Why we should wear our rejections as a badge of honor

For perfection-seeking girls and women, critical feedback is a bitch. If someone gives us anything less than a glowing review, we wither inside and immediately spiral into “I suck.” We take it as a permanent indictment of our character. It’s sickening, demoralizing, and altogether brutal.

The antidote to this is not to avoid criticism, but to actually invite it. Yes, you read that right: I want you to actively ask for cold, hard, unadulterated feedback. And not when you know you’ve aced something, but when you know you’ve got plenty of room for improvement. It’s kind of like radical exposure therapy to desensitize yourself. It might feel like a swift kick in the gut for an instant, but the more you do it, I promise, you’re going to discover really fast that critical feedback doesn’t hurt nearly as much as you think it will. Eventually it becomes kind of like a positive addiction: I now actually love getting it because it points me to my next challenge.

Recently I spoke at a rally right after the woman to whom I lost my public advocate race, who happens to be an amazing speaker and knows how to fire up a crowd. It was pouring out, my son had been pulling on my coat to get my attention all day, and I was especially run-down from traveling; to be honest, I’d been doing so much public speaking that I hadn’t really given much thought to what I was going to say. I figured, It’ll be fine. I’ve got this. After I spoke, I got into the car with my husband and asked him how I did. He looked at me and said, “You kind of sucked.”

Um, what?

“You were a two, maybe a three, out of ten,” he said (as you can tell, we don’t pull any punches in our relationship).

The tough love admittedly didn’t feel great in that second — especially since it was an already serious sore spot to face the woman I’d lost my election to. Still, I was really grateful for his honesty. What good would it do me for him to sugarcoat and tell me I was great when I wasn’t? For a few weeks after that, I thought long and hard about how I’d gotten into my comfort zone with public speaking and how I could get better in rally formats. I’ve now gotten excited about recognizing that even if I’m at the height of my game, I can (and should) still find ways to improve.

The key to this strategy is to not just endure feedback, but to actively seek it out all the time, everywhere, from everyone — especially when you don’t want to hear it. I gave a speech recently in front of four thousand people and got a standing ovation. I was feeling really good about it and didn’t really want anything to spoil that, but I still asked my staff to critique me. Why? Because even the best speeches can always be better. I even do this in my personal life; after my husband and I have an argument and the dust settles, I ask him how I could have communicated better.

Angela Duckworth, author of the bestselling book Grit, identified the courage to accept feedback as one of the four critical factors for building grit. Those who have grit are constantly looking to improve, so they ask, “How did I do?” Angela points to great athletes as examples. Think about someone like Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps; how did they get that good? First, they focused narrowly on the one thing they wanted to improve on. Then they practiced . . . and practiced . . . with 100 percent focus. But the other key component is that they solicited feedback. They had the courage to face the fact that they weren’t perfect — to ask how and where they weren’t great—so they could refine and get better. They were living at the cutting edge of their ability and were totally turned on by that.

When you’re pushing yourself beyond where you’re comfortable and striving for improvement, you’re firing on all cylinders. That’s when you enter that magical psychological state known as “flow.” One secret to getting to that blissful state is to build up the courage to hear feedback, which points you to the next area of improvement, and the next, and the next. The more you do this, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll go from feeling kicked in the gut by criticism to feeling grateful and empowered by it.

Inviting criticism enables you to bear witness to your own imperfections and build a tolerance for them. First tolerance, then acceptance, and then, believe it or not, joy.

Boys and men aren’t tyrannized by failure. Because they’ve been trained from a young age to shake it off and just keep going (a fall off the monkey bars, a science experiment that bombs, a date invitation that gets turned down . . .), mistakes and rejection tend to roll off them in a way that most women can only envy. Our perfect-girl training has kept us safely isolated from the sting of rejection and failure, but as you know, it also weakened our resilience in our adult life. One way we build back our resilience and take the sting out of rejection and failure is by normalizing it.

When Shaan was a baby, our pediatrician told us to skip the excessive use of hand sanitizer and expose him to as many germs as possible to build up his immunity. Much in the same way, we can all immunize ourselves against rejection by exposing ourselves to it. In other words, don’t hide from rejection — own it!

Right now on my fridge I still have the original rejection letter from Yale Law School taped up right next to the rejection letter from my community board. Throwing them away gave them too much power over me. Staring them down, however, put me back into the driver’s seat. They remind me every day to be brave and keep going.

The more I exposed myself to rejection, the less it terrorized me. I won’t lie: there’s always been a little undercurrent of a living-well-is-the-best-revenge fantasy there; I dreamed one day of showing these people what I could accomplish, which gave my motivation a little extra edge.

Display your rejections proudly; they’re a mark of your bravery. Talk about your rejections, mistakes, and flubs, and invite your friends and colleagues to do the same. Read as many stories as you can about famous and accomplished people who lived through failures, like Stephenie Meyer, whose manuscript for Twilight was rejected by twenty publishers before it found a home, or Steve Jobs, who was long ago fired from Apple. Their setbacks didn’t destroy them, and neither will yours. In fact, they’ll set you free.

Reshma Saujani is the author of Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder, from which this article is excerpted.