Debbie Millman on Overcoming Rejection and Reviving Your Dreams

(tranquil music) Headspace Studio. (car hooting) Hi there, I'm Debbie Millman, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace, end to Wednesday. This week we're talking about designing a career we love doing and a life we love living, but we can't talk about dreaming big and following our passions without talking about failure. No matter how intentional, organized, and courageous we are with our dreams and plans, things can fall apart and we are left to pick up the pieces and put them back together. So today we'll talk about how you can better process rejection and failure, and how you can reframe them and feel safer and more inspired to dream again. (bright tranquil music) I had an opportunity to work on a science fiction film that was considered one of the big films of that year, and I was hired with a team of folks to work on the merchandising, and we were all really big fans of this franchise. And because we were such big fans of the franchise, I think that we somehow felt that somehow that gave us this sort of entitlement to do work that was going to be immediately accepted. And when we got to the meeting and started to present our work, I sort of began to see the excitement drizzle out of our clients and in place, I began to see some confusion, and when we finished, the first thing that they said was, "Well, now that we see this work, this isn't working." Now you have to understand back in that moment, we were really, really, really in love with this work. Clearly our clients weren't, and so we did what I think is very typical when facing outright rejection and utter failure in something we really believed in. We wanted to fight for it, and suddenly occurred to me that I needed to fight for the relationship more than fight for the design in that moment. And so I asked to stop the meeting and they agreed, and we took very copious notes on what they were hoping for and what they expected, and we went back and we rethought how we were doing the work. We came back a week later and we hit it out of the park. It was a really defining moment in my career when I spoke to the client afterward, he commended our ability to do that and said that if we hadn't done that, we'd have been fired. When I am rejected for something that I'm really hoping for, and this happens frequently, I find that the best thing to do in the privacy of my own home is to cry. Let it out. Feel your feelings when you're feeling them in a safe place where you know you can express everything that you're experiencing. As soon as you stop crying, you stop feeling as badly, and you begin to metabolize the feelings. Dan Gilbert talks about the surprising science...