Episode 183: Rejection (and how to bounce back)
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time...
“I came in on a Monday morning and sat through a whole staff meeting. And then my boss pulled me aside afterwards and said, ‘so we're really struggling and we've decided to eliminate your position effective immediately. So you need to pack up your desk and go.’”
The sting of rejection at work. Nobody likes it, but is it tougher on women?
“There is some research that women are more ruminative than men, and we kind of turn our mistakes and our failures over and over in our minds...and it can be harder to get past them.”
Rejection and recovery. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
Jessica Bacal directs the Narratives Project at Smith College, the famous women’s college in Massachusetts. She’s also the author of a couple of books, most recently The Rejection that Changed my Life. For this she interviewed 25 women, all well known in their fields, about their experiences with rejection - and what they learned from those rejections.
Now Jess and I have something in common. We've both been rejected from jobs we applied for internally...jobs we thought we had an excellent chance of getting.
Jess’s story begins a few years ago at Smith, when a big, juicy opportunity came up...
“I felt like I was pretty well positioned to get that job because I was already running all kinds of interactive programs, including leadership programs. And my supervisor also encouraged me to throw my hat in the ring. So I applied for this job, which meant getting letters of recommendation from colleagues, and I had to give a big public job talk.
And I was so nervous about the talk and just the whole situation that there was one day where I parked my car, had an entire work day. And when I returned to my car at the end of the day, I left the motor running.”
She was distracted and beside herself with nerves. And after all that...
“I learned after a couple of weeks that they'd offered the job to someone else.”
AM-T: “And how did that feel?”
“In the moment when I heard that, I felt really disappointed and a little humiliated, ‘cause it felt very public. You know, everyone was going to know that I tried really hard to get this job and I hadn't gotten it. A pretty significant part of me also felt relieved that I wouldn't have to do this job.”
And it was that relief or that complexity of response that got her thinking about writing a book on rejection.
Jess writes solely about women in the book and she doesn’t dwell on any differences between women and men when it comes to processing rejection. But she has thought about it.
“I think women are socialized to please, to get approval, and rejection is the opposite of that. You know, we're not getting approval and so, you know, and I think women, there is some research that women are more ruminative than men and perhaps this is also socialization, but we kind of turn our mistakes and our failures over and over in our minds...and it can be, it can be harder to get past them.”
AM-T: “Let’s talk about the cult of perfection for a minute because I do think this plays into a lot of women’s lives. You know this more than anyone that women, young women, tend to excel in high school and when they go to college. But what a huge shock it must be if and when they encounter their first rejection in the workplace. ‘Cause if you’ve put that pressure on yourself that you are great at everything and you are a charging A type, that’s going to be harder for you than it is for somebody else who’s been rejected a few times already.”
“Yeah, no, absolutely. Someone in my last book, which was about mistakes, talked about that really eloquently, Judith Warner, who's a reporter, she got a job at the New York Times as an op-ed columnist, and this was kind of the pinnacle of her career. She thought this was what it had all been... this is what she'd been aiming for. And she had been one of these incredible students who had always gotten A's, she'd always done well, she'd never had a big rejection…”
Then she got fired from the New York Times.
“She talked about just feeling so depressed, going around in her pajamas. She just couldn't get past it. And finally one of her daughters said, you know, you've got to whip yourself into shape. And she realized that she had to try to get past it. And she also saw the roots of it, that she had grown up with this idea that she had to do everything right. And that also that her identity was so wrapped up in her achievement that her identity as a writer with a lot of status, and her identity as Judith Warner the person were kind of inextricable from each other. And she started to kind of reflect on, well, what was really important to her beyond status, beyond working at the New York Times? And it led her to some really interesting writing projects that she ultimately found to be really meaningful.”
Warner is the author of a few books about raising kids in the modern age.
But what if she’d been better able to cope with that rejection? What if she’d had a layer of armor, some experience of failure from her youth, to help her bounce back?
AM-T: “I feel like young women like that who are doing fantastically well at school and university need a talk when they’re at university, somebody needs to talk to them about the possibility of rejection and accustom them to the idea of rejection. What do you think, is that a good idea?”
“Yeah. I do. And I think they need to practice it, you know one of my interviewees, well, it's, Laura Wong who is at Harvard Business School. She does this exercise with her students, ‘get 10 nos’ and she has them go out and try for 10 different things where someone's going to say no, they have to get 10 people to say no to them. So they might ask a photographer friend, could you take my photo for LinkedIn? They might ask someone else, Hey, could I borrow your car? You know, and actually they get a lot of yeses, but they get good practice hearing no.”
Jess has developed a similar class at Smith called Designing your Path, where students talk about failure and also practice trying and failing at everything from pushups to running an Etsy store.
“This practice of failure and rejection on the small scale is hopefully going to prepare them to then talk about it when they try it on a little bit of a larger scale. And, you know, it's the first time we're doing it. So we're going to kind of collect some data and see how it goes.”
In her book Jess talks about ‘rejection as data’ - in other words, what does the rejection tell you about yourself, or about your employer or potential employer? That’s data you can use. So that job Jess didn’t get at Smith...she said she felt relieved. That relief told her she actually didn’t really want that job...she’d felt she should apply, felt she’d be good at it...but she was actually very happy in the job she already had.
