This will manifest as unfinished projects, a lack of desire to send out work, or giving up completely.

One of the best things writers can do in the early years of their career is to have a goal of receiving at least 100 rejections in a year.

This allows you to practice rejection. It helps you reframe your relationship to failure. And it allows you to build resilience in a controlled and healthy way.

2. Allow yourself to feel what you feel

When someone says, “You need to deal with rejection,” it’s possible that what you may hear is “Quit yer’ whining cos nobody wants to hear about it.”

That’s what we’ve been taught, after all.

Culturally, we’ve been conditioned to believe that anger is bad, frustration is bad, jealousy is bad, and that expressing these emotions is inappropriate and wrong.

The fact is that you will feel these emotions. If it’s not socially acceptable to admit to them or talk about them, however, you’ll stuff them in. And that’s when they start to fester.

There is a healthy way to process your feelings. And that starts with acknowledging them.

You’re allowed to feel angry at the editor who sent you a one-word “No” in response to a thoughtfully crafted pitch.

You’re right to feel frustration at the agent who strung you along for two years before telling you she won’t be taking your book out.

It’s normal to feel jealousy when a friend gets a publishing deal for her first book while you’re working on your third unsold and unpublished novel.

While you wouldn’t want to be aggressive or hurtful in expressing those feelings, you are allowed to feel them.

Rejection stings. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to ignore hurt feelings or stuff them away.

However, when you feel your feelings, you’re showing your subconscious that, despite the sting of rejection, it was manageable. You survived. It wasn’t such a big deal.

This is key. Because when you allow yourself to experience the pain of rejection, you don’t develop unconscious avoidance behaviors that prevent you from putting yourself in situations where you may experience rejection again.

3. Don’t make it mean anything

Here is the thing you must remember: There is the fact of rejection and there is your interpretation of it.

The fact of rejection is you sent a pitch or an article or a book and someone, for some reason, didn’t buy it.

The interpretation of rejection is personal to you. It can range from “Eh, their loss,” to “I’m not good enough,” “I will never succeed at this,” or “I don’t have what it takes.”

Your interpretation—self-critical or self confident—will determine how you deal with the rejection and how much it impacts your emotional state.

When I don’t get something I really want, I remind myself that as long as I still believe in my dream and my ability to learn and grow, I can keep moving forward.

A rejection can’t faze me.

A string of rejections sometimes can, but I’ve learned to remind myself of what matters—my dream—and keep moving forward. I remind myself that I’ve been in similar situations before and it’s been fine.

Your dream job or dream career is not dependent on a single person or a single yes. Your career is a culmination of many steps, big and small, and remembering that is key, no matter whether you’re in the middle of a job search or sending out a hundred LOIs to bring in new freelancing clients.

As long as you believe in yourself and your dream, you can keep going.

4. Build a social support system

You know one of the first things we do when we experience a breakup or a romantic rejection? We call a close friend or a loved one. We know instinctively that we need to reach out for support.

But when we experience a setback in our career?

Most of us will suffer in silence.

I’ll tell you why this happens. Part of it is shame. Rejection hurts, and it can often lead to a cycle of self-criticism and negative thoughts. When you’re in that vulnerable state, you may experience imposter syndrome or self-blame. If you’re making the rejection mean something about yourself, such as that you’re a terrible writer, sharing that rejection makes you worry that other people will see that too. They will see through your careful presentation of confidence and badassery and see you for the truth that this rejection has highlighted: You’re shit.

The other part is a lack of understanding.

See, most people don’t understand the creative industry or how common rejection really is. They may offer unhelpful platitudes or give terrible advice about your work. If that’s happened to you before, you know it’s easier to suffer in silence than to deal with the additional emotional burden of having to explain your career to people.

This is why I recommend having a freelancing group or writer’s community where you can share your feelings of rejection or heartbreak with people who actually understand the nuances of your emotional reaction.

If you have a romantic partner or parent you can vent to, that’s a bonus.

5. Know your threshold for rejection

Most of the advice about rejection centers around a neurotypical experience and doesn’t take into account that we’re all on a spectrum, not just in how we experience setbacks, but how we experience setbacks from one day to the next.

While it’s easy to believe that all you need is a “thick skin,” your reaction to rejection may have nothing to do with your ability to receive criticism, and everything to do with triggers from your childhood, things people have said in the past, or your current mental health and level of self-esteem.

