Rejection can come in many forms, but the gut punch feels the same as it shatters your ego. And while the history of your rejection has been written, but the legacy of it is for you to decide.

The way you craft this legacy can result in some of the most meaningful wins of your life, and in this week’s video, you’ll learn how to make that happen. . . .

Rejection is awful. It is an incredibly painful experience.

I was, a few years ago—I think it was about 10 years ago now—making a video. I was in the middle of Beverly Hills, I remember this very well, on the little patch of grass in front of the Beverly Hills sign. And I was shooting a video that was about how to get over heartbreak. I rattled off these three tips for getting over your heartbreak. And at the end of it, I noticed that there had been a guy standing and watching me the entire time I made the video. As soon as it finished, he sort of sauntered over to me, and this older gentleman said, “You’ve never had your heart broken, have you?”

My initial reaction, firstly, was, “I hate this guy.” Anytime someone just really calls you out on something. I hated him. But the funny thing was, he called it: This wasn’t a video made by somebody who had truly had that heart crushed. Because anyone who has truly had their heart crushed doesn’t talk in that tone about heartbreak. They don’t go, “Hey, guys, it’s Matthew Hussey here! I’m going to give you three tips to getting over your heartbreak!” What happens when you’ve been through that, is you have a respect for just how fucking difficult it is to be heartbroken.

Rejection has a lot in common with heartbreak. Rejection is the crushing of an ego, our identity, and it can come from many different things in our life. It might come from the end of a relationship that wasn’t our choice. It might come from being terminated from a job. It might come because we’re an artist and we created something and poured ourselves into that thing and then didn’t get the reaction we wanted. Maybe you’re someone who aspires to make YouTube videos or make content online. And you put out that piece of content that you’re really proud of, that you thought was going to be your way to launch yourself, and then you got comments that made you feel really rejected and not seen. Maybe you went on a dating app and somebody ghosted you that you were talking to. Or maybe you put out your opinion in a big way and someone rejected that opinion, and that felt like a much deeper rejection.

There are so many different ways we get rejected in life. But when we truly feel the pain of a rejection, at our core, it can feel like a fracturing of our confidence, of what we believe we’re worth, of who we think we are in this life. Because at the end of rejection, through the catastrophizing that our minds do, we arrive at this terrible destination of “I am worthless.”

So this video is not going to be three tips for getting over your rejection. In this video, I want to talk to you about two crucial phases in your rejection and in the life cycle of the emotions you feel when you get rejected and how you can use them wisely.

The first phase: Deep, unbearable pain. Now this is a phase where it feels like you can’t get anything done, where it feels like other parts of your life are slipping, because you can’t focus, you can’t get it together. It’s a phase where you’re prone to acting out, because you’re in heightened states of emotion, so you’re liable to say the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing, to make erratic, irrational decisions, burn relationships, burn bridges. This is a time where the potential for the negative externalities of your rejection are incredibly high. So I’m not going to tell you how to transform your life in phase one.

Phase one is survival, “Please, God, let me get through this.” And when we’re feeling that we want to limit the damage we could do when we’re in that place. Because when we begin to heal, we don’t want to wake up to a life with a whole bunch of problems created by our reaction to our pain when it was at its worst. So I think of this as limiting the downside of the rejection. Anytime you find yourself about to send a text, or make a phone call, or make a decision, in this moment that could be damaging, say to yourself, “I’m going to delay my reaction until I can trust the person who’s reacting to make the right decision. If I still want to do that thing in a month, or send that text in a month, or in a week, or whenever, if I still want to do that thing, if it still feels like a good idea. Fine. I can do it. But I’m not going to do it now.” And I guarantee, nine times out of 10, with a lot of thought and a lot of clarity, you will thank yourself that you didn’t act out in the ways that your emotions told you to when they were at their most despairing.

The second phase is when you actually are able to create a little space between you and the rejection. Doesn’t mean it’s not hurting at that point. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t still feel like a deep wound. That you’re over it. Rejection’s a kind of trauma at its worst. But you can get to a point where it’s a little less raw and there’s just enough space to create some perception around it, to decide what the meaning of the rejection is. And I think of this as finding your leverage.

