Why rejection doesn’t have to equal failure – a lesson from my Mum

Hey champ,

I bet your social media feed is still swimming with inspo in honour of International Women’s Day. Mine is, and I bloody love it!

There are so many inspiring, influential, powerful and dynamic women I could choose to pay homage to on this day, but for me, no one fits the bill better than my Mum.

Ahhh, Mum. She’s crazy, beautiful and the ultimate optimist – she can put a positive spin on absolutely anything.

Growing up, there was a time when money was pretty tight. When our house got foreclosed by the bank, she said to all four of us kids “that house was too big for us anyway!”.

When I had my accident and things just seemed impossibly hard, Mum showed me over and over again that while we don’t always have a choice in what happens in our lives, we do have a choice in how we REACT to those things.

We can choose to see the worst in a situation – or we can choose to see the best in a situation – Tweet it!

And damn it if that isn’t the most inspiring thing … because we all have that choice available to us.

Mum is from Tahiti, which is where I was born as well, and when our family made the move to Australia, she was so homesick that she started to write stories about her homeland. I guess she didn’t want to forget her island.

She wrote down her thoughts and before she knew it – she had written a whole book! So she thought why not send this off to a publisher? She packed it all up and sent it off to publishing houses across Australia and guess what she got in return….

That’s right, she got rejection letters. One after another after another.

So as you do when you’ve been rejected, Mum started writing a second book.

Her little office was next to my room and every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of her tapping away at the keyboard.

This second book was picked up by a publisher and it almost instantly became a commercial success. It was translated into 10 different languages and published in 20 different countries.

Looking back now, as an adult, Mum’s success as an author is even more impressive. She had four kids (two of them in primary school) and a full time job when she wrote those books. She had every reason in the world to give up after her first book was rejected. But she stuck at it.

It’s a powerful lesson, and one I’m so grateful that she taught me. Thanks to this woman I know that hard work and dedication will always get results.

Thanks to Mum I know that when we back ourselves, when we keep stepping outside our comfort zone and when we choose how we are going to respond to challenges, we are unstoppable.
Thank you Mum, you are a powerful, vivacious woman and I’m so proud to have you in my life.

Turia xx

PS – Don’t want to miss my posts? I don’t blame ya! Pop your details here so I can let you know the next time I share a strategy like this one.