Dealing with rejection is never fun. It stings. You expressed an interest in someone, and they said ‘No, thanks’. Sometimes, they leave off the ‘thanks’ part. Ouch. But just as physical pain, unpleasant as it is, has a healthy biological purpose, so rejection can be good. The key is using it to your advantage.
It’s very easy to preach ‘turn lemons into lemonade’. But lemonade without sugar is bitter. So, to make rejection anything other than a pain, it’s necessary to give a recipe for making it a positive. The key to that is twofold: accept and explore.
1. ‘Acceptance’ means realising that not everyone will be interested, even if you’re interested in them. That early rejection saves you more grief later, when it turns out your fantasy doesn’t match reality.
2. ‘Explore’ means trying to understand why the rejection occurred.
Sometimes you just have to accept and move on. That person wasn’t for you. But when that happens a few times, or from someone you really thought you had a connection to, it’s worthwhile taking some time to try to understand why.
That can be difficult. There are often multiple reasons, some not so easy to ferret out. Many times, you don’t get much to go on – just a ‘Not interested’. People who reject you rarely give a lot of reasons or facts to help you figure out why they acted as they did. But you have many clues and in some cases they’re worth exploring.
If you communicated by email for a while, and then they wanted to discontinue, you have the past emails to go over. No need to obsess over them. The goal is to use them as data. Examine both sides of the conversation and consider whether you really were clicking as well as you thought. Were there values shared? Did you spend time very early on arguing?
Sometimes it’s possible to do everything right, but do it in the wrong way. Women are often leery of any guy who is ‘too nice’. Men are often turned off by a woman who doesn’t show enough interest in them. They don’t want to feel they are ‘just another guy’.
There is one special case that men, in particular, will often see as ‘rejection’ where they should not: when they receive no response at all. There can be a dozen reasons why you sent a message to that person who seemed perfect for you, but they just didn’t answer back.
Sometimes, women are (with some justification) nervous about reaching out when they’re unsure. In the borderline cases, they just let it go without exploring further. Sometimes, the recipient just didn’t see anything in your email that piqued their interest.
You don’t know the circumstances of the person you contacted, so you can’t really draw any conclusions at all. It’s not rejection, it’s a non-response. Go on to the next prospect.
When you find that one right person, things are usually easy (at least at first). Everything clicks. So, in the end, it doesn’t really matter who or how many reject your offer. You only need that one. That one could be the next contact you make.
