5 Tips For Dealing With Rejection More Effectively

Every business can use more sales whether we’re talking about a bootstrapped startup or a fortune 500 company. The problem is that many of these sales are on the other side of a good number of rejections and perhaps a mountain of disinterest as well.

Rejection is a daily reality for salespeople, direct marketers and business owners alike. It is also something that is part of everyday life regardless if you are running a business or simply dealing with people throughout your day. The tough thing is that rejection stings and many people will go to great lengths to avoid it.

Some people have extremely thick skin and aren’t generally that affected by it, let’s assume that isn’t necessarily you. We’ll also assume that if you’re reading this you want to improve your ability to deal more effectively with rejection.

So, What Can Be Done?

The first thing is to listen to and emulate people who have had a lot of experience with it. Recent podcast guest Richard Forrest, of telesales firm Forrest Marketing Group, is one such person. Richard’s advice isn’t to magically numb your feelings and stop caring, it’s to simply take a different perspective. His company frames sales calls as an exploratory mission to help uncover potential client needs. In this way, his people (if faced with a no) feel that their pitch isn’t rejected but that rather just they’ve discovered they cannot help that particular person. It’s a beautifully simple way of removing one’s own ego from the equation.

Beyond Richard’s reframing practice there are other things you can try. Here are five of them:

Acknowledge How You Feel

You won’t ward off any pain associated with rejection by ignoring it. If you’ve hit a bit of a slump or lost a big sale its okay to let yourself feel disappointed. The best way to deal with uncomfortable emotions is to face them head-on.

Treat Yourself With Compassion

Closely related to number one, you should definitely allow yourself to feel bad but don’t stew in it, and don’t beat yourself up unnecessarily. Treat yourself the way you’d treat a child, be encouraging.

Don’t Let Rejections Define You

Mentally strong people don’t let a few rejections turn everything black, they don’t get carried away and you should do the same.

Turn Rejections Into A Game

Instead of feeling down if things do work, take on the mind of an athlete. You’ve gotta think ‘okay I lost a game but there will be another one’. It simply means that you should be more motivated to win the next one.

Learn From Your Rejection

This is perhaps the biggest key of these five. If you’re getting turned down and not learning from the experience it really can be considered a loss. Sometimes our biggest lessons are hidden inside of failures, have your antenna tuned to these to get the learnings that any failure can bring with them.

Listen to my entire conversation with Richard Forrest here.
http://www.bond-appetit.com/richard-forrest/

Author: Ronsley Vaz

Ronsley is the founder & chief day dreamer at AMPLIFY. He is an author, speaker & serial entrepreneur.

He has a Masters’ degree in Software Engineering and an MBA in Psychology and Leadership. He is known as the creator of We Are Podcast – the first Podcasting Conference in the Southern Hemisphere, and the host of The Bond Appetit Podcast and Should I Start a Podcast. He has an audience of over 3 million in 133 countries.

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