My dad taught me this. Every time something terrible would happen in my life, anytime there would be something that was so unbelievably disappointing or devastating, my dad would tell me, “Matt, there’s leverage in everything that happens.” There are things that have happened in my life, whether they’ve happened to me or they’re self-imposed mistakes and pain, those moments have created incredible leverage for me in the form of my coaching. Because the reason that you’re hearing from me with a different tone on this subject than the me from 10 years ago, who gave three tips to overcome your pain and heartbreak, is because of the pain that I’ve actually experienced since. So you get a different me now. I get to be a more powerful me. I get it to be a me that connects more, that inspires more, that’s able to reach more people, truly reach their hearts because of that pain. That’s leverage.

If you worked really hard on something for your work or for a passion project and it didn’t go well, you got rejected, you didn’t get the response that you’d hoped—what’s the leverage? Think about that for a moment. What’s the leverage? Sometimes the leverage is, “I’ll show them.” Someone points out a weakness in it and someone pointing out the weakness makes you develop a strength in that area that’s 10 times better and more resilient than it otherwise would have been. I’ve been on TV shows before where someone has exposed a lack of knowledge I have in an area And that exposure made me go home and read three books on that subject so I was never in that situation again.

So now I have a well of knowledge that’s a result of being exposed. But I never would have read those three books if I didn’t get exposed in that way. We can call it rejection, but it was this amazing light that got shone on something that could be better. You could be on a dating app and experience the rejection of someone ghosting you and that rejection can be the thing that makes you say, “You know what? I’m going to speak to five more people on here so that this person becomes irrelevant.” That’s the leverage. “This is going to give me a fire in my belly to go and find someone who’s actually what I want.” See, rejection is just energy. That’s all it is. Rejection is energy and that energy can be parlayed into anything that’s important to us in life.

We have to find the leverage and the leverage becomes the legacy. The history of your rejection has already been written. It happened. That’s the history, that’s the historic part. Whatever it was, it happened. But the legacy of it is for us to decide. We get to decide where the energy of that rejection goes and what it creates in our life that never would have existed if it wasn’t for that rejection, whether it’s a new standard, whether it’s a resilience, whether it’s an actual thing that we create in our life as a result of that rejection, whether it’s time spent on something more important than the thing we were spending time on, or whether it’s just getting better at that very thing. Getting rejected and saying to yourself, “You know what? I’m going to get a fire in my belly and I’m going to show whoever this is or whatever this is that I can do this thing. And I’m going to get 10 times better at it, because of this rejection. Not in spite of it.”

The leverage becomes the legacy. And it’s in crafting the legacy of our rejections that our life becomes really, really interesting. To me, that’s where the opportunities are.

If, by the way, you’d like to do this with me: In September, I have a Virtual Retreat coming up from the 24th to the 26th. It’s the final Virtual Retreat of the year. For the unacquainted among you, this is my flagship event. It’s three days of immersive coaching, where I walk people through the blueprint for creating the life they want. And part of that, of course, is rewriting the legacy of your pain, your rejections, the things that you’ve struggled with in your life, and turning them into the treasures of your future. We’re going to be doing that together.

So if you’re watching this video and you’re fired up and you want to do this, the Virtual Retreat is the practical application of this. I’m going to leave a link here. It’s at MHVirtualRetreat.com. It’s in September, but get your ticket now. Why? Because it’s $100 off until the end of the month, but only until the end of the month and that’s the best price it’s going to be for the rest of the year. So you may as well take advantage now. And then it’s in the diary and it’s booked, so you know your growth is taken care of this year. You’ll also find out when you get to that page, MHVirtualRetreat.com, that there’s a couple of other bonuses that are only available until the end of the month. So go check that out. I sincerely hope you come and join me there. It’s the best work that we do in my company and it’s transformative beyond anything else I do with people.

Other than that, leave me a comment on this video. Let me know . . . Here’s the comment I’d love you to leave me: What is the thing that you feel is holding you back from being the most confident version of yourself? Maybe it’s an inadequacy you feel, maybe it’s something you feel you’re lacking, maybe it’s a trauma, something that happened to you, something you’ve experienced in your life, or something you never had, but you feel it’s preventing you from being as confident as you can be in life. Let me know what that is in the comments, because next week I want to talk about those comments. I will see you then.