Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (3 page)

Why you can’t help taking it personally

When you put your heart and soul into something—whether a work of art, a performance on a stage or sports field, a business, or a job you passionately want to succeed at—then it becomes an extension of yourself. It’s not just an object or a game or a business or a job. The end result is not a ‘product’ or a ‘performance’—it’s a part of
you
.

And when you identify with something that is then rejected or torn to shreds by a critic, it’s impossible
not
to take it personally. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert put it more poetically:

“A book is essentially an organic thing, a part of ourselves. We rip a piece of gut from our bellies, and serve it to the bourgeois. Drops of our hearts’ blood are visible in the characters of our writing. But once printed, goodnight! It belongs to everyone.”

This is why you flinch when the envelope comes through your letterbox, or the email lands in your inbox, or the phone rings and you know you’re about to learn your fate.

This is why it hurts when you fail to land that job, or that part, or that contract.

Or when a reviewer trashes your work.

Or when someone you respect damns it with faint praise.

You put everything you have into your work, so any judgment on the work feels like a judgment on you as a person.

But this is a good thing.

Because when you feel rejection and criticism personally, it shows you care about your work and you’re pouring yourself into it. If it stopped hurting, it would mean you had stopped caring.

This is true for everyone who is passionate about what they do, no matter how much they achieve or how successful they become. Believe it or not, it’s even true of writers of books about dealing with rejection and criticism…

Poetry is my own art form, and for several years, I’ve been been attending
Mimi Khalvati’s
classes at the
Poetry School
in London. High-quality criticism is my main motivation for doing the class. Not only is Mimi one of the most sensitive and helpful readers of poetry I’ve ever come across, but the class is full of experienced poets who offer insightful critiques of each other’s work. But the thing is, it’s usually easier to appreciate the quality of the feedback while we’re discussing
other people’s
poems.

But when it’s
my
poem on the table, it’s a different matter.

Now, I’ve worked with hundreds of artists and creatives on how to deal with feedback and respond to it constructively. I know I shouldn’t take it too personally. I should remember that the comments are a judgment on the work, not on me. Obviously. But that doesn’t keep my heart out of my mouth when I stop reading and wait for the first response.

And sometimes it doesn’t stop that little voice starting up in the back of my head, wondering:
“Why did you read out such a load of crap. No wonder they’re sitting there in silence. They’re cringing at how bad it is, and wouldn’t you?”

You can probably relate a similar story from your own experience. When assessing other people’s performance, you may well have a finely developed sense of judgment. But when it comes to critiquing your own work, it’s incredibly hard to look at it with anything like objectivity. It feels too close, too personal, too painful.

OK—now for the good news.

It will—and should—always hurt.

But the sting does get less sharp with time. As we’ll see in
Chapter 9
, repeated exposure to any stimulus—including rejection or criticism—will desensitize you to it. And when you sharpen your own critical thinking skills, which I’ll show you how to do, you’ll be less likely to take criticism at face value.

Yes, it IS a matter of life and death

The pain of rejection and criticism isn’t confined to taking it personally. It’s also accompanied by a sense of dread that—our friends try to reassure us—is way out of proportion to the actual threat posed by a situation such as not making the hockey team, or having a manuscript returned by a publisher.

Or is it?

The psychologist Abraham Maslow famously proposed a hierarchy of human needs, stacked up like a pyramid. The bottom level contains basic
physiological needs
(oxygen, food, sex, sleep), with the next level up
safety needs
(security, employment, shelter). The next two levels are
love and belonging
(friendship, family, sexual partnership) and
esteem
(self-esteem, confidence, respect). Right at the top is
self-actualization
, where we fulfill ‘higher’ needs such as creativity, morality, personal development, and wisdom.

According to Maslow’s original paper, we need to prioritize lower-level needs (survival and safety) before we can move on to higher needs (social interaction and personal development). ‘Belonging’ is clearly a need that is threatened by rejection, and ‘self-esteem’ is threatened by criticism. So Maslow’s pyramid seems to confirm that rejection and criticism are
not
life-threatening.

Since you’re reading this book, the chances are your goal falls into the category of self-actualization: you’re not looking for mere survival or acceptance, you want to realize your potential and make a contribution to the world. Now I have a lot of respect for Maslow’s work, but if we take his pyramid at face value, this kind of goal can look a bit like a luxury item—something you pursue if you can afford it, once your other needs are being met.

But this doesn’t quite add up when you consider all the people who have prioritized self-actualization over ‘lower level’ needs such as survival or social acceptance. For example, the stereotypical starving artist; or charity/public sector workers who accept a reduced income in pursuit of a cause in which they believe. An extreme example is someone like Gandhi, who put his life on the line many times, including going on hunger strike in protest at violence, demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his own survival for the greater good. Even if you haven’t gone to this extreme, I’m sure you can think of times when you chose to sacrifice some of your own needs in pursuit of higher principles or ambitions.

Another challenge to Maslow’s hierarchy comes from psychological research that suggests we experience social exclusion with the same intensity as a threat to our survival. In
Your Brain at Work
, a superb book about applying the findings of neuroscience to everyday challenges, David Rock highlights the research findings that the same neural networks are used to process both social and survival needs. So whether we feel hungry or cast out from the tribe, we experience the same terrifying sense of threat.

Humans have survived and evolved by collaborating. How else did we outwit the proverbial saber-toothed tiger? We certainly didn’t out-muscle, out-run, or out-bite it. But we found safety in numbers, and in our combined ingenuity. So for most of human history, membership of the tribe
was
a matter of life and death. If you were excluded for any reason, your chances of survival dropped dramatically.

