This is How You Can Beat Being Rejected | Imposter Syndrome

Listen to this episode on the From Imposter to Empowered podcast:

Apple podcast

Spotify

Soundcloud

This page is for you if you're an entrepreneur, a woman trying to navigate the online space with a lot of passion and a lot of uncertainty. Firstly, I wanted to remind you that the Many Minds Mastermind is open and for anyone wondering what this mastermind is – it’s is a community of women who are online coaches and are coming together to talk about the real and raw shit that goes on in the coaching industry. Dealing with rejection and failure, overcoming your imposter syndrome, getting through that eagle trap of feeling like you need to know everything and do everything. Really just having conversations about the real things that go on in our lives that affect us showing up as coaches. This industry is so saturated with such masculinity approaches in terms of always ‘hustling’ always feeling like you need to be the expert or are always feeling like you need to know everything. I like to use the term ‘wagging your dick around’ because that's what I see a lot of coaches doing in terms of just trying to show their expertise but not really showing any vulnerability or realness.

 

Listen, that approach can work and it's worked for so many coaches in terms of making lots of money, but you can also make lots of money by being real, authentic and vulnerable.  Talk about the issues that plague you that we all deal with but very rarely talk about. A lot of people who come to me that suffer with imposter syndrome are usually not people who are open about it. They usually don't really talk about it on their stories or don't really engage with any clients about it, but they come to me for my help. That’s just a prime example of how Imposter syndrome is one of those things that you can be really ashamed of. You think "if I admit that I have imposter syndrome, people are going to think that I'm a fraud", people are going to think that I actually don't know what I'm talking about, and that's totally not the case.

 

If this sounds like you, then this Many Mindset Mastermind is for you. You will get 10 weeks of this amazing community once a week. We meet on zoom for however long we need to do coaching. I will do trainings using neural, linguistic programming and hypnosis. You will also have access to recorded hypnosis tracks, journal prompts and coloring affirmation sheets.

 

So if you are interested in that, you can go to the link on my show notes and apply for a call. If the calendar is booked up, send me a message on Instagram @yourcoachjill, and I'll make sure that you get in there.

 

So now we're going to talk a little bit about rejection and failure. This is something that is one of the biggest pillars I would say of helping you overcome imposture syndrome, because rejection and failure are things that we largely avoid. When I say avoid, we believe that everything that is a risk to our emotional safety or physical safety is technically rejection. Let's say somebody comes to you and says "I love what you do as a coach, I would love for you to come and speak on the stage in front of 1000 people".

 

You might reject yourself immediately and think "I'm not qualified enough to do that". Your brain is actually going into fight or flight. Your brain's going into that survival mode of "Oh my God, you are going to risk being rejected and you're going to risk failing and you're going to risk being outed by everybody". At that point, you don't really know what you're actually avoiding. You just know that it's scary, you’re fearful and you're not going to do it. The reason why we're afraid to do anything is not because we're afraid of what other people will think, it's not because we're actually afraid of the actual failure, we're afraid of our emotions behind what that failure will mean to us. So we are afraid to do a speech in front of 1000 people not because of what other people think about us, but how we will feel when we know what other people think about us.

 

This was something that I largely relate to in terms of my speech impediment, even to the closest people in my life. When I am put on the spot, I'm afraid of the feelings that I will have if I mess up. I fear that my family members are embarrassed of me or friends are embarrassed of me, even though that's not the case.

 

We are always logical beings... our brains are trying to make sense of everything and keep us safe, and that means that we take the easy way out. Remember those neural pathways that we talked about. Your neural pathways harden each time you do something a certain way. It's harder to make different habits because your brain is used to taking a certain path, and it doesn't want to work any harder than it has to be.

 

What inevitably happens when we are rejected or when we do fail we do experience those feelings of OMG I'm a failure. "Look at what I did, somebody didn't want to be in my coaching program, I’m not a good coach, I'm not good enough". We continue to avoid everything that makes us feel bad because we don't want to have those feelings of feeling bad, right?

 

So I have created a rejection template, and I use this, I've talked about this on my Instagram, I've used this with my clients, I teach this in my trainings that I do. This is a way for you to really flush out this rejection. Get through it because if you harbor on it, it's not going to do anything for you. It's really good to be able to think about it, depersonalize it and then learn the lesson. We always want to get the lesson out of whatever we do, and this is a really good way to do it.

 

The first question is, how you can look at the situation as neutrally as possible. How can you assess the situation? Let's look at a sales call objection and rejection: somebody says, "I actually don't want to be a part of your group coaching program, but thank you for your time". How can you look at this situation as neutrally as possible? How can you assess this rejection as something that is of 1/3 party perspective? If someone was looking in on this situation, like a coach, what would they say from an objective perspective? Our brains are meaning makers, and we also are really hard on ourselves.

 

The second question is, what did you make this mean about yourself and or your services? So what did you make this mean about your coaching services? What did you make this mean about yourself as a person? When you flush all that out, ask yourself: are these things true? Are these things true that you are saying about yourself, or are they completely ludicrous? But because they're in your head and you don't write them down, you don't think that they're ludicrous. You think that they are actual facts. Again, our brain is a meaning making machine, and it creates stories so we can understand things, and your brain is just creating a story for why this rejection went this way.

 

The next question you want to ask yourself is, what are the possible alternatives to what you think this rejection meant? So you can write down all the reasons why you think you're a bad coach or why you think they don't want your program. But then, what are the possible alternatives to what you think this rejection actually meant? What are the other ways or the other avenues that this situation could have taken that have nothing to do with you? When you do this, you're teaching your brain that there are other perspectives and other ways to look at things rather than just your personal biased perspective.

 

And lastly, what is the lesson you can learn from this rejection that will improve your life or your business? What is the lesson that you can take from this situation that will help inform your practice in moving on? Maybe you experienced an objection that was related to money, and you can now talk to your coach, watch a YouTube video, do something that will help you get around that objection the next time that you do a sales call.

 

Maybe the client or your perspective client who said no needs a certain something in the program and you forgot to mention it. Everything is a learning experience, and if you look at it that way, you actually are able to get the lesson out of everything and realize that things are happening for you, not against you.

 

There’s always something that you can learn going forward after a rejection or a failure. So those are my four questions for the reduction templates.

  1. How can you look at the situation as neutrally as possible?
  2. What did you make this mean about yourself and your services and or your services? And is this true?
  3. What are the possible alternatives to what you think this reduction meant?
  4. What is the lesson you can learn from this reduction that will improve your life and your business?

 

And if you are letting imposture syndrome affect you showing up in your business, then you are going to be unsuccessful because you need to work on your confidence in order to be able to sell. If you're not excited about your offer because you think no one's going to buy it, then nobody will buy. We really want to work on your belief, and this community is a community of women who are doing the same thing as you.

 

There's honestly no better way to improve your business. These women are so supportive, we talk in the group chat almost every day and we support each other all the time. It’s really an amazing way for you to honor your craft and really develop your story because everybody has something important to say, and I believe that what you do is necessary and important, and now you have a supportive community to back it up.

 

At the very least, make sure you follow me on Instagram again @yourcoachjill I have tons of free content strategies and inspo. See you next time.

Close

50% Complete

Grab Your FREE 30-day Journal Prompt Workbook

for the online coach who wants to bust through limiting beliefs, ditch procrastination, and spark creativity by always having something to journal about.