Someone who has ADHD, for example, may experience Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)—an extreme emotional sensitivity to rejection and failure. This can make any rejection, personal or professional, seem like a far bigger deal than it is.

Advice such as “toughen up” or “learn to deal with it” can not only be useless, but harmful.

Coping strategies can be different based on how you experience rejection, and how often you’ve been rejected in the recent past.

As Mark Leary, a former psychology professor at Duke University, told CNBC: “Being repeatedly rejected has a ‘cumulative effect.’ If you wrecked your car every day of the week, it would be stressful and anxiety producing.”

This is why I recommend understanding your threshold for rejection so that you know when it’s time to push forward and keep going and when it’s time to pull back.

I discovered my own threshold a few years ago. As a freelance journalist who experienced rejection multiple times a day, it’s always been easy for me to just keep pushing forward. But when I wrote a very personal novel about my experience being abused and gaslighted, I didn’t take into account that my threshold would be different. Forty rejections later, I started feeling anxiety, but because all I knew was to push ahead, that’s what I did.

That decision derailed me, not just for a few weeks or months, but for years.

Human beings need time to process. If a friend had recently been through a breakup, you’d advise they take some time before jumping into future relationships. When you’re in physical pain, you don’t start running marathons the week after you’ve healed.

You need to give yourself time to recover from emotional pain as well, especially if you’re prone to more intense reactions than your peers.

6. Take actions that affirm your self worth

The advice to “leave your ego out of it” is wise, but unhelpful in the moment because the truth is, rejection does bruise your ego. When you’re in the throes of these negative emotions, it’s near impossible to just leave your ego out of it.

What I recommend instead is that you take specific actions that help you build up your self worth. Some of my favorite ways to do this include:

1. Change your self talk: Research shows that how we speak in “I am” sentences becomes our identity. Say “I’m always rejected” and “I’m a failure” enough times and it won’t be long before the world around you changes to reflect that belief. On the flipside, start writing down affirmations such as “I’m always getting new opportunities,” “I am good at what I do,” and “I can achieve any goal I set for myself,” and those statements will soon turn to beliefs, which will turn to opportunities and success.

2. Set small goals and smash them: I’m someone who loves to reach for the stars and set truly impossible goals that the world scoffs at—and hit them. However, big visions require big commitment and big levels of self-belief. Setting a high target that’s completely out of your comfort zone when you’re feeling shit about yourself only serves to multiply that experience. Set goals that are in line with your level of belief. After a rejection, perhaps the next small step is to put yourself out there again.

3. Visualize yourself doing something really well: This is a very powerful exercise and only takes 2-3 minutes. So take a deep breath, count from 1 to 10 and when you feel fully relaxed, imagine yourself not just achieving success with your goal, but envision the process of you actually doing it. Do this once a day with intention and you’ll start seeing results very quickly.

4. Keep a list of “nice things people said”: I’ve been doing this for 20+ years now, and it’s served to help me remember the wonderful things people were saying about my work, especially when I was faced with criticism or rejection. In the beginning, I had very few of these notes. Now I have thousands.

5. Do something fun: Get out of your head by treating yourself to something nice. Indulge in some self care at a wellness retreat or simply go for a long walk by yourself. It’s important to prioritize your wellness, especially after a setback, so that you can be refreshed and energized enough to come back stronger.

7. Learn from the experience

Once you’re past the initial sting of the rejection, it’s time to do some active digging for information. Put your emotions aside for this one. That is, process them before you arrive at this step.

Now listen, in this business, one rejection means nothing. Even a hundred rejections mean nothing.

But if you’re experiencing multiple rejections on multiple projects, they can point you to a weakness you may not be aware of.

Ask why your work was rejected. Can you fix it? Do you want to?

You’ll need to have self compassion going into this process. You need to be like a detective figuring out where the problem lies.

If you’ve been on book submission and it hasn’t sold, read through all the rejections to see if there’s a common thread. As a freelancer, are you getting a certain type of rejection and could they all be pointing to the lack of a specific skill?

“…look at it and see if that’s actually fair and accurate, or whether you’re being too hard on yourself,” Sharon Martin, LCSW and psychotherapist told TODAY.com.

Ask for feedback from colleagues. Listen to trending podcasts. Join a mentoring program. Come get group coaching from me weekly in Wordling Plus.

This sort of self-reflection and rumination will lead to constant self-improvement that helps you identify what you can do better and get to each next level faster.

