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About the\xa0book

Rejections don\u2019t go on your resume, but they are part of every successful person\u2019s career. All of us will apply for jobs that we don\u2019t get and have ambitions that aren\u2019t fulfilled, because that is part of being a working person, part of pushing oneself to the next step professionally. While everyone deserves feel-better stories, women are more likely to ruminate, more likely to overthink rejection until it becomes even more painful-a situation that the women in this collection are determined to change, and in so doing, normalize rejection and encourage others to talk about it.

Source: www.amazon.com\xa0

About the\xa0author

Jessica Bacal is director of Reflective and Integrative Practices and of the Narratives Project at Smith College. She leads programs to help students explore identity and find resilience in community. She also teaches a course called Designing Your Path, which guides students to consider questions like: What is your story? Where have you been and where are you going? What matters to you? What skills do you need to pursue what matters? Before her career in higher education, she was an elementary school teacher in New York City, and then a curriculum developer and consultant. She received a bachelor\u2019s degree from Carleton College, an MFA in writing from Hunter College, and an EdD from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

Source: https://www.jessbacal.com/bio

Big idea #1\u200a\u2014\u200aRejection is not the\xa0end

Fundamentally, the underlying message of this book is that rejection is not the end of anything. It\u2019s not the end of your career, an idea, a business, a project, a book, whatever it is that has been rejected.

But so much weight is carried by that word. Even the word rejection, carries so much shame, embarrassment, and ego bruising. And women seem to currently experience this slightly differently to men. And that\u2019s not our fault. There\u2019s a quote in the book that says \u201crejection can reinforce a message that many of us are receiving all the time, in small ways, that you don\u2019t belong\u201d.

Research done at London Business School showed that;

\u201cfemale executives are less likely than their male peers to reapply for jobs in leadership after being turned down. And this isn\u2019t because women are less resilient or persistent, but because they\u2019ve already experienced years of small rejections in work cultures that generally value maleness more. They\u2019ve felt a lack of belonging that leads them to believe that it would be foolish to reapply. And for women of color, rejection at work is often compounded by racism\u201d.

So upfront it sets out that this is not a book for women about \u201cfixing the women\u201d. It\u2019s about sharing the experience of rejection by women and what that means, feels like, and looks like for women. And that largely, this is systemic rather than the fault of us as women.

There\u2019s also a big piece in realizing that most things, and most people, get rejected at some point. From academic papers, course admissions, funding rounds, and book deals. And it\u2019s not always a reflection of you or your work. Even more importantly, it\u2019s realizing that everyone experiences it, but often it\u2019s kept hidden, it\u2019s our own little shame or embarrassment that we carry with us. Therefore, we all just end up thinking it\u2019s just us experiencing rejection, and just us that isn\u2019t good enough to be accepted for something.

Big idea #2\u200a\u2014\u200aGo around\xa0it

Pretty much every story in this book involves having to face and respond to some kind of rejection. It\u2019s feeling the feelings, and using those feelings to still go and do the thing that needs to be done.

It\u2019s going around the rejection that results in sometimes a great piece of science, in the example from Angela Duckworth, or a new community and new audience, in the example from Polly Rodriguez, or a new way of working more authentically in Laura Huang\u2019s story.

As Elizabeth Bell puts it in the book:

\u201cI think I realized in some way that if you don\u2019t get what you want in the way that you want it, you can still have it. You just need to tolerate a different path\u201d.

Similarly, Michelle Tea says;

\u201cwhen someone rejects your creative work, it just means that they can\u2019t see a path for it. It doesn\u2019t mean that there isn\u2019t one.\u201d

All of these statements and stories are great reminders as we\u2019re doing our work, putting stuff out there, and being slightly vulnerable by putting ourselves in positions where people can judge or make comment on our work. But these rejections will often force more creative paths, and maybe ones that may even result in an even better outcome, as several of the women in the book suggest was the case from the rejection that they faced.

Big idea #3\u200a\u2014\u200aPractice rejection

The first thing we can do to practice rejection is to ask ourselves \u2018what is the worst that can happen, and can I live with that?\u2019, in order to steel ourselves and prepare for being okay with the worst happening (or realizing that the \u2018worst\u2019 maybe isn\u2019t even that bad).

Rejection is ultimately a muscle, and Caitlin Kirby worked her rejection muscle so much that she actually had enough rejection letters to wear as a skirt to her doctorate dissertation defense. She collected all of the rejection letters that she had whilst doing her doctorate and turned them into a skirt. The comments she got from other students or other doctorate candidates was that they hadn\u2019t realized that every doctorate candidate experiences that level of rejection, and that no one ever talks about how much rejection you have to go through in order to get a doctorate.

There\u2019s some exercises in the book about getting better at rejection. One of them is to get 10 no\u2019s\xa0. You write down a heap of things that you could ask for, and then go out and ask for them. Yes\u2019s don\u2019t count, you have to get 10 no\u2019s. If you write down 10 things, get five \u2018yes\u2019 and five \u2018no\u2019, you have to carry on until you get 10 no\u2019s. The \u2018no\u2019 is all that counts.

The other thing to practice is talking about rejection. So many of the stories in the book touch on women initially feeling like it was just them, but many found a community where they could share formally or informally and help others with their rejection too.

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