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Rejection. The mere mention of the word is enough to send some people into full-blown panic mode. When your work is rejected, it can be hard to not start questioning your abilities and second-guessing yourself. But is rejection really as bad as it seems? Not at all.

I can’t really remember just how many times my work has been rejected in my 13 year career. What I can remember is the last time. It was last week, in fact. And the time before that? Probably a few days earlier.

Rejection is very much an important part of the professional creative process, yet is one of the most difficult to accept. A lot of us come from backgrounds where the support and validation of our ideas are central to how we measure our success. We strive to please our audience with our skills and creativity and hungrily devour praise. When the opposite happens, sometimes we feel a huge sense of failure that can affect us in some pretty negative ways.

A bit of advice: If you ever want to make a living at doing something creative, you’d better get over it. Why? Well, because we’re not mind-readers.

Here’s what I mean: When you create something for a specific company, group, or audience, you’re trying to connect and communicate with them. If that doesn’t happen at satisfactory level, then your work has failed at that job, and in turn, will probably be rejected. At that point, it is your job to reevaluate the disconnect, reexamine the problem, and reformulate a new solution- taking your previous try into consideration. The process repeats until the problem is solved and client / your audience is happy.

Granted, it doesn’t always go as I described it, but the heart of the thing stays true. Rejection happens when the fit isn’t just right. It happens when something that makes perfect sense to you doesn’t effectively speak to someone else. It happens when there is a lack of understanding and communication. It happens when expectations are misunderstood or misrepresented.

The bad news is that when you decide to make your career a creative one, rejection happens more often than it doesn’t. Designers will find themselves endlessly tweaking and changing and modifying their work to better suit the needs of a client from project to project. “Revision requests” from client “feedback” is just a friendlier way of saying that your previous try was rejected, and you need to try again. Illustrators will be rejected for others with more suitable styles or working methods. Comic book writers may find that a publisher already has too many books about ninjas before either submitting something else, or trying another publisher.

Which brings us to the good news: more often than not, rejection isn’t a reflection of your abilities. It’s really just part of the job.