8. Get super focused on your habits

As a professional writer, you need healthy habits.

Professionally, this means creating new work constantly, marketing every day, and building your audience. It also means looking after your mental well-being, making sure you’re in good physical health, and getting enough sleep.

For some writers, especially those who are new to the game or have experienced a particularly thorny rejection, it can lead to wallowing in despair. You can start to feel sorry for yourself or get into a victim mindset without even realizing it.

When that happens, the first things to go are your habits.

Ironically, that’s when you need your good habits the most. For example, for the first few years of my career, I was in the habit of sending out 5 pitches a day. I had very little work and so I wrote personal essays to practice my writing skills and I sent out 5 pitches every day so I could get excellent at marketing my business.

When rejections came—and they came in droves because I was sending out so much—they couldn’t derail me because I had good habits. Even though I didn’t feel like it, I got up the next day and sent out 5 pitches again. I’ve shared the story of how I pitched Time magazine every day for weeks until they finally relented and gave me an assignment.

Trust me, I would feel deflated, and it would have been easy to throw myself a pity party and not send anything out. But I didn’t do that. I woke up every day, looked at my list of habits, one of which was to send 5 pitches, and sent out my work. Day after day, week after week, rejection after rejection, I kept going.

Until one day, it worked.

Build habits and stick to them, particularly when you’ve been knocked off course. There is nothing more important than that when it comes to success.

9. How would your characters deal with rejection?

Here’s a little trick I like to use that works brilliantly for writers.

Imagine a badass character in a book you’ve written or are writing. Write a scene in which they experience the same rejection as you just have. How do they react? What do they do? How long does it take them to get over it? How do they deal with it? Does it strengthen their resolve?

As writers, we put characters in shitty situations and life experiences all the time. We come up with more and more hurtful forms of rejection. A love interest fancies their best friend. The promotion they desperately needed goes to their colleague. Our protagonist gets stuck fighting the antagonist—with no access to her weapons.

As authors, we know that we can’t have our characters throw up their hands in defeat and mope around for days. Readers won’t put up with that. We need our characters to be proactive.

The same goes for you.

In the future, when you’ve overcome this adversity and journalists are profiling you, what would you like to have done in this moment? Who would you have liked to be?

Do that.

Be that.

10. Practice moving on quickly

In his book Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average, and Do Work That Matters Jon Acuff talks about his comedian friend John, who says:

A failure would hurt a lot if I were only performing once a month or once every other month. There’d be a thirty- to sixty-day window for me to carry around that failure. I’d sit with it for all those weeks and it’d be really heavy. But with comedy, if I fail during the 7:00 pm show, I only have to carry it for an hour until the 8:00 pm show. It doesn’t have time to define me when I start again so quickly.

It doesn’t have time to define me when I start again so quickly.

Why do I send thirty pitches in a month, write every day, and start new novels the day after the previous ones have been completed?

Because if my creative works were to fail—and they do—they don’t have time to define me. I’m already on to the next.

I’ve had many courses and launches not sell as many spots as I’d have liked them to and that’s fine, because I’m always creating new ones.

I’ve had many book projects splutter and fall apart midway through the process and that’s okay because I have enough creative ideas that I feel no desire to attach my self-worth to a single one.

It didn’t matter that my first novel didn’t sell for the advance my agent was looking for because I had more novels already underway and there was zero desperation in either of us because neither of us was in this game to see one book succeed; I’m in this game to build a career and a body of work.

I’ve had launches go spectacularly well with my books landing on the Amazon bestseller list with nothing but a couple of emails to my list and I’ve had books land with such a whimper, I wondered if they’d floated away.

I’ve had $15,000 days and $800 months.

But it’s never really fazed me, the high or the low, because either way, I’m already on to the next.

I care about what happens to my work and I put in a lot of time and effort into making sure that it succeeds.

But, as John says, “It doesn’t have time to define me when I start again so quickly.”

11. Allow rejection to fuel your dreams and motivation

Most people see rejection as a negative event, but I’ve always used it as fuel for the fire of my ambition.

If you can learn to separate your self-worth from the rejections you’re receiving, then all rejection is, really, is feedback.

It’s someone’s taste at a certain point in time.

Instead of using it as a stick to beat yourself up with, use it as motivation to keep going.

Believe in your dreams. Believe in your capability to achieve those dreams. And use rejection to improve yourself, learn from your mistakes, and move forward with even more intent and resolve.

---

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Mail
• Link