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I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.

Happy Tuesday, founders,

Rejections…

We face them all the time.

It isn’t something we avoid as founders. It’s a daily workout.

Some bounce off quickly. Others sting a little longer than we’d like. They might dim our light just enough to make us hesitate the next time.

We experience some form of social micro-rejection several times a day - from being ignored in an email thread, a passing disapproval, to a product pitch being met with silence.

But it’s not the frequency of rejection that wears us down; it’s our interpretation of it.

I still remember watching Jia Jiang’s 100 Days of Rejection TED talk in 2015 - one of the world’s most viewed TED talks. After a long day of school (yes, that long ago), I found myself laughing (and oddly comforted) as he documented the funniest ways to get rejected - from asking for a “burger refill” to borrowing $100 from a stranger.

But beneath the humor, what stuck with me was the emotional resilience he built through sheer exposure.

Give me 5 mins, and I’ll give you a fresh new perspective on rejection:

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Rejection sensitivity isn’t about being weak or thin-skinned. It’s a cognitive-affective processing disposition - essentially, a mental filter that scans for social cues of exclusion or disapproval (Downey & Feldman, 1994).

For founders, this sensitivity can become heightened because:

When we internalize rejection, it becomes entangled with our sense of self. The brain processes rejection similarly to physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003). That’s why sometimes a client no-show or investor decline feels like a literal gut punch.

Jia Jiang wasn’t the first to explore rejection as exposure therapy.

In clinical psychology, systematic desensitization, developed by psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe in the 1950s, remains one of the most rigorously tested treatments for phobias and anxiety. The process pairs progressive relaxation techniques with a hierarchy of fear-inducing stimuli, starting with the least anxiety-provoking and gradually increasing exposure, all while maintaining calm.

Rejection Therapy, as a movement, applies the same principle:

For founders, this could mean:

What you’re doing is recalibrating your brain’s rejection threshold. Instead of “they said no, therefore I suck,” it becomes “they said no, therefore… next!”

When we develop "rejection resilience", we then enter a self-reinforcing loop of innovation and opportunity:

A study in the Journal of Management Studies found that individuals who actively practiced cognitive reframing (seeing it as informational rather than personal) reported higher motivation, long-term self-determined persistence and lower burnout rates (Kiefer et al., 2022).

No is just the beginning of reaching a better ‘yes’.

In a more recent talk, Jia shared how his “100 Days of Rejection” experiment kept surprising him. People began saying “yes” so often that he wanted to ask for something he knew would be rejected. So, he asked a pilot if he could fly a plane. The pilot smiled, took him up, and even let him take the controls. As they landed, Jia thought to himself: What if I didn’t ask? How many ‘yeses’ have I missed in my life just because I assumed the answer would be no?

Rejection isn’t a verdict on who you are. It’s a mirror that reflects both the market’s readiness and an invitation to ask why.

Ps. I found Jia Jiang’s rejection assessment. Here it is, if you’d like to do it for fun.

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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