3 Ways to Accept Rejection and Get Six-Pack Abs

Chris Shelley

Creatives, you will be rejected. Your stories, artwork, performance abilities, musical talents and business ideas will be rejected at some point by somebody. It’s just part of life. It’s the yang to the yin. The good news is, you will also experience acceptance. And when you or your work is accepted, you will appreciate it all the more, because of all that rejection. Plus, core work is good for you not just in terms of waistline, but in over-all balance and body awareness.

Still, getting rejected sucks. It does. It’s no fun. If feels personal. It feels like failure, and it should, because it is, but failure is not so much a negative thing as it is a diagnostic thing. If you’ve failed, something in your presentation, style, attitude, wording or note-hitting was amiss and needs some attention. Or, you are aiming for the wrong thing and the person rejecting you is not in fact an evil demon of negative buzz-killedness but rather an angel of fate. Chances are, if you are a creative person, you know this and have read iterations of these facts in a hundred papers, journals and blogs. The process seems to be: get rejected, feel bad, read in some blog that being rejected is common, and try again. Plus, it’s not like you don’t have abs, it’s just that they’re hiding behind some extra packing material above your belt.

And yet — after you’ve gone through all that effort to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, collect your fragile ego off the floor, painstakingly reassemble…