How to stay motivated when you get rejections as a creative
If you eventually want to make money out of your artwork and start a creative business, you WILL get rejections now and then. But how do you stay motivated when you get rejections as a creative? And how do you keep yourself from just giving up on it all? Read on for my personal tips on how to handle rejection.
To create and share your own personal artwork can be scary to start with. So how do you handle rejections when you’ve dared to put yourself out there? Because sooner or later, when you enter the field of having your own creative business, you WILL get rejections, you WILL experience failures and you probably WILL have moments when you just want to give up. In fact if I would take a guess I would say that most creative entrepreneurs, artists, designers gets a whole lot of more NO than YES from possible clients. That’s just a part of the journey and something that you never can protect yourself against.
I feel really lucky as I’m fortunate enough to have learned some mindsets that help me stay motivated through rejections, already as a child. My father has a true entrepreneurial spirit, he’s an inventor and have run his own businesses for almost all his life. Which lead to that I’ve always wanted to start my own business - for all of my life. And he has taught me a few mindsets that helps me everyday on my creative entrepreneurial journey.
Don’t be afraid to fail
It’s all part of the journey and if you try to learn from your failures you will grow and become better at what you do 💪 Off course you’ll feel sad after a rejection or failure, but after a while of feeling sad it’s time to move on - to take a learning from the failure and continue to your next challenge.
Keep on trying until you’ll get it to work
Or try something else that will work 😂 It’s kind of the same as never giving up. Meaning that if you try something out and it doesn’t work, then tweak it and try again. And if that doesn’t work you decide if it’s worth your time trying to tweak it again and try to get it to work. If it’s not you can always try something new!
It’s not the end of the world
Most of the things you do (I would say all of the things, for most of us) isn’t the end of the world if you fail with. Not much can happen. Sure you can loose money, time, energy, confidence and you can get embarrassed. But most of the time this will all pass and you’ll find yourself on the other side of the failure or rejection and not much have really happen.
If you fail - admit it
There’s really no shame in failure or rejection - it’s a part of life and a part of being an entrepreneur. So when you fail don’t try to hide it - admit it. And mostly you’ll find that the icky feeling that the failure gave you disappears much faster when you admit your failure than when you don’t.
Don’t take it personal
Easier said than done ey? But really, whenever it comes to your work, even if you’re an artist that put your heart and soul in your artwork (honestly I think most of us do) - don’t take it personal when someone doesn’t want to buy your work, when an idea you had didn’t go as planned, when your artwork get criticised or whatever rejection you might face in your creative endeavours. It’s most of the times not personal. People think and like different. People have different taste, style and ways of seeing the world. It’s not about you, it’s about them! Or it’s about that your work and their taste isn’t a good match. And that’s fine, because you can’t please everyone!
I have a new favourite quote hanging on my studio wall that say
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without loosing your enthusiasm”
it’s from Winston Churchill and for me this is the core of what it means of being an entrepreneur.
