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‘The best way to make decisions is to go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.’

How to make stress your friend, Kelly McGonigal (TED talk)

I recently listened to the Ted talk, How to make stress your friend by Kelly McGonigal, and it reminded me of the decision-making process I went through to make a career change. After a lot of research, I had reached a point when I had an idea of what I wanted to do but my fear that a career change would be too stressful initially prevented me from pursing my idea.

Like many of us, I was viewing stress as a negative thing. The thing that causes us to lose sleep, eat too much or eat too little. It can make us feel anxious and it can make us grumpy. We all respond to stress in different ways and, when our response is negative, we develop fears and avoid making decisions.

In her TED talk, McGonigal talks about how we should change our thinking and view our response to stress in a positive way to enable us to move forward with decisions. In particular, she explains how we can become resilient to stress through human connection and reaching out to others. In building this resilience, we can then trust ourselves to handle life’s challenges and we won’t be alone whilst doing it. If you are at a crossroad in your career and finding it hard to decide which direction to go in, my suggestion to you is do a reality check through a very simple two-step process:

Become aware of what is concerning you and making you feel stressed. I remember when I was thinking about a career change, I was concerned about telling people – what would their reaction be? I was also concerned about venturing into the unknown.
Acknowledge and accept your concerns and create a simple statement such as ‘I acknowledge that the change will be stressful to me but I know my need is greater and it is worth going through the stress. The benefit is that I will have a job I want’.

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I recently watched a very amusing and informative TED talk by Jia Jiang titled ‘What I learned form 100 days of rejection’. As we all know, fear of rejection is extremely common and can surface anytime, anywhere and to anyone. It prevents us from trying new things, stops us from achieving our goals and pushes us away from what we really want in our life and career.

In his talk, Jia Jiang talks about how a fear of rejection can arise from misunderstandings. When being rejected, we often run away wrongly assuming we are the reason for the rejection. We don’t ask questions, we don’t engage in conversation and we don’t find out the true reason. We close the door to discovering other possibilities and we achieve nothing.

I can remember applying for a training contract as a trainee solicitor and being faced with a pile of rejection letters. Each letter took away a small chunk of my confidence and it felt like a personal attack on my personality and ability. I could have given up but I now know that these jobs were simply not right for me. There was in fact one firm I really wanted to work for and so I persevered with the application process and was successful. The rejections had taught me that the competition was tough and so I needed to work extra hard to achieve.

How can we all turn rejection into opportunities and success?

Jiang’s solution to overcoming our fear of rejection is simple and can be summarised in three steps:

Embrace your fear (Don’t run)
Ask the right questions (Don’t assume)
Turn your findings into opportunities (Don’t stop)

It involves a desensitisation from the pain that rejection brings (step 1) and asking for what you want (step 2). It is through asking the right questions that we can discover the true reason behind the rejection and uncover further opportunities (step 3).

‘When you get rejected in life, when you are facing the next obstacle or next failure, consider the possibilities. Don’t run. If you just embrace them they might become your gifts as well.’ (Jia Jiang)

To find out more, watch his talk and listen to how Jiang proved the success of embracing rejection by setting himself a challenge to seek out rejection for 100 days. It is only 15 minutes long and will certainly engage you in how to overcome the fear of rejection in an encouraging and inspiring way.