My rejection as data story is a little different. I was working at a company where - like Jess - I’d applied for a full-time job, it had come down to two of us, and I’d lost out. For various reasons I’d kept working there as a contractor, but that thing of not having benefits and having my contract come to an end, then start up again...it was getting old.
AM-T: “And I remember having one conversation where I essentially said, why can’t you just hire me? And the person I was speaking to, referring to the top guy at the company, said ‘so-and-so says you’re not distinctive enough.’ And I mean that was personal and insulting. But I also knew, because I knew that company very well, and I'd been in the workplace long enough, and I was mature enough by that time that I thought, ‘that’s bullshit.’ I actually didn’t buy it.
Now if someone had told me that ten years earlier I'd have been desperately upset. But I knew the way these people worked quite well and I knew how this top man worked, and I knew the people he liked to hire were young white guys. And I thought, what this tells me, the data that I got from that, was that I'm never going to get past this particular guy...I’m never going to be given the ‘in’, because he just doesn’t want me. So I used that to cut the cord with an employer that in some ways felt like a bad boyfriend, and ultimately that and some other experiences led me to starting this show.”
“Yeah, that's interesting. And it's like, you knew you were distinctive. I mean, I talked to this researcher, Jack Goncalo who studies rejection and creativity, and his research found that people who do think of themselves as distinctive or as different in some way, are more likely to then kind of turn around and become more creative in the wake of a rejection, you know, they can do what you did where you're like, okay. You know, I'm going to find my own way to, to forge ahead and do something really interesting and satisfying.”
AM-T: “And I think a lot of women to be honest...and this is partly why women start their own businesses, the workplace isn’t working for them, they feel at odds with it because it wasn’t set up for them, so they go off and do their own thing.”
“Yeah. I love the story of Polly Rodriguez in my book. She's an entrepreneur who was working at a startup with all of these guys who, after every meeting with food, would just get up and leave all the food for the women in the office to clean up and then bugs would come and…”
AM-T: “Yeah, there was a fruit fly infestation right?”
“That's right, fruit flies. And she finally just said, I'm done with this. And she also thought, you know, if these people who I actually don't think are that smart can do this, they can run a business, I can do it too. And she started her own.”
Some of the women Jess interviewed for her book are women in the arts. And if you’re an actor or comedian or musician, rejection is essentially the water you swim in.
Amy Campbell Bogie knows all about that. She lives in North Carolina and she got in touch in response to a query I’d put out on social media. She’s in her mid-thirties now, and as a child she was highly musical.
“I trained as a classical musician actually in my youth. And so going to lots of auditions, it's all completely subjective. And everybody's looking for something a little bit different. And so I was trained from a young age that the response to rejection is to kind of just double down on your skills. And I think that's how I've tried to approach it going forward too, is that, you know, if you go into an audition for instance, and someone rejects you, the response is to go back and practice more and then come back the next time and try again.”
Which seems like a healthy way to approach rejection. Still she says even with that training it’s been hard sometimes to shake off that feeling of failure...
“One thing you were asking is the difference between women and men. And I think a lot of that difference is how we process and deal with rejection and how much we internalize it as a personal failing versus that sort of professional 'This situation is just not the right one for me right now, for whatever reason, whether it's within my control or out of my control.' And trying to come back and try again the next time, or taking it as a personal failing and thinking that if you've been rejected once you're clearly just not qualified and should never try again.”
AM-T: “That comment you just made about men and women, have you noticed that in your own life? You’re married to a guy, right?”
“Yes.”
AM-T: “Has he been rejected, have you noticed that he has responded to rejection differently than you?”
“Less so with my husband and more with male friends in my life, or I have two brothers for instance. My husband is very sensitive to these things and definitely internalizes a lot, but one of my closest friends from music school literally will go audition for gigs to play instruments that he doesn't really know how to play…”
AM-T: “That’s the stereotype, right?”
“Yeah. And all through college, he would get these gigs, you know, you tell me, oh, I have a gig on Saturday playing banjo on a boat. I was like, Matt, you play violin, not banjo. Oh yeah. You know, I've perfect pitch and I can figure it out and it'll be fine, whatever. It's a couple hundred bucks on a Saturday.”
AM-T: “That's interesting. So it’s a cousin of rejection, it’s that thing where you ‘re not really qualified to do the thing but you think, I'm just gonna do it anyway.”
“Yeah. And I think it is definitely related because women so often have such severe imposter syndrome and that we don't believe that we can do things. And I feel like that's why when we are rejected, it just reinforces that belief that we are not in fact qualified. And so coming back and trying again, takes so much of yourself and so much effort and confidence to put yourself out there again.”
If you’re very senior, you may have different reasons for not trying again. University College London professor Raina Brands found female senior executives in Britain were less likely than males to apply for a job if they had been rejected for a similar job in the past. But it wasn’t to do with confidence so much as outsider status. The women felt their minority status was related to their rejection. They already didn’t feel like they belonged...so they didn’t want to throw their hat in the ring again, feeling they were unlikely to succeed.
