Grieve, Evaluate, Plan, Execute: How being rejected from a coding program gave me a strategy to deal with rejection

In August of this year I got rejected from the latest cohort of Founders and Coders, a free coding bootcamp in London. At the time it was a real blow. They run a great community and I would still recommend them to anyone getting into coding and web development in London. But now, with some perspective, I realise it is one of the best things that could have happened to me.

You see, I wasn’t particularly used to rejection in my academic and professional life: I graduated with first class honours in Law at the LSE and have gone from good job to good job ever since. And yet, in my quest to start my own business, here I am embarking on a journey that is strewn with obstacles. Rejection is something I am having to become familiar with and, accordingly, I have had to develop a strategy to cope. Is mine the best strategy out there for coping with rejection? I doubt it. But I hope it has some helpful insights in any case.

So, here is my coping strategy in its full glory (using my rejection from Founders and Coders as a demonstration of how I apply it):

1. Grieve

A lot of the advice you will see on rejection will say that there is nothing to be achieved from wallowing in pity, that you should treat rejection as a positive, embrace it or that you should even leave emotion out of it (“why do you care?”).

I disagree. Rejection is going to sting and, the bigger it is, the more it will hurt. To me, there is no point trying to ignore this — you can’t just pretend you don’t care. Worse still, straight after rejection you are not in a good position to make decisions. Research shows that rejection makes you stupid. Why would you choose to make a decision at a time like this?

Instead, let yourself feel hurt. Seek the company of others or hide away for a little bit. Eat ice cream straight from the tub or peanut butter straight from the jar (can you tell I’m a stress eater?). Even play with a teddy bear. Whatever you have to do to feel a bit better, do it. Time and grieving will give you perspective, let them do their job.

2. Evaluate

It is only after you have some perspective and are feeling a bit better that you’ll really be able to re-visit the rejection with a clear mind. This isn’t going to be fun, but if you don’t do it you won’t learn much (if anything) from the whole experience.

What do you need to evaluate? In my mind there are two questions that need to be answered at this stage:

a. Why did I care about the rejection?

This isn’t about coming to a realisation that you shouldn’t care. Instead, this question should help you narrow down what it is you were hoping to gain if you hadn’t been rejected.

For example, when I was evaluating my rejection from Founders and Coders, I realised that I was mostly seeking (i) guidance on what my curriculum should include and (ii) a community of learners who were looking at the same things and going at the same pace as me. I could take this knowledge into the next step of the coping process.

b. Why did I get rejected?

This is a hard question to ask but very important if you are going to try something similar in the future. You should start with self-evaluation — what steps did you take? Was everything you did well received? Did you make the necessary preparations? How do you think you compared to the competition?

Only once you have evaluated your own performance should you seek feedback from an outside party. Don’t ask for general feedback, go specific. I had noted that the picture I had painted of myself in my application to Founders and Coders wasn’t the same as their core target student. So when I asked for feedback I asked whether this had harmed my application. It turns out it hadn’t. Instead I was told that I hadn’t been active in the community long enough to separate myself from the fierce competition. By going specific in my questioning I had demonstrated that I had thought about my short-comings myself but by no means had I limited my feedback to the area I had picked out.

You are unlikely to have done everything perfectly so, whether or not you are able to get external feedback, make a note of what you could do better next time. Keep this note and refer back to it occasionally (specifically when you are about to embark on a similar task).

3. Plan

Now you are ready to decide what you want to do next. Start with your answers to why you cared — how could you achieve the results you were seeking? This could be by keeping on working (repeating the process) until you succeed. Alternatively, you could have a number of different routes to attaining the same goal.

I had identified that I wanted guidance on an appropriate curriculum while learning to code. I’d noted that a lot of the teaching websites are great for beginners and early intermediates, but are really lacking when it comes to bridging the gap to the coding professionals. However, there are plenty of free and cheap resources out there and some notable learning websites (such as Free Code Camp) are doing well at bridging this gap. As my starting point for further learning, I found a list by OSSU and one by Google. While these resource lists weren’t completely in line with my aims (to get to a point where I could prototype my web app product myself or effectively manage an external contractor to do so), I could selectively pick from them to pick up the skills I needed.

I also identified that I wanted to be active in a community of coders who are learning similar things to me. It turns out that the Founders and Coders community could still provide this to some degree, through their meet-ups. By going to these meet-ups and asking what else people were doing I was able to get involved with other communities — some with professional developers and some with learners like myself.

Whatever you decide to do make sure you are bringing what you learnt from your evaluation into this planning stage. Einstein is often quoted as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It may be a cliche, but don’t be the person who falls foul of it.

4. Execute

Finally, just do it! You can’t let the fear of further rejection hold you back. Now that you have decided on your best course of action, execute it. Struggling for motivation? There are lots of psychological tricks to help you, but more on those in a future post!

Like what you have read or have some feedback? Please get in touch and let me know. This is my first post on Medium so any feedback, good or bad, is welcome!