Since the week before last, I’ve been continuing to think about the fear of rejection, especially because I tuned into Jay-Z’s GQ interview
Have you seen it yet, sis?
It reminded me of this comment that I shared in my IG stories about how part of not taking nos personally is actually not allowing them to sit in your spirit
This is because one of the things that Jay-z mentioned is that when he was first trying to get into the music industry, he got a lot of nos
Especially trying to get placed on stations like MTV etc
But he claims: "Although I was rejected, I was never dejected" as he saw that as a reflection of them instead of him
Meaning he saw them as wrong for not seeing his talent rather than himself as being talentless because they couldn’t see it
This goes back to a concept that I remember reading in the book “The Mountain Is You”
Where it talks about the fact that, a lot of the times, when we are rejected, it's not necessarily the rejection itself that is the issue but what we believe that, that rejection says about us. In other words:
You would not allow rejection(s) to stop you if there wasn’t a (doubtful or insecure) part of you that believed it was warranted
And so I think, just from mulling it over, part of being able to let rejection roll off of your back and not sit in your spirit in a way that stops you going forward is actually coming out of agreement with what people say about you
In other words, you not only need to come out of agreement with what people say about you, you need to stop agreeing with your own inner critic and saboteur
One of my favorite ways of doing that is thinking about the parable of the mustard seed (in Matthew 17:20)
Based on that: A question I ask myself a lot is “How would somebody who had the faith of a mustard seed walk in this situation?”
Would they just go and sink into a corner and die? Or would that faith of a mustard seed drive them to try again or to tweak what they're currently doing, for example?
Because too often we wait to be 100% certain or 100% sure that we're going to win, but that little percentage of us that does believe is enough
It's enough to help us get over the rejection. It's enough to help us to keep going and do so until we ultimately win
That, a lot of the time, is the secret to not just the Jay-Zs of the world's successes- but our own
The question is, will you implement it?