Handling Rejection: a Conversation with David Bloom

This week, I had one of the best conversations about the complexities of parenting that I’ve had in a long time.  After getting my Taylor Swift email last week, David, a long time client turned friend, replied with a clear, “Yes … AND …”

So we hopped on a call to discuss.  

Rebekah:  You replied to the Taylor Swift newsletter with a really lovely email. Can you talk a little bit more about what you shared?

David: Yes, of course. And thank you. I want to say that it’s true that life doesn’t have a lot of participation trophies and sometimes people just have to recognize when they didn't win. Work harder, do better, be smarter, learn something new — that message is  very important, especially in an age in which we so often don't behave that way. I see it in the workplace and you see it with grade inflation at schools. And so the message I think is critical.  

What I wrote to you is that there is also an element of letting go of the things that you do not control. For example, getting into a school that you want to get into. 

The applicant, my daughter, for example, doesn't control the quality of the other applicants. She could be amazing and could have worked like a dog, and a bunch of Intel science scholars and future Nobel laureates could also be applying. And so the lesson I teach my own kids is control what you can control. And then be okay with the outcome. 

Otherwise, your thoughts start to focus outwardly on other people's thoughts and other people's actions, and that can lead you into a very toxic place.

Rebekah: So it sounds like you pulled a page from the Buddhist art of detachment.

David: Yeah, yeah. It's a little bit of the Buddhist art of detachment. It's a little bit of Greek Stoic philosophy. The world is a complicated place. Just because I work hard doesn't mean I'm going to get everything I want.  

Frankly, I was just laid off from my job. I worked like a dog, and I delivered excellent results. My company is going through a budget crunch as part of a lead up to an acquisition. We're being bought by another company, and they had to make the numbers work.

I don't control that.

And so I am sad, but relatively at peace because I controlled everything I could control.

I recognized that there were decisions that were rational for other people, although they were disappointing for me. And I think it has helped me very much navigate what is a pretty difficult moment in my life.
 

Rebekah:  One of the things you're touching on is the role that grief plays in all of this, and how to hold space for that while also moving forward. Detaching from outcomes doesn't mean you're not sad about it or... 

David: Totally. Yeah, I am sad. I liked my job. I liked the work, I liked my colleagues. If I was my daughter and I had worked so hard in therapy, in academics, in the application process, and the interviews and still didn't get in, I would be sad. I might be frustrated. And I might feel all those other feelings too. Right? Anger, resentment, whatever those things may be. 

And pair that with your message:  Be accountable to yourself, write a better essay, practice more for your interview. 

 And so I'm on a listening tour. I scheduled three exit interviews from my company for myself. Typically, an exit interview is when the company wants to get your honest feedback on your way out the door because you're not going to pull any punches. 

I want the exact same feedback for me, and so I scheduled an interview with a subordinate, with a peer, and with my boss. And I'm going to use that information going forward. 

Rebekah: And sometimes that works. But sometimes it doesn’t. Right? 

What about when we’re trying to be successful at a thing that's not aligned for us? When we're knocking on door after door after door, and they're all the same shape and color and size, and we're not getting through them. When is it time to reevaluate? 

Is that actually the door for me?  Maybe I’m knocking on the wrong doors for where my skills and passions and interests lie. Then, I need to go find a different door.

David: Yeah. Taylor Swift could have chosen a different path and settled for not winning Grammys. She could have thought, "I'm okay where I am. People like my music." But she didn't settle. 

Instead, she committed to honing her craft until she became a global pop phenomenon, an unstoppable force in the universe. She even made her boyfriend a notable figure just by dating her. It's not a common occurrence, but she achieved it. 

Similarly, I considered pursuing certain prestigious jobs, that I easily could have gotten, given my resume. However, upon reflection, I realized they weren't the right fit for me. 

Now, with 30 years of professional experience and a lot of therapy, I'm taking a different path. But there are kids and parents out there hoping that their efforts will eventually pay off. It's crucial for them to transition from determination to reflection to avoid repeating the same mistakes. 

Rebekah: Absolutely. So here’s the question: How do you take that 30 years of experience with both success and rejection, and use it to approach conversations with your 14 and 12 year olds?

Because we can't expect kids to understand that their feelings of grief are distinct from their feelings of disappointment, which are separate from the quality of the work they did, without some guidance. How do you approach that?

David: Alright, obvious disclaimer that I'm an imperfect human being and an imperfect father. So, my advice comes from a place of imperfection and failure as much as does a place of good outcomes. Anyone reading this interview should know that David is neither full of crap nor some kind of pedestal sitter.

The thing I've tried to do deliberately is first look inward.

What is truly my philosophy about being a parent? What's most important to impart to my kids, and how do I want to teach them?

