How to Heal & Level Up from Failure and Rejection

This article is all about turning failure and rejection into stepping stones for leveling up. We were and will be faced with a lot of failures and rejections throughout life. However, the mindset we choose to approach them completely determines if we are going wither or thrive afterward. So, in this article, I am going to share with you some tips I find particularly useful when faced with failure and rejections. These mindset shifts helped me leveled up so much that I never thought I ever could. Hopefully, they will also transform the way you see failure, now as the best tool to pull your success forward from the future.

1. Embrace Your Emotions

It is totally normal to feel sad and angry after failure or being rejected. So the point is not to avoid the emotions but to not let them affect us in the long run. I have a whole article dedicated to this, but in short, we have to allow ourselves to experience the emotions in order to move on.

It’s also very important to stop being so hard on ourselves. We have been told or subconsciously programmed to think it’s not okay to feel a certain way in a situation, which may cause us to endlessly blame ourselves when we do feel that way. Having been through this multiple times, I realized that the fastest way to move on is to simply allow myself to feel those emotions. The more I did this, the faster those emotions pass and the faster I was able to recover from the experience.

The ultimate goal is to become an observer of our emotions, to watch them come and go without being affected. The best way to get there is by practicing self-compassion, which means allowing ourselves to experience those emotions. With time, we will begin to realize that they have lesser power over us because we made a choice to face them instead of avoiding them.

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. What is my usual emotional reaction when faced with failure and rejection?
2. What does my inner voice soind like when I failed or got rejected?
3. How long do those emotions stay? (How long will you still be thinking about the situation)
4. Write down exactly what you are feeling at the moment and observe them as they pass by (Remember that emotions are temporary!)

2. Accept the Circumstances (Avoid Ego)

In life, there will be times when we do everything right, perhaps even perfectly. Yet the results will somehow be negative. Depending on what motivates us, this response can be crushing. If ego holds the way, we’ll accept nothing less than full appreciation.

Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

It is easy to deny or to find excuses for what happened. But doing so won’t actually make things better, it only creates an illusion of what is possible because it is operating from ego. When it comes to ego, things always end up “feeling” better at the moment but end up way worse in the long run. Therefore, we should try gradually shifting our mindset from ego to acceptance.

Your ability to accept a situation – the real situation – will ultimately help you overcome it.

Evy Poumpouras (Becoming Bulletproof)

On the other hand, simply accepting what happened allows us to rise above the situation. It allows us to approach the situation in a neutral way, which results in a clearer mind to find the problem and come up with a solution. By adopting this mindset, every failure or rejection is now a valuable lesson of self-discovery and an opportunity to practice courage for confidence.

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. What does my thinking pattern look like when I am trying to deny or find excuses for what happened?
2. Reflecting on a past experience, how did things turn out, or how did I feel when I shifted the blame onto external factors for things not going my way?
3. Reflecting on a past experience, what happened when I decided to think throughly about the situation? How did I feel?
4. Pay attention to how things shifted with your energy when it comes to avoiding ego

3. It was Never Personal

This is definitely a big one. It took me a long time to realize that rejection has little to do with us but more to do with the other person’s (the people who rejected us) journey. People reject us because what we have or what we have to offer doesn’t fit “their” exact needs. Contest judges don’t select our work as winners because “they” don’t think it is the best fit for winning the contest. But that doesn’t in any way mean that our work or our ideas are bad just because a few people don’t approve of them.

Even if our work is not good enough and needs improvement, we still need that realization that it was never personal in order to improve. Otherwise, we will be trapped in this black hole of self-blame that makes us too broken to do anything about it.

We can always improve and become better at what we do, but that has to come from a place where we genuinely believe that we are already good enough. And that other people’s opinions or actions are not a reflection of our worth. We get to decide that. According to my experience, the more detached we are to external validations, the more other people are going to realize our value.

Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

Marcus Aurelius

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. How would my mindset and reaction to rejection look like, knowing that things were never personal?
2. If I am able to take everyone’s choices and opinions (good or bad) with a grain of salt, how would I approach failure or being rejected?

4. You are Worthy

You are magical, born to be as bright and meaningful and inspirational as stars. You are a living breathing miracle in motion.

Jamie Kern Lima (Worthy)

Continuing from the previous point, maybe the reason why we failed or got rejected is because our work requires improvement, or that there are other people more qualified for the position. But that’s okay because it just means that we are not there, yet. As long as we believe that we are capable of achieving the things we want, take actions to make it happen, and be consistent with it, we will eventually get there.

The greatest challenge that is keeping us from getting there is being exposed to various opinions, whether it’s from strangers online, family memebers, or the people we love. With a strong foundation of self-worth, those voices are just background noise and can no longer affect us.

The best way to practice cultivating self-worth is by doing the inner work. This is all about telling yourself that you deserve to be treated well, wanting the best for yourself, taking good care of yourself, and absorbing knowledge to increase your intelligence. It wasn’t easy at the beginning but I promise that when you start getting more comfortable doing this, it is going the most beautiful thing you can do to yourself.

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. What is one activity I can do today that will increase my self-worth?
2. What are 3 things I absolutely love about myself?
3. What does being kind to myself mean to me?
4. If I had high self-worth, and I know for 100% that I will eventually get to where I want to be, how will I deal with failure and rejections along the way?
5. What words make me feel the most loved? (Say it back to yourself)

5. Focus on Getting Better

Failure is the most informational rich data stream on planet Earth.

Tom Bilyeu

Now that we have the right mindset, it’s time to evolve from the experience! A great way to do this is to deeply reflect on the experience, or to ask experienced people for advice on what might have gotten wrong. It is important to do this with a calm mind because that is when all the inspirations come in. Like compounding interest, skills and knowledge compound every time we learn from an experience. Therefore, just image how much we will level up if we always took valuable lessons from our failures or rejections!

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. Reflect on your past failure or rejection. Use 1 sentence to summarize the lesson you took away from each experience.
2. How do the lessons you learned from previous experiences help you on your upcoming challenges?
3. Do you think you will be able to learn those lessons if you didn’t fail or got rejected?

6. Opportunity to Cultivate Resilience

Apart from accepting feedback for making improvements, I also like to reframe failure and rejection as opportunities to practice resilience. According to Oxford Languages, resilience is the ability to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties.

With the right mindset, our level of resilience builds up whenever we failed or got rejected. This allows us to recover faster from failure and rejection, and as the growth starts compounding (mentioned in the previous point), we will be more comfortable with taking on more challenges. This will lead to even more growth in our skills, confidence, and resilience.

Journaling Prompts for Tip 6 (Click here)

1. How long does it take for me to recover from failing or being rejected?
2. What mindset can I adopt next time I am faced with failure and rejection to develop resilience?

7. Consistency is the Key

Like skills and money, it takes time for effort to compound over time. However, all of this is possible because of consistency. With the right mindset of high self-worth, willingness to learn from every experience, and mental resilience, the last step is to continuously working on our passions despite not seeing immediate results + keep getting better along the way. By doing so, failure and rejection are now accelerators on the journey to where we want to be.

Journaling Prompts (Click here)

1. Was there a time I stopped doing something because I failed or got rejected?
2. Sort out an action plan to prepare for the next failure or rejection. We got this!

Hope this helps! Thank you so much for reading!