018: Deal With The Feedback Loop of Rejection And Do Better

Rejection. It ain’t the best feeling in the world, but it’s an important part of growing up. Rejection is the feedback loop of life, and we can choose to reframe these moments to drive personal development and growth. In today’s podcast episode, I discuss the importance of dealing with rejection and identifying constructive criticism versus imaginary incidents. Sometimes, our imagination can get the best of us and create stories of perceived rejection built upon false assumptions. However, by practicing mindfulness, we can address these negative feelings when they do arise unexpectedly. Lastly, I explore how rejection can impact our fitness and why it’s essential to handle rejection with a growth mindset.

Choose to do better to be better for others.

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Transcript

To love without expectations is to trust in reality,

to put words into action and welcome curiosity.

For what is love without the consequences of the heart?

And what is love without the determination from the start?

That regardless of what happens, we continue to act

to love selflessly, wholeheartedly, as a matter of fact.

And when the storms arise and the rain continue to fall,

we will choose to accept growth through love. The greatest gift of all.

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How's it everyone? My name is Mike Cabuco, and welcome to another episode of the Love Notes for Life podcast. Your creative space for amplifying greatness through gratitude rejection. It ain't the best feeling in the world, but it would be a great disservice to you all and my personal integrity if I did not address the fact that I've dealt with a handful of rejection throughout my entire life. Now, before you attempt to feel sorry for me, or don't, whatever floats your boat, I would like to solidify my stance on the subject.

It ain't the end of the world, and I need to constantly remind myself that every single day that rejection is a natural part of growing up. Cue the flashback music, please.

So it's the mini-Mike was sporting an electric 80s neon style puffer jacket and was known allegedly for rocking the faux mullet. Don't ask. My dad had this thing for wanting me to look like a little islander kid. Anyways, back to the flashback. So mini-Mike was in grade school, was a pretty solid good kid, had exceptional grades and made sure that his name was on the teacher's starboard.

But like any little kid, mini-Mike had a mini crush on one of his classmates. And his mini-classmates knew it would be fun to trick mini-Mike into thinking that this girl that mini-Mike was into was into him. That was a mouthful. And spoiler alert, she wasn't. And the minute mini Mike tried to give her a candy gram on Valentine's Day, well, let's just say she just stared straight back at him in a sort of…”Are you serious right now?” look and laughed alongside the other tricksters in the class.

Yeah, that wasn't a fun day in class. But nevertheless, what happened, happened. And in the moment, especially when you're an innocent, wee little young lad, it's really hard to make sense of it all. As a kid, that moment just didn't make sense.

I mean, if you're lucky and you grew up with values, the first lesson you learned is being nice to others. And when that feeling doesn't get reciprocated, well, it's seriously an unusual situation as a kid. And as a kid, you're charged with emotions, these new feelings that you've never felt. You start questioning your values, your self worth, subconsciously, and you seek no. You run towards the easiest path out of the situation, hide in a little dark corner, and contemplate the possibility of living alone forever and ever and ever.

Okay, Mr. Dramatic, calm down. Take it down a notch. All right, already. I apologize for the theatrics and for being overly dramatic.

But I can't emphasize enough that when we're kids, our first exposure to rejection can create quite the sting. And at that point, you hope that the teacher would step in, settle the children down, and either a console little Mikey and say, hey, everything's going to be a okay, kiddo, or B, say, you never had a chance. But I digress. Rejection is a fact of life, and how we deal with it influences our outcomes in life. So rejection is life's built in feedback loop, and we can either learn from it or run away from it.

Consider this if I never learned how to deal with rejection as a kid, then how could I possibly deal with the bigger rejections later in my life? Oh, yeah. You thought that was the only notable incident of rejection that I've ever experienced in my life? You must be dreaming because my life is far from perfect. And some might even say parts of it resembled the misfortune of the Baudelaire children from Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why I really enjoy those books. Now it makes sense. Yet despite what life has thrown at me, I wouldn't be the person I am today without experiencing rejection. It took me a year to get my first professional job right after college, because nobody wanted me. However, during that downtime, I got my first taste of starting a business, learning the side hustle and learning how to be an effective communicator.

