How to Deal With Your Self-Esteem From Rejections

If you are handling rejections well, your life will be enriched by this experience. If you are handling rejections poorly, your life will be stripped off its bearings, literally. The difference between a winning attitude and a losing attitude is often very small, but it's enough to shape your behavior for the rest of your career.


Studies of rejection show that there is a distinction between rejections which cause emotional pain and rejections which cause physical pain. In four studies (N =628), each of which was carefully preregistered, rejections which caused physical pain were reported as causing significantly more pain than rejections which did not cause pain. Results suggest that such rejections indeed feel much worse than non-physical rejections and this may be due to an increase in the perceived intensity of pain. What makes rejections which cause physical pain different than rejections which do not cause pain? The answer lies in the two types of pain: the conscious and the unconscious.

Whenever anything gets rejected by you or anyone else, you become aware of a kind of "electric shock" or "bug bite". This shock or bite can feel very painful and it can last from a few seconds to several minutes. The reason that rejections can feel very painful is that they disrupt your flow of thinking - your thought-pattern. When you get rejected you have to change your way of thinking - otherwise you will keep getting rejected. If your thought-pattern is not changed you will continue to get rejected until you change it...

The difference between rejections which hurt and ones that do not is that rejections that hurt you will make you feel that you have failed and that there is no point in continuing. When you are rejected in cyberball however, your failure is not as important as your ability to continue to try. Your failure does not hurt you nearly as much as the rejections which do hurt you. You might not be able to change what has happened but you can certainly change your perception (of it) and the way you react to the events in cyberball which caused you to fail. These reactions can be changed however just by learning how to manage your pain.

In cyberball you will usually be working on a manuscript. Whenever you receive rejections you should look at what caused the rejection. For example, if the publisher said that your manuscript had great potential then you should not be discouraged from pursuing the idea. There could be something wrong with your manuscript, which they did not see when they rejected it. Other times you might get a bad reject from your grammar checker or you might misspell someone's name while typing the words into the text editor.

Most publishers will admit to having rejections due to typing errors although most of these will be quite reasonable. You have to take the time to proofread your work before you submit it so that you can catch these errors. You also need to know how to handle your new data points and learn to take your time with your writing.

Rejections are extremely painful and can affect your confidence even if you are trying to write a bestseller. If you are constantly receiving rejections you will start to feel as if everyone is seeing your mistakes even if they are not. You might feel like you never good enough and this will affect your self-esteem. This can also cause you to develop addictions such as quitting your job, spending more time with family or using the rejection as an excuse to not do anything else with your life.


It is OK to feel bad about the rejections if you are only doing your best. It is not OK however, to let the emotional pain consume you because you cannot change what has happened. The most important thing is that you continue to write even if you feel rejected because the more you focus on your work the better you will do. Focus on what you can control and move on because everyone can be rejected once in a while but it does not mean that your work is not good enough.