From my teens through my late twenties, I would get totally derailed by rejection. If a guy I was crazy about (note the word ‘crazy’) rejected me, I was devastated. I would ruminate about it for weeks on end. The dialogue in my head was awful. “Why did he break up with you? Why did I say or do whatever it was that I said or did?” I would turn the relationship on it’s head, analyzing it to death (even though it was already dead). Does this sound familiar?
As I’ve grown, my belief system has grown, too. I now believe that rejection is a gift. How did I come full circle? It’s based on how I now see the world.
3 Keys to How I See the World
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Everything happens for a reason. If you believe that everything in life has a purpose, but you just might not understand that purpose at this time, you can begin to learn from everything that happens. Once I stopped analyzing everything that happened to me, when I began to think of the bigger picture in life, I trusted that everything was unfolding as it should. It takes a degree of faith to feel this way, but it really changes your outlook on life’s challenges, such as rejection.
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You are the co-creator of your life. I always considered myself to be a positive person, but I didn’t realize that I was surrendering my power to several things in my life. Whether it was something from my childhood that I wished was different, or something in my marriage that I had tried but couldn’t change, I felt stuck and angry about those things that I couldn’t control. I now know that ‘if only’ thinking doesn’t work. Instead of trying to change the things that didn’t worked, I changed my response to those things. I stopped being friends with people who sucked the life out of me. I began to look deeply at the things I was saying ‘yes’ to (but were draining the life out of me). In short, I started to create the life I wanted to live. Once I took charge of those things, rejection happened less often. And when it did, I was able to process it much better.
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The only person I can control is myself. I can’t control how someone else behaves, but I can control how I respond. I can’t control how someone treats me, but I can control the standards I put in place for how I want to be treated. Learning how to get clear about my standards, which reflect my core values, was key to respecting myself more. Which in return led to people respecting me more. I stopped seeing myself as rejected. I learned to reframe rejection as the gift of clarity about who I should be with.
Truth is, with my new way of looking at life, I hardly ever feel rejected. I now feel like I am in the driver’s seat in my life, and I make powerful choices about everything and everyone I allow into my life. I realize I can’t do possibly do justice to the topic of my life philosophy in a short blog post. What I have done is attempt to capture the essence of what makes me a happier, more fulfilled person, with the hope that it will positively influence how you see the world.
I hope you take away one main point: that rejection is truly a gift. If you follow steps A through C above, you’ll see that rejection is part of the plan. You may not understand the plan, but have faith that it was meant to be. You’ll come to understand why it happened as it reveals itself to you at some future point in your life. Rejection is not something to bemoan, but rather something to learn from. Every rejection clears the way for the right things to come into your life.
If you can’t let go of what’s not working (and that goes for every aspect of your life), you won’t be able to be with the man who is right for you. I hope you can learn to process rejection in a productive way. Maybe you can eventually learn to eliminate rejection altogether by reframing how you view it.
Whatever the case may be, rejection is a gift. It’s what you do with it that matters.
Do you have a story of how you learned from rejection?
