How do you feel about rejection?
“Rejection is the absence of meaningful love.” Charles Solomon, author
“Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it they reject themselves.” Charlie Chaplin
“I think all great innovations are built on rejections.” Louis Ferdinand Celine, French writer and physicist 1894-1961
“I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.” Sylvester Stallone
I’ll confess, I react to rejection.
Yes, there was a time in my life where I sought to get rejected as many times in a row as I could. Why? I was in sales and I knew that every no led to a yes somewhere down the road. And every no told me why people didn’t want what I had. So, I got really good at screening prospects, overcoming objections and closing sales.
That was when I was working for someone else. It’s different when you take rejection personally.
The first time it happened to me I was devastated –for days.
But . . . break-ups happen all the time, don’t they?
You know, when someone shows no interest in what you’re doing. They unsubscribe, they unfollow, they cancel, they never come back. But why?
When a new service called qwitter for twitter that reports on unfollows came out, I was hesitant to sign up.
Did I really want to be notified every single time someone decided to stop following me on twitter? Could I stand a dose of daily rejection? At first I was skeptical, but being the positive person I am, I’m finding the the qwitter reports are giving me feedback on what works and what doesn’t in my community. Because each message comes with the link that prompted the unfollow, you can track responses.
So far, followers left after I referenced Kung Fu Panda [lost 3], welcomed a spa that I visited [lost 2], asked about holiday singing gigs [lost 1] and gave out a registration link to a blogging conference [lost 4].
In almost, every case the people who left positioned themselves in their profiles as successful Internet marketers. I’m going to keep tracking the results and look for patterns to see what topics take people away.
How about you, would you change your communications based on your community’s feedback?
Would you follow the advice from The All American Rejects?
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