Rejections, unanswered proposals and failed interviews are all part not just of freelancing but also in real life. These can be depressing. But here at WAHP we help you cope with rejections.

Stay motivated after being rejected, watch how in this FB Live Session.

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Hello, good morning everybody. This is Jason Dulay, and I'm here bringing you your Live@WHAP session for this week. First of all, let me make sure that I share this with the Work At Home Pinoys Facebook group because this is currently on the Work From Home Roadmap page. Just give me a few moments here. I’m gonna hit the share button to load this and share this is in the group. And this should be. How to Stay Motivated? Today we're answering the question, how to stay motivated even though you get rejected? And a couple of weeks ago, I asked the Facebook group about topics that they wanted to hear, and this was one of the most upvoted topics, so we're gonna talk about that today.

So, good morning, good morning Mitch, good morning everybody. If you want to say good morning, just comment below in the WFHR page. And we'll also be doing a Q & A, question answer portion, afterwards, so please feel free to ask your questions on and I will address them later after we have this short discussion. So discussion, we have like a 15-minute discussion and a 15-minute Q&A afterwards. For those of you that are new here, if you're new here, if you don't know anything about freelancing. If you want to start learning how to work from home. We have that link down at the bottom of the screen, just visit freevacourse.com.

And lastly, later today, we have a meet-up in Cebu so all the Cebuanos out there I should see you later in Ayala Center, 4th floor Coffee Bean at 1  PM. Hope to see you there. Alright so on to our topic. Good morning Ria, LJ, Lea and Lorea, good morning everybody.

So, on to our topic. How to stay motivated even though you get rejected? And this is something that's common to everybody right? You know, when get always have that period of time where we don't feel motivated, especially when we get rejected like we're applying for jobs on Upwork and we get declined after decline, clients don't reply to us. Or even not just in Upwork but even if you work if you apply to jobs in real life or you’re applying  from a promotion and you don't get what you're trying to get.

And that doesn't just apply in work, it can apply in regular life, where you know we try to do workouts, we try to exercise and then sometimes you just feel demotivated, especially if you don't see the muscles if you don't see the six-pack. If you don't see the beach body ready, you say, "What's the point?" It feels you get depressed, you get demotivated and you don't want to do things anymore. You don't want to try anymore, you want to apply to jobs, you don't want to try to work out,  you don't want to even do your work. Like if you're already working on something, like if you're doing some data entry for a client, sometimes we just don't feel like doing it, right.  We always have that tendency to be demotivated. So first of all,  and that's a problem because when you feel demotivated, we can't get things done. We can't earn as much money as you wanna earn, we can't apply for the jobs that we need to.

So, first of all, before we address that problems, let’s talk about what motivation is. A motivation it means that it's that drive that's connected to your mental and emotional state. So if you have the proper mental and emotional state, then you can get things done., right. You know you feel really motivated, you feel really happy. “I'm going to work out today”, “I'm going to do my best job”, “I'm gonna apply for more jobs”,  “I'm gonna be happy, I'm going to do this really well”. And that's what motivation is. But the problem of motivation is that it's fleeting, and what we mean by fleeting is that it goes, you know,  sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not there.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is, How do I keep doing things even though I don't feel motivated, right? And motivations are connected to our emotions? So  how do I separate my emotions from the things I need to do? Okay, so you have to separate the two or else if you're relying on your emotions, which is motivation. Motivation is very emotional. If you're relying on emotions half the time you'll want to do things, half the time you won't want to do things. And the answer to that question, the answer to how you can separate your feelings, your emotions from what needs to get done is by something we called discipline.

Discipline, so what is discipline? Okay, discipline by itself is it separates the mood, separates feelings from your ability to perform actions. That's what discipline is. Discipline is just continuously doing something. Because if you want to get something done you can either get it done with motivation, or you can get it done with discipline. Discipline is doing things even though you don't want to do them. Okay, let me repeat that, it's doing things that, you know you need to do okay you know you need to do these things, doing these things even though you don't want to do them.

So just for example, if you're thinking about athletes,  a lot of us are watching the NBA Playoffs,  the Spurs,  I'm a Rockets fan so that we lost yesterday. And the Spurs it's going to be the Spurs versus Golden State Warriors, and on the other side I know it's going to be the Cavaliers versus either the Washington Wizards or the Boston Celtics. But these athletes, these athletes in order to get into top shape, they don't rely on motivation. ‘Cause half the time you don't feel like working out, they rely on discipline. They rely on continuing to do things, even though when even though they don't want to do it.

