Fear of Rejection in the Professional Sphere: An Insight

 

Human beings are capable of experiencing all kinds of emotions ranging from happiness, grief, trauma, and even fear. One of the greatest fears, we, as ever-evolving creatures feel is that of rejection at our workplace or in the professional arenas of our life.

Rejection can be in the form of not getting selected in your dream course, not getting your desired job, or even promotion barriers that one face in their careers. It is quite easy to say to never quit and be strong and resilient but the person experiencing it only knows what all it takes to cope with such experiences.

Personally, I’ve felt this too like many of you and thoughts like “Am I not good enough?”, “Probably I didn’t work that hard for it”, “Why can’t I get one thing right" and all such thoughts take a toll on our mental health. We also create biases in our minds as a form of defense mechanism like “ They knew the other candidate before and that’s why I got rejected” to make ourselves feel better.

But the reality is that these are just excuses we make to escape the pain and lack of incompetence that we’ve developed over time. We need to understand the fact that rejection is a part of life and it is the only thing that makes us better.

We’ve come across people in our life who have taken rejection in the right spirit and made something out of themselves. The world-famous example of Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba also highlighted the same fact that “One should never stop trying. He mentioned that he was rejected in 30 interviews and in many universities like Harvard. But what is it that made him so persistent? It’s the sense of knowing that not all doors are closed and there are rays of hope.

Everyone has different ways of dealing with rejection according to their personality traits and what makes them feel better. Some most common ways have been mentioned below:

1. Catharsis

Catharsis, a term used by Aristotle, is a system of releasing all the repressed emotions to have a sense of relief. Believe it or not, no matter how hard it is to express what you’re feeling, once you’ve done it not only makes you feel lighter but also gives you a sense of purpose back again and to bounce back. It can be in any form like anger, crying, sorrow, and for some people even engaging in their favorite hobby!


2. Having a Task-Oriented Approach

Human Beings by nature have a way of reacting to a situation by either doing something for it or simply ignoring it to avoid emotional pain. While avoiding at times seems a convenient option but someone who really wants to get better at things would have an approach that has a solid action plan.

• Identify- Identify what the root cause of the problem is. For instance, if someone did not clear in the GD round, one should analyze whether he/she or was not confident enough or was it that the points presented were not strong enough.

• Engage- Once you’ve decided that what is it that you need to work on, have a proper action plan for that. Using the previous example, one can practice their communication skills by rehearsing in front of the mirror or have a habit of researching to present valid facts.

• The opinion of your Loved Ones- It is a fact that what we perceive of ourselves is quite different from what others see. Often, our friends and family members can highlight that what is it that we need to work on since they are the ones who’ll want us to succeed more than anyone else.

3. Accepting Criticism

One of the most important things is to understand that there will always be a point in your life where disagreements take place. It is your duty to know the difference between someone giving you constructive criticism and someone who is just saying words out of envy. It is completely fine to change your facts if some new information is presented to you. Everyone has weaknesses but people usually try to turn them into their strengths by working on them. One can only be approved if they are aware of themselves.

Wrapping Up

In such times of pandemic, we’ve seen people losing their jobs and some even go through a salary cut. What is of greatest importance is we normalize the fact that rejection is part and parcel of such a competitive world and we should give utmost support to people who are the victims of it.

It’s not just the class of 2020, but such instances have happened in the past too where a pandemic has occurred in 1918 and most recently after the 9/11 episode. The learning from such episodes is that those people too got out of such situations because they had a mindset of resilience. We can do this too and we’re all together in this!

Written by - Kashish Chadha