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Rejection is part and parcel of running a business and it’s critical that you learn how to handle it and reframe it and not take it personally.
As a businesswoman, you will spend a lot of time being told ‘no’ by potential clients. You’re going to get people who sign up to work with you and subsequently change their minds, and from time to time, you will fail at things.
Let me give you a few examples of typical rejections:
If you run a membership, people aren’t going to stay forever. They will leave when they feel they’ve gotten everything they need from it or if their priorities change.
Similarly, if you’re building an email list and regularly sending out newsletters or email sequences, you will get people unsubscribing. I want to reassure you that both of these are normal and nothing to get upset about. They’re part and parcel of running a business.
Whatever your business is, people will join your membership for a while and then they’re going to leave. People will subscribe to your email list and unsubscribe over time as their situation changes and they move on to other things. If you don’t recognise this, don’t become aware of the feelings it brings up and reframe how you think about them, it can derail you. It can cause you to want to give up or believe that what you’re doing isn’t working.
Thinking that your email marketing doesn’t work because someone unsubscribed isn’t true. The same goes for your membership. If someone leaves it, it doesn’t mean that your membership is failing. There could be any number of reasons why they’ve decided to leave or unsubscribe, but what is challenging to deal with is that you’ll likely never know the real reason. But that’s how it is in business when you’re putting content out there. Some people will love it and consume every scrap for years and then, suddenly, unsubscribe.
It can hurt, especially if it’s someone you know, have worked with and helped a lot. It can be so easy to take it personally. It can be easy to think you’ve done something wrong or that your content isn’t interesting anymore. But you really can’t afford to think like that because it stops you from taking action. You stop showing up, and you stop learning and growing.
Getting used to rejection, reframing it, and moving on is part of your growth and how you become more resilient as an entrepreneur. It’s how you create consistency too. You need to be super consistent if you’re a small business owner who gets clients through social media and email marketing. The rejections we’ve talked about can come at any hour of any day, and you mustn’t allow them to stop you. You have to reframe them and let them go to be able to continue doing your thing.
So how do you reframe rejections then?
1) Limit the amount of time you allow yourself to wallow You’ll often not know the real reason for the rejection, so don’t torture yourself by wondering what it could be.
2) Accept that not everyone will like you, and that is OK. You don’t like everyone, so it’s unrealistic that everyone will like you.
3) Accept that people’s plans and priorities change, and despite all the help you’ve given them, sometimes they need to follow a different path and explore other things. Whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with you, so don’t waste your time and energy wondering about it.
4) Wish the person well and embrace the space that their leaving or unsubscribing has created for you to receive more wonderful clients into your world.
5) Find an affirmation that helps you handle rejection.
My personal favorites are
‘This decluttering is happening so that I have room for more abundance and even better clients’
and
‘All is perfect, whole and complete. I don’t understand why bad things seem to be happening right now but I know that everything is happening for my higher good in the longer term’
So those are my pearls of wisdom for you this week.
Think about the last time you were rejected. How did it affect you? Could you use any of my tips to help you deal with it better in future?
