StunningArt
Rejection is something all higher education professionals will experience in their careers. Whether it’s being turned down for a job offer, promotion, grant, or journal publication, we are subject to the gatekeepers of academe and in danger of succumbing to what author Seth Godin refers to as the “tyranny of being picked.”
Credentialing and having various committees determine access is what professionalizes the industry. But when you passively resign to fate and wait to be picked, you give the gatekeepers all the authority and eliminate yourself from participating in the work you want to do. You lock yourself out and think that someone else has the key.
If rejection is not being picked, then maybe you should take Godin’s advice and pick yourself.
“If you’re hoping that the HR people you sent your resume to are about to pick you, it’s going to be a long wait,” Godin wrote on his blog more than a decade ago. “Once you understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound.”
Institutions have problems. That’s why they hire people to solve them. Not getting a job means it’s not your problem to solve yet. Continue solving problems on your own or find another problem. Don’t sit back and wait to be called upon.
Where candidates go wrong, especially in job interviews, is when they think of themselves as the search committee’s object of scrutiny: I have what it takes. They should pick me. When, in actuality, the employer is just trying to solve a problem and you might have the right combination of talents or possess the key to offer a solution.
The focus should always be on the problem: increasing enrollment, improving student learning outcomes, finding the next breakthrough innovation, whatever it is in your functional area of academe. As hard as it might seem, because your work is so much of who you are, you can’t take rejection personally.
Think of your career as driving in traffic. You should because the word “career” comes from the medieval Latin word “carraria,” meaning a road for vehicles. Rejections are simply red lights, stop signs, and detours. Do you take those personally?
“If someone we knew took traffic signals personally, we would judge them insane,” wrote Ryan Holiday in his book “The Obstacle is the Way.” “Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it.”
The way to rethink rejection is a two-step process. The first is acceptance. That doesn’t mean passive resignation. It means avoiding the tyranny of being picked.
But acceptance won’t get you anywhere without the second step: picking yourself.
Don’t wait for some great epiphany and instead find different approaches to solving problems in your profession.
“Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles,” Holiday said.
So, when you hear the gatekeepers say, “We chose to go in a different direction,” you won’t be left behind. You also have the power to choose to go in a different direction — your direction.
