What to Do in the Moments After a Rejection

A while back my sixteen-year-old told me he's not interested in college. He doesn't want a nine-to-five job. He thinks school is pointless. He wants to be a race car driver.

This was new. It sort of came out of nowhere.

I felt a lot of fear. My mind started imagining futures where he skips school, skips college, and ends up with a hard, crappy life. I noticed how badly I wanted to control his experience.

And underneath all that, some part of me was also able to think: oh, cool. This is showing me an edge where I can grow.

For years I've found it useful to treat my life as a presence dojo. A dojo is where you train. So a presence dojo is the place I go to practice staying present with different "sparring partners."

My son announcing he wants to race cars is one sparring partner. An investor who ignores you through the whole pitch and then says no is another.

Most people don't relate to that no as training. They relate to it as some sort of threat to their survival. And that changes everything about what happens next.

Why a "No" Hits So Many Layers

When someone says no to your startup or your fund, there's the surface disappointment: this isn't what I pictured. Then there's a deeper layer, where the no threatens your identity. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not really that great.

And underneath even that, we're still just a bunch of humans playing startup. We're wired to want approval. So we perceive someone declining to invest almost the same way we'd perceive them saying I don't want to be your friend. It hits the old childhood places where we didn't feel fully loved or seen.

When your startup is the dojo for your growth, a part of you can hold all of that and stay curious: interesting, this is showing me I still have some unhealed stuff. Which brings us to the actual move.

What to Actually Do in the Moment

Here's the process I'd walk you through if I were standing on your shoulder right after the meeting.

1. Slow down and notice you've been affected. Most people are already running a defense pattern before they realize it. The simplest tell is that you're in your head instead of your body. Your mind will generate thoughts to distract you, strategize, or rationalize. So the first move is to stop and ask: what am I feeling right now?

2. Feel it, in your body. A feeling is worth a thousand thoughts. Often the entire storm of thinking is just a strategy to avoid feeling something. Bring your attention down to where the feeling actually lives, and let it move through you like a wave. The lie your mind tells is that if you let yourself feel it, you'll turn into a puddle and be useless for your next meeting. From my experience, when you feel it all the way through, it doesn't take long, and it actually helps you reset.

3. Accept yourself for being below the line. The Conscious Leadership Group distinguishes between a state of presence (above the line) and a state of threat (below the line). After a hard no, you're probably below. There's a trap here of judging yourself for being below the line and viewing it as "bad," which leads to you being below the line about being below the line. Instead, just allow yourself to be human.

4. Look at the stories your mind is making up. Over a decade ago I read Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism. His distinction stuck with me. Optimists tend to label a setback as temporary and specific: this one investor said no. Pessimists label the same event as permanent and pervasive: all investors will say no, because I suck at fundraising. Notice which one your mind reached for.

5. Take 100% responsibility for how you created the experience. This one's nuanced. Most people confuse it with figuring out what they did wrong, which is really just self-blame wearing responsibility's clothing. The cleaner question is: how did I create this experience for myself? Usually the answer is some attachment to an expectation you didn't know you were holding.

Only then, from presence, get curious about what you might do differently. And when you have no 15 minutes to spare, take a breath. Four seconds in, four seconds out, four times. Thirty seconds can change the whole next meeting.

One More Thing About Those High Expectations

None of this means lower your expectations. I'm a dreamer. I love believing in my clients' dreams and encouraging them to dream bigger.

The trick is to hold the dream without being attached to it. You have every right to your dream and to the conversation. You have no right to the outcome. And here's the part worth sitting with: the less attached you are to the outcome, the easier it is to create it.

When my son told me what he wanted, I could have gripped harder and tried to steer him back toward the life I'd pictured. Instead I did for him what I'd do for any of my clients with a dream: I got out of the way and supported it.

My wife took him to his first go-kart training, then to his first real races a couple of weeks later, and he won four out of five. The instructors couldn't believe he hadn't been racing for years.

You never know how things might unfold when you stop trying to force life to match your idea of it, and start treating it as a dojo you can work with instead.

That's what the no in your inbox is offering you too.

With love,

Dave Kashen