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How to Get Over Rejection at Work

Hilary Corna
3 min readMar 9, 2021

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Your job application was rejected.

You didn’t get a raise.

Someone else got the promotion you wanted.

A team member never speaks to you.

It doesn’t matter what form rejection takes. Bottom line, it hurts.

As human beings, we are hardwired to be sensitive to rejection .

Think about it: thousands of years ago, people needed to belong to a tribe to survive, and rejection served as an early warning to alert them that they were in danger of being kicked out. The more painful the rejection was, the more people would strive to correct their behaviors so they could belong.

The same principle applies today. We belong to different tribes in different aspects of our lives. Our team at work. Our families. Our friend groups.

In the workplace, we often associate our self-worth with our performance. Our careers are not our identities , and learning how to separate the two is a long-winded process.

Here are ways you can rise above rejection, no matter how painful it may be:

Know that other people experience rejection.

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Hilary Corna
Hilary Corna

Written by Hilary Corna

CEO | Founder of The Human Way | Bestselling Author | New book #UNprofessional out 9/21 | Host of the UNprofessional podcast | As seen in Forbes, Fortune, WSJ

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