Yes, Rejection Hurts - Here's How to Turn it Into a Source of Motivation

Rejection sucks.

It doesn’t matter how many times you get hit with it, it always stings. And worse, it often leaves you feeling even less confident than you were before. These two factors create a perfect storm for living a life of regret and missed opportunities.

But whether you’re trying to pitch a business idea, convince others to support your cause, or just ask someone out on a date, rejection can also be a stepping stone instead of a roadblock that stands in your way.

If you can change your perspective on rejection, then your can change your entire outlook.

A rejection is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success.

– Bo Bennett

Before we talk about dealing with rejection, it’s important to note that rejection is all about what goes on in your head.

Sure, it’s caused by an outside event, but what is important is what happens in that brain of yours immediately afterward.

• Do you beat yourself up?
• Do you tell yourself, “See, I knew you weren’t good enough”?
• Or do you see it as a stepping stone to something greater, understanding that in order to get to success you need to encounter a certain amount of rejection?

Having worked in a sales environment and later as an entrepreneur, I have an intimate relationship with rejection.

It is one of those things that you never quite get over one-hundred percent, but that you can absolutely learn to deal with in a productive way, very much like with emotions such as fear or anger.

And, for me, what led to that mastery of the art of dealing with rejection was really just one simple idea. If you can come to see that this idea is true in all things, it will change your perspective on rejection forever.

Instead of seeing it as something that knocks you down hard, with the chance of never being able to get back up, you can perceive it as a painful event that actually motivates you to keep moving forward.

RELATED: 9 Incredibly Successful Entrepreneurs Who All Failed Big Before Winning Big

How a number-based goal system can help turn rejection into a game

Okay, so back in that sales-based business I mentioned earlier, we had to contact people via various methods such as cold-calling to try to get sit-down meetings. Yes, it was the worst thing ever. Anyway, back to the point.

Sales is always a numbers game. It’s also filled with rejection. So, what did we do to help us deal with that rejection? Well, after a while, we got a pretty good idea of what our “conversion rate” was. In this case, conversion rate meant how many “nos" we had to get through before we got to a “yes”.

So, every time we’d get a no, we would just jot it down, mentally telling ourselves “Yes! I’m X closer to another yes.” We actually turned rejection into a metric for productivity.

I’ll say that again: We turned “no” into a desirable, productive outcome. That changed my entire perspective on rejection. And not just when I was doing sales (never again…), I went on to apply that ideology to everything else I’ve done since.

This trick turns the tough journey to reaching your goals into an addictive game of sorts.

And if you can buy into this game, you can transform your relationship with rejection forever, softening the blow when you experience it and increasing your chance of success tenfold.

What’s your number?

So, my question to you is this: What’s your number? You probably have no idea now, but if you keep going, you’ll get your yes.

You might be thinking, “But what if I never get a yes?”

The cool thing is, everyone has a number. Yours might be higher than someone else’s, meaning you’ll have to go through more rejection before you get to your goal, whether due to less experience, skill, connections, dumb luck, or other factors, but you still have a number and if you keep going, you’ll get that yes.