Dealing with Rejection (and Failure)

Recently, I was a guest on the podcast "T is for Training"; one of the subjects discussed was dealing with failure which sparked a discussion on how do you get over the fear of failure. Somewhat flippantly I suggested "practice, practice, practice," and I wanted to take a minute to dig a little deeper into what I meant.

Practice your presentation. 
Lifehacker had a great post about how to improve your presentations. All you need to remember now, is that everything is a presentation. From the time you present your idea to get permission or buy-in, through every moment of it's execution, to the "debriefing", or to explaining why it failed, you are in the middle of a presentation. This means your actions during this entire period should ideally be planned almost to the point of being scripted. Of course you can't anticipate and script every little thing, but the more things you have planned for, the fewer things can catch you by surprise. The key focus of this type of practice is so that regardless of what comes, you can maintain your demeanor and poise. Many people are impressed when someone demonstrates the ability to keep their equilibrium when things fall apart.

Practice handling failure
Not only do you want to be able to keep your head when things spin out of control. You also want to demonstrate that you can handle failure, rejection, and criticism gracefully. I want you to visualize being told "no" or worse being told your idea is a bad idea. How humiliating it is to hear that, especially if it comes from someone you expect. Did you cringe? Then do it again. And again. And again. Until you can visualize hearing those words and still visualize yourself gracefully accepting the words and moving on, repeat the exercise. Then, for good measure, repeat it some more. A majority of times this is your worst case scenario and you just showed yourself how to get through it repeatedly. You might note this is an implementation of "expect the worst and all your surprises will be pleasant." Repeat this step through implementation of the project, figure out what ways it could fail, then try to address those weaknesses, and finally prepare for them to fail anyway.

Practice letting go
Most AA style programs have as a step believing that your fate is in the hands of a higher power. I am not going to be so cruel as to suggest that the deity of your choice might want you to fail; however, the reason for this is that you need to realize there are things you cannot control. Flip a coin and try to make it land on heads 100 times in a row. Sure if you do it enough it will happen, but it's more likely that was the law of averages happening. The truth is you cannot prepare for everything. When I worked for a radio station we had an Italian engineer who, when things went wrong that he didn't predict, would say "f***ing Murphy," referring to Murphy's Law. You need to realize that if you did your homework and prepared for as much as you could expect, if things go wrong then it was just "f***ing Murphy." Take a deep breath and say to yourself "Oh, I didn't realize that could happen like that," and prepare to take the lumps you practiced for earlier.

No, the gut wrenching feeling when things slide out of control will never go away. No, the gut wrenching feeling that things might go wrong will never go away. Accept that practice doing your best when faced with the worst.