Just a few days ago I set up a profile on Handshake and began advertising for an intern. As of today I have received nine applicants from students at universities all over the world. It has been an exciting few days as I consider all of the possibilities of having an intern working on the podcast, though a bit overwhelming as I navigate the next steps of how to narrow down who to hire. 

In order to allow for some time to get organized, I sent a message to each of the applicants informing them that I am continuing to accept applications but will be setting up interviews soon. I asked that they respond with some days/times that would work for them to have a 20-30 minute phone conversation to discuss the prospect of working for Dr Williams, LLC. 

Within a few minutes I received a response from one of the applicants informing me that they are no longer interested in the position. My knee jerk emotional response was one of disappointment, discouragement, and fear. It felt really bad, a byproduct of practiced alignment since feeling good most of the time is becoming more normal, feeling bad feels REALLY bad when it happens. 

I sat with the emotions and analyzed my response to the rejection. I realized that most of us avoid rejection when possible because “no one like to be rejected”. I put that in ” ” to highlight the fact that most of society views rejection as a negative experience. So much so that many of us shy away from going after what we want because of a baseline fear that rejection could occur. We take it really personally when someone says “no” to us when we are putting ourselves out there in an attempt to achieve acceptance. 

Almost immediately after running through all of this in my mind, I began to feel gratitude for the rejection from the applicant. Knowing that the negative emotion was me out of alignment with my Inner Being allowed me to know that my Inner Being was seeing the situation differently than I was as I sat in my knee jerk reaction. This communicated to me that my Inner Being viewed this rejection as a positive thing. I asked myself why it was a good thing.

At face value I wanted all of the applicants to want to work for me. There was something nice about the idea of having my choice in whichever one I wanted and knowing that they would be on board with accepting the position. Then I realized how much work that was going to be to work my way through each applicant and what they could offer to the business. On top of that, I would have to dish out my own rejections to those who I was not choosing, and provide the possibility of negative emotions to those who were truly wanting to be accepted. 

The gratitude I began to experience was me lining up with the way my Inner Being is thinking about the situation. The Universe was doing the weeding out for me to narrow down the best candidate while simultaneously making it easy for the applicant to move on to something else. It’s true perfection, as is the way of the Universe. I realized in this moment that I would much rather the Universe take care of the busy work (as my Inner Being knows better than anyone what it is I desire) and allow for the decision to be easy on my part, as I trust that the Universe will provide the perfect intern for me, which will simultaneously be the perfect fit for them as well. 

This has offered me a different way of looking at every rejection I have ever received. From now on I trust the rejections that occur in my life and I feel gratitude for them. The Universe is always conspiring to give me a match to my desire. I know this at the core of my being.