Turn Rejection into Rocket Fuel

🎯 What’s Included

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community

💫 Rounding out the February meetup, 🤝🏾 Community events, 🅰️² March meetup details

💡 Skill Spotlight

A Step-By-Step Practice to Turn Rejection into Rocket Fuel

📆 Join us IRL

A²’s next Conscious Connection for founders, leaders, and curious people is on March 19 at 6:00pm.

We're inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table. It's a great place to make authentic connections in an intimate setting.

Our calendar is the hub for A² IRL gatherings. Subscribing is the easiest way to get notified of these!

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From The Community

💫 Rounding out the February meetup

The February meetup was awesome, y’all.

We continue to see growth in meetup numbers and hit an all-time high of attendees. More importantly, the conversations we had were the deepest we’ve gone. It feels like this community has found its stride and people! We covered fear and doubt around starting a company, co-founder dynamics, fitting in as an immigrant, confronting death, and so much more.

This was our first event at our new home — Capital Factory. I’m so excited to embed the values of conscious entrepreneurship into the nexus of the startup community in Austin.

More about Capital Factory:

​Capital Factory is the center of gravity for entrepreneurs in Texas. They meet the best entrepreneurs in Texas and introduce them to their first investors, employees, mentors, and customers. To sign up for a Capital Factory coworking membership, click here.

And HUGE thank you to Sandra for facilitating! Here’s more about her if you’d like to connect.

🅰️² March meetup

Looking for more authentic connection in your life? Join us in March for Conscious Connection for founders, leaders, and curious people!

We're building Conscious Connection by inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table.

Know anyone that’s looking for more of that in their life? I’d appreciate it if you invited them to our next event!

💡 Skill Spotlight

Here are a few things to try the next time you face a rejection.

1. Remember that our physiology drives our psychology. Start with doing something to ground yourself — could be a few breaths, a walk, or cuddles with your pet.

2. FEEL YOUR FEELINGS! Honor the rejection. Honor the feelings that come up and name them. These could be (but are not limited to): sad, angry, frustrated, disappointed, grief. When naming the feeling, make sure to use the label “I am feeling X”. This helps us label our emotions as transient. This is the MOST important step. If you only do 1 step, do this one.

3. Find support - within yourself or with others. This forces us to celebrate! It’s OK to feel good about supporting ourselves.

4. [Only do this step if you feel you had a significant degree of control over your situation] Mine the experience for learnings with the “needs work” process. Here’s how that works:

   1. Imagine the “rejection” in your mind. Stop at the “-1” action that led to the “failure”.

   2. Visualize yourself taking a “+1” action instead.

   3. Smile and celebrate immediately and intensely!

5. Make a plan and take action

   1. For example, you thought you were going to get that promotion but didn’t. You got feedback from your manager on it. Great. Now, sit down with your manager and make a tactical plan to improve. “How am I going to hit these goals and address this feedback in the next 6 months?”

   2. Get rejected from a job? Ok, I’m going to honor my feelings, take a walk with a friend, and then apply for 5 more jobs, and do 3 peer interviews.

6. Remember that your life is bigger than whatever rejection you just encountered.

📚 Resource Corner

• Book: Anti-Fragility by Nassim Taleb; explores the concept of “anti-fragility” where things gain from disorder instead of being crushed by them

• Podcast: Founders — sometimes we need to hear stories of other people who have faced rejection and made it through. The Founders podcast is an excellent resource for those stories.

📆 Join Us IRL

A²’s next Conscious Connection for founders, leaders, and curious people is on March 19 at 6:00pm.

We're inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table. It's a great place to make authentic connections in an intimate setting.

Basically this graphic:

📫 Our calendar is the hub for A² IRL gatherings. Subscribing is the easiest way to get notified of these!