Amy, despite her early training in rejection, was still stung by one particular incident just over a decade ago. She was in an entry-level role, working for a company that had been understanding during a difficult time in her life...
“I had moved back to my hometown in part because my mother was sick and she unfortunately passed away previously in that year. Um, and so I was kind of in a sensitive place anyways, I think, which made it extra difficult because I was trying very hard just to keep myself going and keep my life together. And unfortunately was laid off with no notice. I came in on a Monday morning and sat through a whole staff meeting where I was assigned tasks to do for the week. And then they, my boss pulled me aside afterwards and said, so we're really struggling. And we've decided to eliminate your position effective immediately. So I know that we just assigned you all this stuff, but actually you need to pack up your desk and go.”
At the time, it was terrible. She was floored. But she’d already been thinking in the back of her mind that maybe graduate school might be a good next step for her. So she did some odd jobs and contract work while she applied to grad schools.
AM-T: “So you would say that rejection did have a silver lining if you like, in that it galvanized you?”
“Yeah, I think also, and I will say that my mother had a very high-powered career and she got a PhD while I was a very small child when she had three children, which was always a huge, made a big impression on me. And I admired a lot about her, and when she was sick, I had a conversation with her towards the end of her life about that decision to go back to school when she was a mother of three young kids and her reasoning, it's always stuck with me. It was that she was sick of other people telling her what to do and taking credit for her work. And she wanted to be the boss.”
AM-T: “What was her PhD in, what did you mum do?”
“She taught in the public health school at UNC actually here in North Carolina for most of her career. And so she was able to lead her own lab and have graduate students under her and everything and have a great amount of autonomy. I think that that was already percolating in my brain at this time. And just being treated so poorly by an employer kick-started me to want to just want more for myself to be honest.”
Amy went to graduate school and got an MBA. Since that time she has worked in community development. Today, she’s director of development for a nonprofit. But going back a few years to when she had just finished grad school...she knew at that time that she wanted to move home, to be near her family, to be moral support for her dad. So she laid the groundwork to get a job in her hometown...and things were looking good.
“And I reached out to all of my contacts and I was actually invited to apply for two different positions, which to me felt like a done deal. And unfortunately I did not end up receiving an offer for either of those positions. So I was selected as a finalist for both of them at the same time and was able to fly in and do interviews the same week...and interestingly enough, in both cases, I lost out to women of color, and as a white woman, working in the community development field, it's really hard for me to be angry about that because I firmly believe that representation matters in those kinds of organizations.
But it's a small enough community that I knew that I had to maintain good relationships. And so in that case, I've tried to view that as a relationship building exercise more than anything else. So in both cases, I continue to work with both of those organizations professionally...I felt strongly that it's too small of a field in too small of a community for me to burn any bridges there. So since then, I've tried to think of those sorts of interactions going into an interview, even if it's interviewing for a job and not just an informational interview, as a relationship building exercise, as opposed to an opportunity for rejection.”
Which is such a good idea - to re-frame the experience of not landing a job in that way. Amy says in her small city people know one another, her family has lived there for a long time, and her behavior doesn't just affect her reputation but that of her family members too. She needs to conduct herself professionally, always.
AM-T: “I’m really glad you raised that thing about staying in touch because I think about this a lot too... because I had a rejection situation where if I'd wanted to I could have sort of flounced off and gone ‘screw you - I never want to see you guys again.’ And I held back from that partly because I knew that I could benefit in some ways by being associated with this organization. But you know what it’s like when you're really emotional and upset and angry, you do have the urge to give them the finger, and just flounce off. But I think in most cases when people do that they are shooting themselves in the foot. And I know in the initial period it may feel really hard to be the grownup, but I would advocate for that in most cases. Unless you have been in some kind of abusive situation with a company when of course I would say, leave them alone, I think it’s important that we step back, have our feelings, and then say OK, I’m going to be mature about this and keep this relationship going.”
“Yeah, I completely agree. And it's something that I was not good at in my youth, and I've had to improve upon over the years. Actually, my husband is really, really good at that. And he's constantly telling me to take a breath and keep in mind what my end goal is. It's helped me a lot too, just to be grounded in myself, I think, and have more confidence in myself and that any one job is not going to make or break me.”
And after that situation where she missed out on those two jobs? Rather than applying for other, similar roles Amy ended up freelancing for about two years. She wanted to take stock...
“And I felt like I needed to work on building some skills. So by freelancing, I was able to work on a lot of projects simultaneously, so I could build those skills that I wanted to improve upon. And that I felt like I needed just more exposure in my field before I could come back and get that director level position that I was applying for. And it worked. So the next time I went on the job market was two years ago now. And I applied for, I think, five positions and got three or four interviews and multiple offers. So it was much, much better.”
Amy Campbell Bogie in North Carolina. Thanks to her and Jessica Bacal for being my guests on this show. You’ll find links to more information on what we’ve talked about in the show notes under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
If this episode resonates with you let me know, post a comment on the website, tweet me, email me at ashley@thebroadexperience.com...I’d love to hear from you. A lot of my reason for doing this show has been to help people feel less alone in their work experiences.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.