I want to eat no’s for breakfast

How to stop ruminating on negative and neutral feedback

If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters is about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives.

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My daughters have a name for girls who bend themselves into pretzels to get chosen: Pick Me Girls. I kinda think that for most of my life, I was one. Not in the way they mean it by putting other women down to seem more desirable. My version was more like: Work really hard, do a good job, then wait with a smile on my face for someone to notice and invite me to the table.

Most of us have been conditioned, from very young ages, to let our work speak for itself and trust that the right people will notice. To self-advocate is to risk being seen as too much, too aggressive, or (gasp) not nice. A Harvard study found that even when women and men scored identically on a performance test, men rated themselves a 61 out of 100 while women rated themselves a 46. And even when told a potential employer would use that self-evaluation to determine their hire and pay, women still promoted themselves less.

So we wait. And we hope. And we keep doing excellent work and then wait and hope some more.

Lorine Pendelton, Katie Cella, Tracy Luckow; Photo by Jessica Morrisy

During Uplifters Live, when I was moderating a panel of founders and VCs, I asked how they dealt with constant pitching and rejection. Lorine Pendleton didn’t hesitate for a second. “I eat no’s for breakfast,” she said, and the whole room erupted. I have thought about it every day since. I want to get so comfortable with rejection that the fear of it stops running the show.

But it’s freaking sneaky. I'll just keep doing great work, and the right people will find me. I don't want to seem pushy. If it's meant to happen, it'll happen. So demure, maybe even admirable? But research on rejection sensitivity tells us that the more we've been conditioned to anxiously expect rejection, the more we avoid any situation that might trigger it. We don't ask. We don't pitch. We don't reach.

This week, I interviewed sofiakavlin and Bonnie Blue Edwards who are building The Unsent Letter Mailbox. Bonnie attended one of Sofia’s events and loved it. She saw big potential in it, so she just... reached out. Said: I see what you’re doing. I love it. Can I send you a one-year plan?

Bonnie didn’t wait to be invited. She made an invitation.

Sofia said yes, obviously. What creative visionary wouldn’t? I was so moved by the badassery of that ask — the willingness to put out a specific, generous offer and risk getting ghosted or rejected. That’s the move so many of us skip. Our best ideas quietly simmer while we wait for someone to notice them. Or maybe we put them out there once or twice and nobody bites, so we hide them away in their safe, dark little corners telling ourselves that it’s just not the right time or the right move, or we are not the right person.

So, here’s the irony in all of this. The thing I’m actually best at in my work is helping people stop wishing and start doing. I am really, really good at this. I’m the woman people call to help them convert worries, uncertainty, and waiting into forward motion.

And it is still hard for me to do it in my own life. Every day.

So I’m practicing. A coffee invitation here, a collaboration pitch there, a hand raised for something I’m not sure will get a yes. Each one is a small deposit into my no-tolerance fund. It gets easier. It doesn’t get easy.

But, friends, what we know for sure from 156 episodes of this podcast is that the women who do the biggest, most meaningful things aren’t the ones who waited to be chosen. They’re the ones who kept making asks, kept extending invitations, kept collecting no’s until the yes finally showed up.

We don’t have to be pick me girls. We can be badass invite girls instead.

What would you do this week if you were eating no’s for breakfast?

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts and an invite to our weekly Uplifters co-working Zoom/unhinged dance party.

See you Friday!

Aransas