Rejection

- BY NEHA

At the outset, let me first thank my friend for her epic (read freaking long) blog post. You guys have no idea how much she hemmed and hawed before finally agreeing to write her first awesome blog post.

So, I have this App on my phone called ‘allwomenstalk’ (not sure if the makers meant All Women Talk or All Women Stalk – both are kind of…well…ahem…so not true), which I find quite interesting.

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I was going through an article on this App recently and came across the following lovely quote on Rejection, something we all have faced, in some way or the other, in our lives.

“Every time I though I was being REJECTED from something good, I was actually being RE-DIRECTED to something better” – Dr. Steve Maraboli

From personal experience, I have found this quote to be largely true. Whenever I have felt that I was being denied of something I really want, I have, more often than not, ended up getting something even better. Now I know some of you readers may not agree with this and think of this quote as one of those inspirational quotes that are less inspirational but more consolatory. Which is totally fine, like I said earlier, to each his own. However, if we take a moment and introspect (introspect objectively that is), we are bound to find instances from our past where we may have, sometimes rather unceremoniously, been rejected from something, only for that rejection to have given us the extra impetus and zeal needed to actually get something way better.

I have had a myriad of rather unpleasant experiences with friends in the past. On most occasions when a friend did something mean and horrible to me and gravitated out of my life, I was always like – ‘Why God, why? Why are you denying me of friendship?’ In retrospect, every time a friendship fell apart, it wasn’t entirely the other person’s fault. Like they say, it takes two to tango. In most cases, I was at times equally responsible for the friendship ending. I was immature (am not saying I am mature now, just relatively speaking); talked more & listened less; was highly competitive (most of my friends were my class mates); and at times quite self-centered. Perhaps, had I met my best friend (who also happens to be the co-owner of this blog) some years back, our friendship would have probably met the same fate.

You see the Universe was not actually denying me friendship; it just wanted me to become more ‘friend-friendly’! There is always a take-home message in all our harsh experiences, mine was to become more ‘friend-friendly’, and when that happened, my friendships really blossomed from thereon.

Another instance that comes to mind is when I was applying for jobs at the start of my career. I had just returned to India after completing my Masters from United Kingdom. It had been two months since I started looking for jobs that matched my academic profile but I was making no headway, not even an interview. I know two months is not a long time (especially given the niche area I specialize in), but at that point, with a foreign degree in hand, two months to me seemed like eons! I just could not comprehend why employers were not paying any heed to me, more like rejecting me. I have been an A-grade student all through school and University, so I took this rejection quite hard.

One fine day I receive a call from this company that I had no recollection of ever applying to (I had applied to so many firms that I lost track of their names). They called me for an interview with the senior management and after some time (again which seemed like eons) offered me a position (I later got to know that people at times need to go through 2-3 rounds of interviews there).

While I am no longer working with that company, I have always maintained that I am what I am as a professional largely because of the training and guidance I received in that organization. I shall forever be grateful to that company for the exposure I received to a gamut of Clients & industrial sectors, my international transfer to Singapore, my Mentor’s guidance and for honing my reporting & and project management skills. In fact, I grew so attached to the organization, that I was teary-eyed on the day of my farewell there. All in all, I totally believe that as a beginner in the corporate world, I could not have had a better start to my professional life. So, thank you to all those employers who passed my CV over. Your rejection (or whatever the hell it was you did with my CV) made me wait and eventually get picked up by a company that appreciated my skills and developed them further.

The bottom line is that every time you feel rejected, even a tad, remember, you are just being given a nudge (ok sometimes a rather big shove) towards another direction where you will feel appreciated and so much more!