You’ve heard it a million times before, “If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try, again.” Easy to say, but how do you do it? How do you keep trying when you are failing? How do you remain hopeful when you’re not having any luck? How do go out and try again when you feel embarrassed?
At Down To Earth, we find that the key to persistence is having a positive attitude , so if you didn’t read that one yet, you might want to read it first.
Here at Down To Earth we hold several things to be true. First, everyone is human. Humans make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes have horrible results. However, mistakes rarely have PERMANENT results. Further, mistakes often have unanticipated positive results, too. Finally, if you don’t happen to notice any positive results of your mistakes, you can think of some if you try really hard. Once you get yourself thinking of mistakes as something that all humans do, that aren’t permanent, that have positive results, they’re not that scary to make anymore. Therefore, you are unafraid to persist.
Here’s another way you can look at rejection. Let’s assume that you are only going to get about 10% of what you ask for. If you ask for 10 different things, you can assume you’re only going to get one of them. If, however, you pick one thing you really want and ask for it in 10 different ways, you’re probably going to end up getting it somehow. If you believe that, then you can prepare yourself to ask 10 times. You can also be ready for the fact that 9 of the answers are likely to be, “No.” Each “No” that you get puts you closer to the “Yes.” Therefore, when you ask for something and someone tells you, “No,” you can actually be happy that you got one of the “No’s” out of the way and are that much closer to the “Yes.”