Oh, here's another one. If I didn't get rejected twice from engineering grad school, I would have probably never took that art class. That gave me the opportunity to play in the sandbox of creativity and discover the career potential of a creative within the 21st century, rejection is an important part of life, and if you're willing to go through the feedback loop, it reveals your strengths and weaknesses, and if you choose to do so, pursue opportunities to become better. We all experience rejection, and it's up to us to reframe rejection as a teachable moment. But while I understand the science behind rejection and the potential growth we can gain from it, I will not discard the fact that dealing with rejection is easier said than done.

It is a trial in life, and it creates a lot of stress in our lives if we're not prepared to handle it, and that undesirable stress can affect our performance in fitness and create unhealthy behaviors. You know, there's also a neat aspect of rejection, especially when it's paired with stress. And I'm not talking about neat in a sense that, hey, those are some pretty neat sneakers you're rocking, or that's a neat approach to your training. Or that's neat that, mike, you're such a nerd about nutrition that you would set aside free time to watch hours upon hours of lectures and read studies on nutrition just for fun. But I digress.

The neat I'm talking about is non-exercise activity thermogenesis. NEAT. N.E.A.T. Isn't that neat? And NEAT is like that subtle variable that gets left out of the discussion during talks of the calories in and calories out equation. So NEAT is like the subconscious things we do in a day. It's stuff like fidgeting tapping our feet, shifting our body to correct our posture, or shivering nonstop at Lumen Field to watch soccer and support OL Reign on a cold night in sub-50degree weather.

No lie. I do have the post data that I did indeed burn an extra few hundred calories. Pretty cool. Anywho, neat sorts itself out as activities that we don't necessarily pay much attention to unless we make ourselves aware of it.

Dr. Eric Helms over at Three DMJ did a fantastic lecture on how neat can drastically affect the calories we burn within a day. So Eric proposed the idea that nutrition focused on muscle and strength can be described as a pyramid built upon our behavior and lifestyle. As an overview, the pyramid from bottom to top, is arranged as follows energy balance, macronutrients, micronutrients, nutrition timing and supplements. And energy Balance, which sits at the foundation of the pyramid, describes the calories in, calories out equation, but also incorporates a multiplier for our neat behavior. This NEAT response can vary from individual to individual, but the common thread is how stress can greatly reduce our neat multiplier.

When we have a stressful day we are not at our best. And you may notice that you feel like you don't want to do as much. Stress causes us to act out of character, and when it happens during a hypocaloric diet or a low calorie phase, it can play mind games. Like you could be making progress for weeks on end on a certain caloric deficit. Then all of a sudden the dial stops.

But when we zoom out and compare our behavior from the successful weeks to the weeks when we started to feel flat, we can observe that there was a significant behavioral change. Those stressful moments in life projected as a form of rejection can seriously stunt our health and fitness goals. And if a reduction in meat was bad enough, stress can also lead to bad decisions. When I was at my weakest, I remedied problems and rejection with binge eating. I remember going through weeks of great progress and then one big bad day would throw me off course.

I would then feed into my stress and neglect my health, wellness and fitness. I really had a bad relationship with food back then, and it wasn't because I wasn't loved enough as a child. No. It was because I just didn't have the best coping mechanisms or tools with dealing with rejection. Now, I understand that to deal with stress, you really can't just ignore it.

To deal with rejection, I needed to face it head on. I needed to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I also needed to stop with the assumptions. I can't count the number of times that what I perceived as rejection was merely a construct of my imagination. There were moments where I would get triggered by the initial information, make assumptions, and invite unnecessary loads of stress within my life.

However, I made an error in judgment by falling into this feedback loop of creating stories without the full picture. Maybe it was my way of wanting closure immediately or achieving instant gratification, but it was not the best way to go about it. It was a bad habit that I needed to intentionally shake out of me. I needed to retrain my brain and my heart to experience rejection with honesty and learn the difference between rejection and the stories crafted by my imagination. I needed to acknowledge that I didn't know everything and it would be a big disservice to my life and others if I consistently fell into the trap of assumptions.

