Rejection is a part of life, both personally and professionally. We all face it and it’s unavoidable. But, it’s also a great learning opportunity. Whether it’s about your self-confidence or how you interact with people, what’s important is how you learn to get over it and what you take away from it. Believe it or not, it takes some practice but learning how to deal with rejection comes down to 5 simple factors.
Accept It
Know that it’s a part of your romantic life and you will have to deal with it. The sooner you accept it and know that you will grow stronger from it the less power fear will have over you.
Learn From It
Make sure you take away something from the rejection. Whether it’s learning from a mistake you made or that a particular someone wasn’t right for you, rejection can be a powerful learning experience.
Give It Time
Getting over rejection takes time, so be patient. Focus on yourself – your health, fitness, mental strength and you’ll emerge stronger and better. Don’t beat yourself up after a short period of time, time heals all, as the old saying goes.
It’s Not The End Of The World
Yes, it’s a terrible cliche but it’s absolutely true. Lean on your support group of friends and family and try to take a step back and look at the big picture. Every person you probably admire has been rejected and moved on to do great things and you can too!
Get Rejected More Often
Getting rejected more often is actually a good tool. It actually makes it easier to deal with and helps you understand and move on more quickly. Also, getting rejected means you’re taking risks and living life to the fullest.
Some people are born with it, some people aren’t, but confidence is definitely something that anyone can have. It just takes some work and a positive attitude. Confidence can help you in all facets of life, from dating to professional settings, so that’s why we’re sharing a few tips on how to be more confident.
Identify self-limiting thoughts/actions
Whether you work through it on your own or with a professional, getting clarity on where you lack confidence is an important step in changing it. Whether it’s facing your fears or understanding where negative thoughts come from you’ve got to know where you stand to improve.
Know The Truth: You Are Great
We all have self-doubt, it’s part of life, but confidence starts from the inside out, and working on loving yourself and recognizing your own great qualities is a key point in becoming more confident.
Talk To Yourself
This might seem a bit weird at first but it really works. It can take many forms from mantras you say to yourself at the beginning of the day to just giving yourself a pep talk before a big date or job interview, putting yourself in the right frame of mind can really help you feel more confident.
Practice
Confidence takes practice. From consistently working your own processes to just interacting with people on a regular basis, practice makes perfect. The more you work on it, the better you’ll get.
Be Positive
Confidence also starts with a positive outlook. By cultivating a positive outlook on life, social interactions, work, etc. you’ll be able to focus on being genuinely happy with yourself and others
One final point, know the difference between confidence and arrogance. There’s a fine line between being confident and cocky. Confident people are engaging and fun to be around, arrogant people come off as disingenuous and rude. Yes, it’s important to know your worth but you never want to think you’re better than anyone, projecting the right type of confidence will bring people to you whereas arrogance can just turn people off.
It’s back to school time again, so we thought we should share a bit of advice and wisdom for all you students out there. School is a time for fun, sure, but it’s also time to start thinking about and working on your future. So with that in mind, here’s some of our favorite advice that every student should know.
Relax
The pressure you’ll feel is self or community imposed. All the decisions you think are completely life-changing are easily fixable if you keep your head about you and don’t fall for the trap that the major or direction you choose now is what you have to do for the rest of your life. Take your time, you don’t have to figure it all out at once.
Start good habits now
Good habits will absolutely carry through long past graduation day. So start taking your mental and physical health seriously. Work on things like eating better, getting enough sleep, reading more, and putting a productivity workflow into place (check out GTD, Pomodoro Technique, Bullet Journaling). Learn how to find your motivation and use it.
Learn how to be a good conversationalist
This skill is something that will be useful for the rest of your life. Be genuinely interested to learn about other people. Whether you’re making new friends or using your conversation skills for networking, being confident and comfortable making conversation is really important.
