THE REJECTION THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

The perfect gift and conversation starter for women who talk about dealing with failure and accepting not being perfect, this book features fascinating interviews with twenty-five women, including Keri Smith, Angela Duckworth, and Roz Chast, about triumphing over career setbacks and challenges.

Rejections don't go on your resume, but they are part of every successful person's career. All of us will apply for jobs that we don't get and have ambitions that aren't fulfilled, because that is part of being a working person, part of pushing oneself to the next step professionally. While everyone deserves feel-better stories, women are more likely to ruminate, more likely to overthink rejection until it becomes even more painful - a situation that career-development professional Jessica Bacal is determined to change, and, in doing so, normalize rejection and empower others to talk about it.

Empowering and full of heart, the stories in this collection are diverse in every sense, by top women from many cultural backgrounds and in a wide variety of fields; many of their hard-earned lessons are universal. These are stories from engineers, entrepreneurs, activists, comedians, professors, lawyers, chefs, and more, on how they coped with rejection and even experienced it as a catalyst for their own personal professional growth. Powerful, motivating, and endlessly quotable and shareable, THE REJECTION THAT CHANGED MY LIFE will become the go-to book for women at any stage of their career learning to navigate the workforce.

Jessica Bacal directs The Narratives Project at Smith College, an independent women's college in Massachusetts with students from every state and from 60 countries around the world. Her programs motivate students to deepen their knowledge of themselves, explore their passions and personal capacities, and articulate their values and goals. Before going to Smith, she was an elementary school teacher in New York City, and then worked as a curriculum developer and consultant. She received a bachelor's degree from Carleton College, an MFA in writing from Hunter College, and an Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.