And what is rejection but exclusion from your chosen tribe? If you want to be a sports player, not making this year’s team means you’re out of the tribe—and you may never get back in. It’s the same story if your book manuscript is rejected—it feels like another nail in the coffin of your ambitions to join the tribe of writers. Ditto failing to land a job: excluded from the tribe of [insert name of your desired profession], you start to wonder whether you should go back to waiting tables, sweeping chimneys, or whatever is your personal definition of the job you’d least like to have.

In each of these scenarios, rejection feels like being cast into the outer darkness where there is weeping and grinding of teeth. (And licking of lips by saber-toothed tigers.)

How does this relate to criticism?

Just recall the difference between someone criticizing you in a private conversation versus bawling you out in front of the whole group. Or between receiving a scathing comment about your work in a private email and in a review in the biggest newspaper in the land.

Public criticism can lower your status in the eyes of the tribe. And the people who tell you not to worry about other people’s opinion obviously don’t know about the research into the effects of social status on monkeys.

Like humans, monkeys organize their society hierarchically—every member of a monkey tribe knows his or her place in the hierarchy, and it’s possible for outsiders (human or monkey) to identify an individual monkey’s status from its body language.

Researchers have discovered that when a monkey moves up or down the social ladder, this has direct, measurable, physiological effects—including the release of hormones, gene activity, white blood cell count, and the strength of the immune system. Every time a monkey moves down the ladder, its nervous system downgrades itself. And each time its health and vitality is downgraded, its chances of survival shrink a little more.

So each time you are publicly criticized, you feel as though your social status is slipping a notch or two. You may not be out the door yet, but you’re one step closer to the exit. One step nearer the outer darkness. Which is why rejection or criticism
feels
like a matter of life or death, however much you try to tell yourself it isn’t.

But it doesn’t have to feel like that forever. As we’ll see, there are plenty of things you can do to lessen the impact of rejection and criticism, and to develop the quality that will keep you going in spite of them: resilience.

Notes:

Mimi Khalvati:
http://www.mimikhalvati.co.uk

The Poetry School:
http://poetryschool.com

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Ernest Feydau, 11 January 1859

David Rock,
Your Brain at Work,
Scene 10 “Turning enemies into friends” (HarperCollins, 2009)

Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A Theory of Human Motivation,”
Psychological Review
50(4): 370-96.

“Low Social Rank Messes with Monkeys’ Immune Systems by Altering Gene Expression”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/04/12/low-social-rank-messes-with-monkeys-immune-systems-by-altering-gene-expression/

4. Make it something worth dying for

Since rejection and criticism are a matter of life and death, there’s no point exposing yourself to them for anything less than a dream worth dying for.

I’m serious.

Whichever path you choose in life, sooner or later you will experience a moment when you feel tested to breaking point. On this day, the obstacles will be stacked so high, the rejection so brutal, the criticism so cutting, the people you encounter so hostile, petty, dishonest, ungrateful, or plain nasty, that you feel stretched to your limit—and beyond. When that day comes, you will slump down in a heap and ask yourself why you bother.

And you’d better have a good answer ready.

Because if you’re doing a job or running a business just for the money, it won’t be a good enough reason to pick yourself up out of that heap and rise to the challenge.

If you’re a dilettante, toying with your talent in the hope of fame, fortune, or the adoration of fans, that won’t be enough either.

If you’re doing something because it’s what’s expected of you by your family, friends, or peers, that won’t be enough.

If you’re doing something because you’re good at it, the rewards are easy to obtain, and it feels like the path of least resistance, that certainly won’t be enough.

At that point, getting a raise, or a corner office, or maximizing shareholder value, or even a medal, or your name in lights won’t be enough.

At that point, it will feel like your identity—your very essence—is on the line. Going forward means risking the loss of your place in the world, your opportunity to live your life to the full and actualizing your potential. It means risking obliteration.

So when you ask yourself why you bother, and whether to risk going on, it will make all the difference in the world if you’ve chosen a path worth dying for.

Because in that case, your decision will be simple—not easy, but simple.

You will have a reason to take the next step, to risk it all, and to meet the challenge with every ounce of your strength.

You’ll be prepared to put yourself on the line, and take whatever flak or pain comes your way. You’ll feel a fountain of strength rising up from your core, picking you up, and helping you to endure whatever is coming your way—failure, humiliation, shame, disappointment, hurt, or whatever—and to push beyond it.

So what on earth is worth dying for?

It needs to be something you are passionate about. Here are a few suggestions:

• Justice
  —righting a big wrong.
  
• Generosity
  —helping others survive, thrive, and achieve all they can be.
  
• Achievement
  —amazing the world with something spectacular, extending the limits of what’s humanly possible.
  
• Inspiration
  —touching people’s hearts with the beauty, sorrow, and wonder of life.
  
• Knowledge
  —adding to the store of human knowledge, about ourselves and the universe.
  
• Protection
  —preserving what’s most precious, such as people, civilized values, or the environment.
  
• Joy
  —enjoying life and giving pleasure to others.
  
• Leadership
  —taking responsibility and using power for the common good.
  
• Wisdom
  —understanding what’s truly important: how to live a good life.
  

When you’re connected to one or more of these principles, it’s like plugging in to a massive power grid, giving you an inexhaustible source of inspiration, motivation, and resilience.