Cope With 'No,' and You'll Be Closer to 'Yes'

Rejection. It eats at your wallet and your self esteem. The thought of more can make it difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

So how can you handle the flood of "no's" until that one treasured "yes" comes trickling through?

Salespeople do it all the time, and the lessons they have to share can help job hunters.

What motivates Jennifer Krinsky to slog through days that can be knee-deep in snubs is that every time she gets a no, she knows she is one step closer to a yes.

"Rejection is the price you pay for success," she said.

It takes making as many calls as possible to land an employer or a customer, said Krinsky, for 16 years a recruiter for the Porter Group, a sales headhunter in Columbia. She often makes sales calls for the company herself.

"My best way of handling rejection is not taking it personally," she said.

But with the bad job market, she said she is finding veteran salespeople that she is trying to place are indeed taking it personally, because the "goods" they are trying to sell are themselves rather than someone else's services or product.

Krinsky said a tenet that has served her well is the knowledge that one turndown does not close a door forever.

"I live by the motto that things always change, so even if someone is not interested in my service right now, they may be in the future," she said.

Fine, but what happens when the rejection is especially painful -- say, a job or sale you really wanted or thought you had in the bag?

For that moment -- and here "moment" is key, Krinsky said -- her favorite home remedy is what she calls her two-minute pity party.