Being A Good Panelist

[Music] today I want to talk about rejection and how to respond to it we work with a lot of professionals who say that the whole reason they find it difficult to present themselves in the first place is that they fear rejection so it’s a pretty darn common concern I would suggest maybe it’s beyond common I think it’s pretty darn close to un Universal I don’t think anybody likes rejection I don’t think anybody Embraces rejection or pursues rejection but we can learn a lot from rejection and of course we can have a negative emotional reaction to rejection so I want to suggest a few things the next time you experience it the first thing is give yourself time to experience it it’s really okay to feel depressed hurt bruised it’s an emotional thing and I want you to give yourself permission to feel those emotions you don’t need to just immediately leap to okay what can I learn from this take a little bit of time and I don’t know if grieve is the right word but feel the feelings that you feel in response to this occurrence this rejection once you’ve done that then you can sort of Turn the Page and start to ask yourself okay what can I learn from this how can I benefit from this because rejection really is extremely helpful now the reason I’m talking about this is today I experienced something that felt like rejection what it was was going through feedback from participants in a room that went through a series of workshops that I delivered and there was plenty of positive feedback but there were a fair number of people that I just didn’t sync up with what I was putting out they weren’t taking in and that can happen sometimes so that’s the version of rejection that I experienced now like I said it wasn’t a universal rejection there were plenty of people who really enjoyed what I got and there was plenty of positive feedback that I got but it’s really easy to focus on the rejections as opposed to the positive comments so what I want to recommend to you is that a rejection no matter what form it is is rarely like a 100% rejection even if you’re only talking about one person and not a room full of people it’s rare that that one person 100% resoundingly rejects everything about you but the fact is they are rejecting you in some way maybe you’re trying maybe you’re an individual trying to get hired by a company and the company rejected you or the one person who was interviewing you rejected you but maybe it was tough maybe there was a lot they liked about you and you just didn’t make it high enough my point is a rejection is not a rejection of everything about you it’s not a complete rejection of everything that you are the thing that you want to do is get a fair and true assessment of what worked and what didn’t work and if it was involving a large number of people to get a sense of how many people perceived you in what way and what can you learn about that perception and what can you change for next time so that’s all I’ve got for you around this topic keep at it keep pursuing things keep presenting yourself don’t expect 100% success always try for as much success as you possibly can generate and be okay with rejection