How to help students cope with rejection

As college counsellors, we are present when our students are likely to face their first major rejections in life – from the university of their dreams, a target university or even an apparent safety school.

Most of our students will eventually experience the tumultuous storm of emotions after receiving an email beginning with “Thank you for your application but…”. And, as their college counsellors, we are right there when it happens.

Delivering pastoral care post-application is part of our job. A framework in psychological research that can support us in this regard is the concept of self-compassion.

Coping with rejection: what is self-compassion?

Self-compassion involves extending compassion to oneself in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure or general suffering.

Self-compassion comprises three main elements – mindfulness, self-kindness and connectedness – according to Kristin Neff, associate professor in educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

It is important to point out that self-compassion is different from other self-concepts we might be more familiar with, such as self-esteem and self-confidence.

Self-confidence is trust in your own abilities, personal judgement and power. Self-esteem is our sense of self-worth, perceived values or how much we like ourselves. Promoting these two concepts is relatively common, especially in Western cultural milieus buoyed by individualism.

However, rejection can undermine the very bedrock of self-confidence and self-esteem.

How to foster self-compassion

How then do we foster self-compassion in our students? We can do this by taking practical steps to strengthen each element that makes up self-compassion, and by creating awareness of the concept itself.

You can do this in a series of one-on-one conversations, or by organising a “rejection workshop” as I do, timed for December when the first batch of students start hearing back from schools. I believe teaching the whole group of students about self-compassion and practical strategies in the face of rejection can be as helpful and integral to your role as teaching students about application strategies.

Teaching self-compassion

First, we can educate our students about the concept of self-compassion. This can be done through presentations, but also via a test of self-compassion, developed by the aforementioned Dr Neff. As college counsellors, we are used to drawing from assessments to boost self-awareness, and this can be a useful test to incorporate into our work. This test produces an individual’s scores in the three elements of self-compassion and can be a useful launching ground for conversation.

Collaborating with the social-emotional counsellor at your school might be a helpful way to start this initiative, either on a small scale (one-to-one conversations with students who might benefit from it) or on a larger, group scale.

Encouraging mindfulness

Mindfulness is one pillar of self-compassion and is the ability to observe our own negative thoughts and emotions with openness and clarity.

Breathing techniques are an accessible and effective way to help students to be resilient and mindful. For example, incorporating breathing techniques into the rejection workshop can be helpful.

Another way to do this is to ask students to identify their feelings, using a tool such as a feelings wheel. Because an experience like rejection can bring forth a confusing storm of multiple emotions, it’s helpful to have students name each one they experience.

Naming a feeling out loud can help students to acknowledge it and subsequently put distance between the emotion and the self who is feeling it. English syntax impedes this because it often results in individuals easily identifying with the emotion directly (“I am sad”, “I am disappointed”). Asking your students to name each feeling (for example, “I feel sadness”, “I feel disappointment”) can give them a healthy distance from the emotion and subsequently increase resilience.

Teaching self-kindness

Self-kindness is the ability to be warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our own pain and continuing to be self-critical. It can be fostered in two ways.

First, present students with an array of coping strategies (such as this one) and ask them to pick what would work for them. Feel free to collaborate with the social-emotional counsellor for ideas, or even refer the student to them if you feel that the situation is beyond the scope of your duties.

Another way to teach self-kindness is to have a conversation that uncovers underlying assumptions behind the unearthed feelings, and then challenge those assumptions. Strong emotions – such as fear and intense disappointment – in the face of a rejection often result from an internalised assumption that the student needs to be perfect and an expectation that others (such as parents, teachers and friends) expect only success.

These assumptions are antithetical to self-kindness and you can gently point out the impossibility of this internalised expectation (“It’s okay not to succeed every single time”) and help them to be kind to themselves by modelling that kindness.

Fostering connectedness

The third element of self-compassion is connectedness, or “common humanity”, as denoted in the self-compassion test, which is the awareness that these experiences are a normal part of being human.

Connectedness can be fostered by pointing out that everybody – even celebrities and seemingly constantly successful people – always face rejection. I also like to share my own experience of rejection from universities when I was in high school, which helps students to feel like they are not alone and subsequently trust me more.

You can also encourage students to seek out connectedness with others after the rejection. Rejection is in essence an exclusion from a group, so experiencing instances of being connected to close others who accept them, no matter what, can help with this painful experience.

Applying self-compassion for yourself

Finally, needless to say, these principles can be applied to our own lives as counsellors as well.

Whenever our current tenure at a school ends, we embark on a job search journey, inevitably filled with its own share of rejections. Being kind to oneself, pursuing connections with others and adopting a mindful attitude can help us weather the challenges that come with any rejection.