Internships
If you’re in college, even as a freshman – start looking into company internships NOW. They will show you what it’s really like to work for a certain type of company or industry. Use these as a try-out for potential careers. You can also talk to your guidance counselors and career centers and ask if they have any specific programs for this.
Learn money management
While it’s not taught in most schools, learning how to budget is huge. Look up personal finance (try Reddit) and how even putting $20 or $100 a month now will give you financial freedom much earlier in life – even if you’re working in a low-wage job. Don’t take on unnecessary debt. It’s easy to get sucked into putting things on a credit card, so don’t do it unless you have the means to pay it off everything month. Also, build credit as early and quickly as possible by getting a credit card and only adding 1 autopay item to it that you automatically pay off each month. If you’re worried about yourself, send it somewhere – parent, friend, etc. – if you’d be tempted to use it for unnecessary spending.
Evaluate your career/life goals
Think hard, do you actually need to be in school right now? Trades pay incredibly well and most don’t require college degrees. Your late teens and early twenties will see lots of changes. Not sure if school is for you? Take a gap year and go explore career opportunities! Education is important but school will always be there for you when the time is right.
Take responsibility for your decisions
You don’t get to blame your parents for your problems anymore. As you come of adult age, it’s time to be responsible for your thoughts and actions. You can’t blame anyone else for what happens to you from here on out. It’s up to you now to make your life as good or bad as you want it. If things aren’t going well in your life, start with numero uno and figure out what’s happening before jumping to blame outside factors. You dictate the way your life goes and you have the opportunity to make it what you want. The world doesn’t care about you enough to cause you to fail.
Evaluate all your friendships
The friendships you make during your school years will often impact your life in negative and positive ways you won’t foresee now. Toxic people can hinder you from being the best version of yourself and we talked about taking responsibility for everything earlier. Now it’s time to let that also dictate who you surround yourself with. As the saying goes, you’re the sum of the 5 people you hang with the most. So surround yourself with only good people.
Learn tact
Saying inappropriate things to people is something that’ll be harder to shake as you get older. Follow the 2-minute rule. Listen for approximately two minutes before interjecting into a conversation. You convey tact, have context of the subject matter, and understand the contributor’s style. Tact is a huge part of those conversationalist skills we mentioned earlier.
Get to know your professors
In your later years, good relationships with professors can lead to recommendations, research, and job opportunities. Don’t think your adjunct professors can’t help you, too. A lot of them actually work in the industry you’re interested in and teach as a side gig. Most faculty members are delighted when students visit them to ask about the readings, the course topic, or just to get to know them. Professors are required to hold office hours for students: your tuition is paying for that kind of contact. So use it!
You’ve entered an exciting and formative time in your life, so make the most of it! As we said, setting yourself up for success in the future starts now.
You asked, we answered! In this Q&A video, we discuss things like what to splurge/save on, our upcoming wedding, some of our favorite motivational books and podcasts, and much more!
It’s the time of year again – when you make promises to yourself to change or do things that are good for you and then February rolls around and they’re nothing but a blip on the radar. In this part of The Better Man Series, let’s talk about getting over the hump to be motivated as well as staying motivated to action.
Motivation is like a muscle – it has to be exercised to avoid atrophying.
As a man, a major goal in life should be to constant improvement in whatever aspects you deem necessary. When you give up this journey of curiosity and improvement is when the verve for life goes away and you’ll basically be dead – figuratively and literally – if you’re in your twilight years. Obviously, depending on your age, your goals can vary, but the mechanisms for getting and staying motivated are the same no matter who you are.
Over the years, in talking to people of all ages about betterment, I’ve encountered a weird issue – they feel bad for trying to improve their lives and it stops them from trying or aids in quickly abandoning their goals. They say they feel:
Selfish
Like they’re not helping others enough.
Bad because their family or friends make fun of them.
Too old, young, poor, skinny, fat, etc to do anything.
I’d argue that in order to make others around you better, you need to improve yourself, first. Only then will you be in a position to truly help others.
