How do you deal with rejection?

I suffered social rejection as a child and found it a severe trauma.

It still affects me in some ways but not particularly in my career (e.g. I am not a great salesperson but I feel about cold calls the way Brer Rabbit feels about being thrown in the Brer Patch.)

Overall it has gotten better as I have gotten older and I expect that to continue.

move on and prepare for next one.

The first thing is to sleep before sending any email back to the person who rejected you. Take some time to breathe and have someone you trust give any draft you write a read through before sending. It never helps to go negative.

Afterward, I take the time to mourn and process the rejection. It sucks and that's very human. I've been rejected more times than I can count, and at times, I was overly confident that a job was going to be mine during the interviews.

I've learned to keep going and put myself out there over and over regardless of what happens. I'm doing this right now for a job that's really calling me, like one of those 'I don't want to wake up at 60 with regret if I don't at least try.' You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

It is a bummer and it hurts getting rejected but I think I use my rejections as motivator to get a better job. In my college placements, I was rejected from many companies despite getting quite close at a dream company. Got an internship at a great startup, but didn't get a full time offer there due to some genuine bad luck, hunted for jobs during the pandemic, got rejected some more times and got some offers, accepted one of them and joined it where I have been for 1.2 years.

That being said, had I been at the previous startup I had joined as an intern, I might have earned been earning more and it still feels bad from time to time. But having a stable job and stuff to focus on helps keep me distracted.

I was rejected for jobs (internal side moves) many times for about 10 years. I've never been good at boasting about myself or making out I can do more than I can, and never knew the right people. Turns out those three things are a prerequisite for moving anywhere.

I was getting pretty bitter about the whole thing, seeing people who could talk a good game in jobs they couldn't do properly, certainly not as good as I could.

I realised it was all a big game though and eventually played it good enough to move to a job I wanted. Much as I hated playing the game, it was that or quit.

remember that it doesn’t reflect you as a person.

You don’t know if the company actually thought your performance was bad or they just hired internally or randomly chose someone else.

And even if you know your performance was bad, that doesn’t mean you are a failure. Everybody makes mistakes and everybody has flaws, and truly understanding and acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses is one of the best abilities you can have.