Then, holding myself accountable for living out that philosophy in my actions. It's a bit like detachment.

There are times where it's really uncomfortable. But if I want to be the dad who makes my son confident as a man when he grows up and respectful to women in his life, I have to model that behavior and explicitly teach it. Explicitly teach it, even though he'll probably kill me.

Just as an example, the puberty talk that we did was four different sessions covering different topics in great detail with no embarrassment whatsoever. To the point of both of us sitting next to each other and doing anatomical drawings to ensure those lessons sunk in.

That's a moment where I had to get over my embarrassment, reluctance, and the fact that I never had a talk like that from any parent in my life, not even close, and just live my parenting philosophy.

The second part is when the kid comes back to you with results or experiences or feelings, you have to be as consistent in that moment as in the moments you create.

So, when my kids come to me and say, "I got a 97 on my essay, I'm very excited.” I say to them, "I'm happy for you." I don't say, "I'm proud." I am proud of the work they did to put themselves in that position. Pride goes towards the thing they could control. They did the thing I am proud of, regardless of what their teacher thinks.

Rebekah: They did it when they actually wrote the essay three days ago. 

David: I mean, the teacher could have given it an 86, right? Or a 74. The exact same essay. Or it's graded on a curve and there's a future Pulitzer Prize winner in the class, so everyone looks a little less stellar in comparison.

And I tell them that. I say, "I am happy because this is a great reflection of the work you did. I am happy you got this grade and I am happy you are happy." And then I link and label it: “I was already proud of you for the work you did.”

And I have to be confident enough in them and the consistency that they've heard from me, that I can also do the reverse. "You got a 97. Wow. I am happy for you. That is great. I will tell you, I was very nervous because you didn't really put in a lot of effort on that assignment, and I didn't think you did the best you possibly could have.”

Rebekah: . So it sounds like you're doing a lot of naming. I love that phrase: link and label. I hadn't heard that one before. Definitely stealing it. 

David: Go for it. 

Rebekah: That idea of just being really clear and naming it, I want to underscore how important it is. You also mentioned the importance of being as consistent in the moments when things just come up as you are in the moments that you intentionally create. And gosh, is that hard.

David: So hard. 

Rebekah: And it's so important. The moments we create, we can shape however we want. Within reason - humans are messy. But those moments that we have no control over, that’s when we need to be able to compartmentalize all of our own parental feelings, anything that might have been triggered in us, that has nothing to do with our children. Those moments are when we need to be able to look back to our maps, our vision statements, our understanding of who we want to be as parents and how we want to show up. How can we acknowledge their feelings and name them? "Hey kiddo, I'm noticing that you are incredibly frustrated and angry by this. And I think that's totally predictable, expected, valid, fair." And then do the teaching.

David: I know we’re talking about parent / child relationships here, but it's as important for me to be as transparent and consistent in my conversations with my spouse … because I want her to know why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's not that I'm managing her, but I want her to understand that I said _____________ to our kid and here's why.

And I think that has been super helpful. Also really painful, frankly, sometimes even more than with a kid. Because my wife and I are very much on the same page and we are also still different people, and that creates inevitable friction. Even in a relationship that's doing as well as ours.

I can't imagine how much harder it is if you're not on the same page and you're trying to model these behaviors. I've seen it. It's incredibly painful. And that is another reason to double down on detachment: focusing on the things you can control, taking ownership of your own actions, and releasing everything else.

To your original point about Taylor Swift: What can I control to make the situation better because I cannot control their reactions?

Rebekah: Absolutely. You and your wife have been through what probably feels like three lifetimes worth of parenting in the last couple of years — I'll let you share what you like about that. But I'm curious how much everything you're doing now with your kids has been informed by what you've learned in those experiences.

David: I think I had a lot of anger in the beginning of this journey. My anger stemmed from feeling like I was a damn good father, yet I still found myself in this challenging place.

Looking at some of the other fathers I know, both in my generation and older, I couldn't help but think that they weren't half as involved, caring, thoughtful, or supportive as I've been. And yet, their kids aren't in wilderness programs, and they're not dealing with stress in the family to the extent that we are. I was really resentful.

So what changed?

My own therapy, my wife's therapy, my daughter's wilderness therapy, my daughter's therapeutic boarding school, and now our family therapy. Therapy, therapy, therapy.

Yes, if you look at the world's population, I was an outstanding parent … for that nice, even distribution of personalities. [David draws a bell curve with his hands.] Outstanding.

But my kid is not evenly distributed.

So no matter how great I was for the fat part of the bell curve, I needed to shift to be that good for this other thing on the far end.

I need to be that good for this other standard deviation on the long tail to the right, for all the statistical nerds who read your newsletter.