While your friends or family may never say this, or even know why they do it – making fun of you is just a reaction to them being scared that your progress is going to make them look and feel worse. And it’s 100% true, but that’s their problem, not yours. Don’t let them drag you down so they feel better about themselves.
As for being too (insert excuse here) – that’s just an excuse you’ve learned to justify your lack of motivation. You know it’s B.S., too.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
Let’s get into actionable steps to get and stay motivated.
Find your triggers
Start thinking about the things you run into in your daily life that inspire you to action. They could be anything, but here’s some common ones:
Certain outfits or articles of clothing to wear. This is discussed in the video at the top of this article.
Once you’ve established the things that motivate you, it’s now time to make them, in some way, part of your day. This is key to ensure that wonderful Pavlovian response is triggered multiple times a day. Think of it like a quick caffeine jolt for your motivational engine.
Be around people who inspire you
Being around motivated people is inspiring and it’ll absolutely rub off on you. So find a way to be around them – invite them out to coffee, give a call, schedule a recurring monthly lunch, join a co-working space, etc.
If that’s not possible, then you can try watching or listening to speeches of people you find inspiring. Just find a way to interact with inspiring and motivational people on a regular basis.
Define & Set Goals
As man without goals will achieve very little. So set goals and start hashing out what you really want to do. The one thing I’ll warn you against, though, is not setting specific enough goals. Wanting to be rich and famous is not a goal, it’s the result of a goal (of goals) achieved. Wanting to be more in-shape is not a goal, it’s too vague. So keep them specific, like:
Bench pressing 200lbs
Going on a monthly date with my significant other
Learning a new language
Getting a promotion to a certain position
Buying a house by the time you’re __ years old
Starting a business
Don’t know what goals you want to achieve? Put together a “Anti-Goal” list of things you’ve tried or thought about trying and absolutely don’t want to do. Then start whittling it down by way of deduction instead of addition.
Don’t beat yourself up
The common issue I see with people who lose motivation is not giving their goals enough time or flexibility. If a goal takes longer than you anticipated, or your goals have shifted, or you have a setback – don’t beat yourself up over it.
You are your harshest critic.
People often get discouraged and think about giving up when these things happen, but instead of feeling down about it, understand that this is part of the process and be thankful for how far you’ve come and that these are things every motivated person has encountered, as well. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it.
Have a plan of action
Figure out a way (probably many ways) to achieve whatever goal(s) you have and then break it down into actionable, bite-sized chunks. Then, and only then, can you take that motivation and start working on achieving your goals.
Standing at the foot of a mountain and not realizing that it’s going to take many, many smaller steps to get to the summit will do yourself a disservice and you’ll give up because you didn’t set a plan of action to get to the top.
Coincidentally, the more smaller steps you achieve, the more motivated it’ll make you. Movement begets more movement.
There are some systems available, if you’d like to take a structured approach. Getting Things Done is a system I personally use and a bit of a companion or supplement to that system is called Bullet Journaling – which I also do.
It’s easy to be busy everyday, it’s hard to make progress everyday.
Set aside time for review
Over the course of working to achieve your goals, you’ve got to ensure you understand how far you’ve come and celebrate the small victories. Without that, it’s easy to get frustrated and lose motivation.
Your goal(s) will take a while (almost always longer than you thought) to achieve, so you’ve got to set aside time celebrate these smaller wins the to give yourself the motivation to keep working to the ultimate goal.
I like to take the natural breaks of seasons/holidays to set aside time for reflection and reorienting. During the Easter holiday, 4th of July weekend and Thanksgiving weekend, I sit down, look at what I’ve done and first, be thankful for al that I’ve achieved and then decide if directions or mindsets need to be adjusted. It’s extremely helpful and refreshing and I can’t suggest it enough.
That’s it! I hope it’s been helpful and you start working toward your amazing goals this year!