I realized that sometimes the best solutions for rejection was actually taking a breather, a moment to step back from the situation and assess what was really going on. By delaying my actions, I learned to create more clarity and coherence with my ideas. And it helped me make better decisions. This feedback loop would extend throughout my life. But having that self-awareness allowed me to actualize the difference between a true form of rejection and a fictitious story conjured up by my imagination.

The mind is powerful. And sometimes we need to get off of autopilot, take the wheel, and shift our behavior to formulate better outcomes. Rejection is an opportunity to pause for reflection. And we can use these moments to better define and interpret the world around us. Sure, it's easy to run away from the situation and yeah, you'll feel like life is out to get us, but it's a hard lesson that I encourage you to welcome.

It is in these defining moments that if we can just push through it, we can emerge as a much stronger, kinder and prolific individual. And you really have to have faith that life will get better. Because with enough time and experience, this is what I believe those feedback loops of rejection will eventually get shorter and shorter. And then one day, when you think you've had enough, when you're scraping for one last breath and you're so close to quitting, life surprises you with acceptance. Remember, life rewards.

Those who are willing to experience delayed gratification believe that rejection doesn't last forever. Because growth from rejection leads into the freedom to find happiness, peace and power to silence the noisy construct of the world. She's out of your league. You're way underqualified. You don't have experience.

You're not talented. You're just not the right fit. You really think you had a shot? You must be dreaming all this negative talk. It's one thing to hear it from someone that you don't value their opinion.

But when it comes from someone that's close to you, or that you look up to, those words of rejection hit differently. It hurts. Yet if we reframe that negative talk with a different vocabulary and delivery, those same words can offer some wise words of encouragement. You're growing up. You're learning to do better, to be better for others.

You're building the right skills to validate your qualifications. You are putting in the hours to gain experience on the weeknights and weekends. You're setting aside time to learn how to strengthen your craft and communicate your ideas better. You're putting in the mileage to shape yourself into a better fit, a right fit. You're staying prepared because when the time is ready, you can execute your shot with minimal flaws.

You are dreaming. And you're doing the work now to make those dreams a reality. You see, handling rejection is all about perspective. And when you've exhausted all options and done the best that you can while staying true to your morals and values and the outcome doesn't quite align with your expectations, then it all comes down to the toughest lesson of all acceptance in the moment.

Some things in life aren't meant to work out now, to give room for other things to fall into place. To be so young with an appetite for reason and curiosity is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you've still got a lot of life to live. But on the other hand, it's a curse because you still haven't experienced and learned all the lessons that life has to offer. However, if we can learn to accept our predicament and that life does require delayed gratification, then we can develop the motivation to do better.

The way I see it, I've got one life to live and I can spend that time wisely by moving forward, learning every step of the way and always striving to live a full life. That's all we can truly ask from ourselves. And I'm slowly getting better with being okay with that. Life can get scary, it can get uncomfortable, it can truly hurt at times. But if you've made it this far in life, then you already have the power to give your goals one more shot, one more try, and if it didn't work out the first time, that's okay.

Switch up the variables and give it another shot. Keep going and going and going until the lessons are firmly established and you discover an outcome that you can mark as success. Growth isn't easy, but I'm confident that you can do better to be better for others. Don't worry, I'm walking alongside of you every step of the way and we'll both get better. I promise that if you fall, I hope that my words of encouragement can pick you up right back up when you are ready.

Everything will be okay. And I know that together we can change our lives for the better, embrace every single opportunity to learn, fortify your position in life, and keep moving forward.

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Thanks y'all, for tuning in to another episode of the Love Notes for Life podcast. I look forward to continuing this conversation of awareness and amplifying greatness through gratitude. My book Love Notes for Life is now available on Barnes and Noble with the direct link in the show notes below.

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Thanks y'all, for the support and always remember there is beauty in knowing that there is only one of you. Take care.