And so I was able to say, okay, I am a damn good dad in many ways. I just need to also be an effective dad. I need to be damn good for this child. And then learning about that child and understanding what makes them tick.

My energy wasn't aligned with what my child needed. So I had to learn. And I started to build new emotional muscle memory. And we're just so much better.

But it was my work. To learn those things and practice what I'm teaching my kids about emotional detachment and taking responsibility.

That was my journey, too, just as much as it is my kids’.

Rebekah: Gosh, do you remember what I said to you and your wife? Very, very early on in our work together? We were talking about getting some pretty intensive interventions for your daughter, and you said to me, "What are the guarantees that this will work?"

David:  I think when we are drowning in an emotional crisis it is very natural to ask, "Where's the lifeboat and when is it getting here?" As opposed to, "Hey, David. We're going to teach you how to swim and maybe build your own boat."

Rebekah: Well, that's what I said to you, essentially, "There are no guarantees that this will work, but I do have one guarantee. I can tell you for sure that any time the parents don't do their work the intervention itself doesn’t work. The only thing I can guarantee is that it will not work if you expect your kid to do all the heavy lifting."

David: Yeah. I will tell you, some of the most important therapeutic conversations we had with our daughter involved or centered around us explicitly telling her our role in the process and what we were doing: the workbooks we were following, the podcasts we were listening to, the support groups we were attending. So she knew she wasn't alone.

Rebekah: Right. 

David: She needed to know that if she was going to do all this work, she wasn't going to come back to the same family system, the same situation that she had left, and that it would all be, I don't want to say it all be worth it, but that we were all going to be there together. 

And I think it gave her confidence in a way that she just didn't have before. It gave her the courage to really invest in her work. And she did.

Rebekah: It's incredibly freeing too, as I think about all of these families right now who are getting these school admissions letters that are either, “You're in” or ”You're not,” to know that as parents, truly you did your part.

Your kid did their part.

And there's this whole other environmental space that neither of you had control over.

And so if you know that you did your part and you helped give your kid access to whatever they needed to be able to do their part, then great, right? There's nothing more you can beat yourself up over.

Coulda woulda, shoulda. They're all just coulds, right? Could you have gone to more hockey practice? Sure. But that would have meant giving up the family dinners which have shaped your kid into the person you’re proud of. Could you have done that? Sure. But you made a different choice that was right for you.

David: Yeah. I think that's a really important point. We have our energy, our time is not infinite. We gotta place our bets. And, there's work, there's sleep, there's spouse time, there's kid time, there's friends time, there's alone time, there's exercise, there's therapy, all of that. No matter what you do, you never have more than 100%.

And so we are constantly trying to optimize. For us it was optimizing for family dinner, optimizing for therapy, optimizing for work so we could pay for all this and have our own successes that we had more control over. And so our 100% got broken up into those specific chunks.

I don't know if we made the “right” choices.. I have no idea.

But I can tell you, going into this process, we put an awful lot of that 100% into therapy and into the family process, because we did not want to come out at the end of this therapeutic journey and not feel that we had not done everything in our control to have the best outcome. I didn't know if my daughter was going to wind up being who she has become, but I sure as hell didn't want to think that I had left a stone unturned.

And again, it was like Taylor Swift. When I finally was able to get away from the anger and the frustration and recognize that I had to put in the work, I did it. I learned new parenting styles.

Taylor Swift did it. And the parallel to Taylor Swift is Beyonce who's been nominated and won more Grammys and anybody else but never Artist of the Year, Song of the Year, or Record of the Year. I don't think she's saying, “I got to work harder.” I think she's saying there are things about the Academy that are out of my control, and I'm just going to keep putting out my art because that is within me and within my power.

Rebekah: There are lessons in that. Whether your family is on a therapeutic journey or just a human journey.

As our kids go through these developmental stages and changes, less and less falls within our control. That seesaw of control, influence, detachment, and giving them wings to fly - it starts to pivot as they get older. You have to do your own work for each developmental stage and be ready to relinquish control and influence bit by bit. Do the work that you can do, and help that young person be able to eventually do the same for themselves.

Put a good Irish Serenity prayer up on the wall, and step forward into the unknown.

David: That is correct. Look, we do our best. We control what we can control. Then, we have to keep going. You need the resilience to just keep going, because there will definitely be setbacks caused by you, caused by your spouse, your kid, or the universe. Like not getting into a school, right? 
All I can tell those people is, “You are not alone. Don't take responsibility for the decisions of others. If someone didn't accept your kid that may be either their good judgment or their bad judgment. But it was not your decision.”

All you can do is to keep loving your kid and working to grow with them.

Rebekah: Beautifully said. Thank you.