Rejection Can Make or Break Your Freelance Writing Career
Don't let rejection break you. Use these four affirmations instead.
Rejection is hard. You know that by now.
And while there are many useful tips out there on how to deal with rejection, experts tend to neglect explaining why it’s hard:
Any form of action you take to move past rejection starts with your mind.
Like many elements of freelancing, dealing with rejection starts with having confidence and systems in place to help keep you focused. So here are a few affirmations to use to help keep your head clear and focused. Make sense?
Let’s start with the most important one:
1. I feel [emotion] because [reason].
Be honest with your emotions. Are you sad because it was a high-profile client you would have loved working with? Frustrated? Annoyed?
Denying or avoiding the truth of how you feel often causes more conflict later on. This will push your freelance career backward instead of forward.
The worst thing you can do with rejection is to reject yourself. By letting yourself be sad, mad, frustrated, etc., you can let go of the experience easier and quicker. This will help open more opportunities for you sooner rather than later.
2. I will assess what happened and try to find at least one lesson.
The second-worst thing you can do is repeat a failure without making any tweaks. More often than not, with some detective work, you can gather at least some information. Use this information as clues for how to avoid rejection next time.
- Did you do enough research on the topic? Did this affect the quality of your work?
- Did you get a response? What did they say? Did they explain why they rejected your writing?
- Did you follow the instructions in the submission guidelines?
In some cases, you may not know what went wrong. That’s okay. Don’t spend too much time on this. The goal is to improve. It’s a great way to find optimism out of a negative experience.
3. I am not alone. Everyone goes through rejection because it’s part of succeeding.
We all have celebrities and successful people we admire. But we tend to forget that we only see the success, not the journey of how they got there. Top celebrities and business owners had to start at the bottom. Oprah, Jennifer Aniston, J.K. Rowling, Bill Gates, you name it.
Everyone goes through rejection, especially the successful ones. This is a powerful perspective you can use to help move forward. Who knows? Often, the most successful people you know or admire succeeded because they failed.
By handling rejection the right way, you can achieve success, too.
4. I will keep moving forward and remain focused on my goals.
Writing experts often suggest setting goals early on in your writing career. They often neglect to explain why it’s important.
Rejection is one reason why it’s important.
When dealing with rejection, it’s easy to lose track of your goals and why you’re freelancing in the first place. Rejection has a way of dangling the temptation of pleasing everyone you pitch to in front of you. Don’t take the bait.
Your first priority should be achieving your goals. Rejections may be a part of the process, but they should never be the reason for it.
Rejection isn’t a pretty topic. But it’s a part of freelancing. As long as you’re willing to learn, your future as a freelancer is bright. So keep going.
