Navigating rejection as a business owner.

Pretty photo on film from when I walked the West Highland Way… just because.

Rejection is often the hardest part when it comes to running your own business, especially if you are a creative soul. There are so many layers as to why this is our biggest challenge. I don’t know anyone who has found this easy.

Firstly, our survival is tied up in people wanting to work with us. It’s how we get paid so if you are living through a period of a lot of rejection and ghosting then it can start to have a massive impact on both your mental and physical wellbeing. It can see you loose confidence and self esteem which then becomes a catch 22 because you stop putting yourself out there.

The rejection confirms our deepest beliefs about ourselves… we aren’t enough.

Not good enough.
Not creative enough.
Not good enough at marketing.
Not good enough at sales.
Not good enough to have a business.

It doesn’t matter which variety of not good enough you want to pick, it’s all the same. Whether we like it or not we are creatures who need external validation and rejection is the opposite of that.

(Before we proceed I want to have a nod at quitting. Now, if you really want something or want to do something then I will cheer you on while you persist. As long as it’s still what you want and despite the challenges of rejection you are finding joy in what you are working for. But if you are utterly miserable and exhausted of all resources, I just want you to know that it’s ok to quit, especially when it comes to business. It does not define us, you deciding to pause, quit or change direction is not defeat, its courage. It takes just as much courage to quit as it does to continue. Anyway, back to rejection…)

That does not mean that we can’t navigate it better. Rejection is completely unavoidable in life. It’s inevitable and I really feel like it’s something we should be given some skills in. Imagine if we had been taught this, that being rejected is absolutely ok. It’s an opportunity to learn and be curious. To hold ourselves to account and to keep going. Instead of a catalyst for shame.

It’s something that happens to all of us. Yes some more than others because we can’t ignore the scale of privilege and where we sit on it but it does happen to all of us. Over and over again I have heard from authors who have had their books rejected dozens of times and sometimes it has taken self publishing to get it out there. Which gets me on to the worst rejection and the only one that matters.

Self rejection. The one we do to ourselves. External rejection only impacts us intrinsically if we are also rejecting ourselves. The first step to working with rejection from places outside of our control is to do the work to stop rejecting ourselves. Which is not easy but vital. Genuine self love and acceptance makes it far easier to move through the world and take risks because we then always have a safe place to come back to.

Next is realising that when you are rejected it usually has nothing to do with you. You made an offer and for whatever reason that didn’t work for the person who said no. Of course you can ask for feedback but I have found that it’s usually to do with price or how I choose to work, both of which I am confident in and know works for my ideal clients so I am ok with that.

The other day I rejected a couple who were enquiring with me for wedding photography because I knew that we would not be a good fit and I didn’t want to waste anyones time and I helped them find someone who was a good fit. Rejection doesn’t have to be horrible.

There is another side to rejection that I want to touch on. And that is the co-dependancy element. When we reject an offer, a person or perhaps a service we find it deeply uncomfortable because we feel responsible for their feelings. The truth is we are not responsible for how someone reacts when we reject them, that’s on them. I believe that aside from most of humanity being overwhelmed and exhausted that the next biggest reason we get ghosted so much is because we are shit at doing rejection. We don’t like to make other people feel bad so we let our silence or absence do that for us.

So ghosting isn’t really about you either.

Exposure is the next step when it comes to getting better at rejection. A lot of us will cling on to comfort at all costs to avoid rejection but that comfort gets us nowhere fast and we often wind up suffering for it. So we need to expose ourselves to these uncomfortable feelings by putting ourselves out there and taking some risks.

Jia Jiang’s Ted talk on rejection goes into this beautifully and is an amazing insight, you can watch below…

The more you expose yourself while building up that self esteem the easier it becomes. You can start small, maybe reaching out to see if someone you want to connect with fancies a coffee, or entering a competition with some images, writing or art. Or perhaps you want to go totally left field and use some of Jia’s challenges. It doesn’t matter as long as you are only aiming to be curious and grow.

Me and Rosie discussed this more extensively on our podcast Oh SNAP recently and you can listen on either of the links below. I hope you enjoyed this but it’s also cool if you didn’t ;)

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