The Dummies’ guide to deal with naysayers
Jan 18, 2017 · 4 min read
Naysaying is the subtler rejection. It kills the germination of an idea by instilling it with doubts that often felt like our own thoughts. Just like any other twenty year old something, because of how young and crazy we all seem, I’ve spent more than half of my life dealing with naysayers, with people saying “no” to me and my beliefs. If there’s anything I’m capable of sharing the most, it’s this. Imagine coming across a resume and its first line reads, “Cathy | Foolish Stubbornry Expert — 20 years in the art of being stubborn & handling rejections of all kinds”, but I currently don’t have a resume.
Anyway, here’s a little anecdotal something I think you might benefit from knowing about my years of dealing with naysaying & rejection:
- Don’t give up, don’t be disheartened, even if it comes from someone you love & I have a not-very-positive experience for this: when I was 8 years old, I wanted to make dresses… for the rest of my life. My mom thought it was an incredibly ignoble and perilously mediocre goal so she took away my sewing kit after making me choose between her and my little ambition. Of course I was a good kid so I threw a tantrum and moved on. But I’ve always felt regretful of this moment and it has continued to bother me since then. I regret that 8 y/o me felt disheartened and gave up so fast with so little resistance. When rejection comes from someone you love, you’re most vulnerable to yielding to their opinions. If you want it badly enough though, be mentally prepared to pull through when you can’t get the much needed support from loved ones.
- Know that they don’t have as much data as you do (about yourself): Toward the end of high school, I had the idea of wanting to be a writer and publishing my own first book when all my teachers subtly suggested that it was simply self-delusional since English was not my primary language. They unanimously advised that I should do something in the field of Science researching because all of my electives were in the Natural Science subjects (Chemistry, Physics, Biology). I hated researching and I chose those subjects actually because they were my comfort zone coming from an Asian education background. Yea I did pretty well but god I hated it and would make a terrible researcher. My teachers didn’t know about this. Knowing how much people know about you can give you a rough idea of how to evaluate how much their rejection should matter. In other words, when someone says no to some of your ideas, you might want to give the feedback some contextual understanding regarding how much they know you as a person.
- Sometimes they want to undermine you: I’m not paranoid but there are people out there who really don’t want the best for you. I have rarely encountered this, only once or twice at the most and it was done not directly to me, but I wanted to include because I want share that although we always assume the best of people and give them benefits of the doubt, sometimes people might intentionally not hold your best interest in their heart when giving feedback.
- Sometimes they want to help you: This scenario happens way more frequently than the previous one. When someone says, “no it wouldn’t work”, they really really want to contribute to your idea, to develop it in someway but the best they could come up with was those words. Which you might want to understand as, “I don’t see how that idea would work out, I want to help you out but my knowledge & professional experiences are limited to other domains which forbid me to effectively discuss or help your idea progress”. When I was trying to gain feedback for a B2B product I was building, I made the mistakes of weighing in too much the “no’s” from many people who clearly had the intention of wanting to help me but weren’t from the same industry as my product.
- You might want to take someone’s naysaying as the signal of something & I’m sorry to have sounded vague: The act of exclaiming “No, it wouldn’t work” could be a signal that the person believed that you wouldn’t be able to pull it off. It could be a signal that this is how the general public would think of your product. But all in all, it should only stay as a signal, to which you might respond however you decide to respond. Don’t stop because of it and don’t ever let it prevent your progress of yourself, which is either by failing or succeeding doing that thing that people keep saying “no” to and stopping you from doing.
