3 Things I Did To Overcome Sadness

Last night, I received an email from Buffer, informing me that they would not move forward with my application. I’m not going to lie. I was really sad.

However, I know that it is pointless to keep feeling sad. Recently, I had told a few friends a line of motivation, which I found applicable to me in this situation:

Shit happens. What matters is how we deal with it after it happens.

Being rejected by a company that I really want to work with does not feel nice at all. It’s terrible. However, what matters is how I deal with it and what I do from now on!

In this post, I would like to share the three things that I did to overcome the sadness.

1. Give myself a limited amount of time to feel sad

5 years ago, when I was competing for my Junior College’s canoeing team, I had a team mate who was so good at running that our school’s cross country coach got him to represent our school at the Cross Country National Championship. He was leading the race all the way, until he collapsed 100m before the finishing line. Was he sad? You bet. What was worse was that the Canoeing National Championship was taking place a few days after that. He was so upset that he was not in the mood to even think about the canoeing races.

Our canoeing coach found out about the incident and went to speak to him. I thought that what he said was brilliant. Our coach said something along the lines of:

Take the whole of today to brood over the incident. Tomorrow, I want to see you back to your normal self again.

I believe that it is very hard to immediately not feel sad about something, especially when the thing matters a lot to us. We need time to get over it. And so, that was what I did. I gave myself some time to get over the sadness.

I gave myself the whole of last night to brood over the rejection. I played more FIFA games with my house mates than I ever had (it’s only about 6 games actually), showered and meditated before going to bed. All these while, I could not stop thinking about the rejection. However, I told myself that I want to be back to my normal self by the time I wake up the next day.

I’m glad that I did ☺

2. Talk to friends

Another thing I did was to talk to some of my close friends. One of them was Thomas Dunn from Buffer, whom I got to know a few weeks ago.

He is a really awesome friend who is always encouraging and supporting me. When he found out about the result of my application, he came to console me. He told me that my application was amazing but perhaps the circumstances might not be right for now (I’m still studying so I cannot work full-time). He also told me that it’s incredible that I made it to the interview stage as a student. (On hindsight, I feel really happy about it.) Thanks to his support, I felt much better.

(Thomas, if you are reading this, I’m really grateful. Thanks! ☺)

3. Look on the bright side

The other thing I did was to be positive. There is a mantra that I firmly believe in:

Everything happens for a reason.

While it is sad that I did not get the job I wanted, there are many things that I got out from this experience.

• I learnt a lot about myself.
• I learnt a lot about the application process, which would be helpful when I apply again in the future.
• I made a really good friend, Thomas and got to know a few other really nice people like Nicole.
• Nicole gave me very useful feedforward (Buffer’s way of saying feedback) to work on and improve myself.
• I became even more motivated to improve myself.
• Finally, I believe that this experience has helped to build my character.

Looking back now, the rejection does not feel as horrible as it seemed☺

These three things have helped me get over the incident and come out stronger. I hope they could be useful for you too when you face similar situations.

(This is my 1st blog post of my 30in30 challenge — 30 blog posts in 30 days. I hope to feel comfortable, more confident and become better with writing through this challenge.

This post would be reposted on my personal blog, www.AlfredLua.com.

Buffer is still hiring. Check out their open positions!)