And how do you build discipline is by repetition. The thing is you have to train your brain, you have to train yourself,  you have to train your brain to get used to doing things even when you don't want to do them. Because if you think about motivation, when it comes to creating like doing data entry or creating a spreadsheet, creating an Excel spreadsheet.  In order for you to do your Excel spreadsheet, if you're you rely on motivation it's going to be "I'm so excited about this excel spreadsheet, I’m so excited about sorting these columns and these rows," that's what motivation is. But discipline is, “I'm going to do this because I know I have to do it.”  When you rely on motivation, you're going to start thinking, “No, I don't like doing this job anymore maybe I should quit.”  I want to ask you, have you ever encountered this? Have you done this where you know you're working in a job and you don't like it anymore? so you quit. You go to another job, maybe you go to another office you can do it for a couple of months, maybe a few years and you quit. You think that, “I wanna eat cake rather than eating vegetables, I can't lose weight, maybe I'm weak, I must be not a strong person,” so you're going to quit. And that's the problem with motivation most people think that they need to have motivation to keep going. And yes motivation is nice, it feels good, it makes us well be happy and you know pushes us. But motivation will go away, it's very evident in gyms right, you know in January 1st, we see so many people going to the gym. They're so motivated, they wanna lose weight but after a few weeks, motivation disappeared. And this applies to everything in life when you are applying to jobs and you don't see any results, you're going to lose motivation. Even if you do the same job every day, over and over again. Even though it'll make you 50,000 or 100,000 pesos a month, you are going to lose motivation. But you could still have to do it, you still have to keep going and that's  why discipline is so important.

And I'm telling you this right now, but a lot of you don't understand that they're going to think they're good that you might agree with me but it's different to agree with me, and it's different to actually apply what I'm telling you. And what I'm telling you is that you have to slowly build habits every single day in order to build discipline. Because you have to train your brain, you have to train yourself to keep doing things because on our own we as human beings are very weak, we're very emotional. That's how we're built, that's how our brains are built. So we have to train ourselves. If you want to keep applying to jobs even though you don't feel motivated anymore, then apply to one job day, and that's it. Keep doing it every single day. I don’t know how many of you know Jerry Seinfeld, he's a comedian. He has a show Seinfeld. What he would do is that he would write one joke a day. Because he is a comedian, he'd write one joke even though he was demotivated, you would write one joke. What he would do is he'd have a calendar, you know those calendars were the different days on them and he would cross out you know write an X on a day where he'd write a joke. So when he wake up in the morning, he sees the calendar and he sees, “okay I've written jokes on these days, I just have to mark an X on this day for me to do this one thing today and to build this habit.” So that's what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to forget motivation. Motivation is unreliable. It’s not sustainable and what you should be doing is building discipline by building habits.

Start something today, do something small today, you know, something that you can keep doing every single day and just get used to it. Train yourself to keep doing it even you know when to when you when you feel demotivated when you feel like not doing it anymore, remember that you made a promise to yourself, that you're going to do the simple thing, it shouldn't be too difficult, but you're going to do the simple thing every single day whether you like doing it or not. Whether it's applying to jobs on Upwork, whether it's learning new things, whether it's taking the time to study different blogs, different courses and so on. Whether it's doing push-ups or going to the gym or going for a run in the morning. Make a promise yourself to just do one simple thing every single day and build that habit, and once you build a habit you're going to separate the emotion from you being able to accomplish things and then you're going be extremely productive.

If you look at me, if you look at different people and think that we're successful, you know, we earn a lot of money online freelancing and if you think that we are successful, one of the reasons that we are successful is because we keep doing things even though we don't feel like doing them. And I know some of you out there, you know, have a problem with motivation. I see this because some of you guys have move from, you know you've tried to take one MLM, you've one networking company and then you switch to another networking company. You've enrolled in so many different courses but sometimes you're taking a course in writing and you say “You know I don't feel like writing, maybe I should learn web design”, and then you learn web design after a few weeks, “I don't you know this is boring, I don't feel like it, maybe I should learn bookkeeping, I don't feel like it.” And that's the problem the feelings are telling you to stop. But you have to separate the feelings from the actions so build discipline. Discipline is doing the things that you know you need to do even though you don't feel like it.

Alright so that's what I wanted to share with you today, okay. And it's a very simple message. It's a very simple answer to the question, how do I stay motivated even though after getting rejected? But it's very important that you should build discipline. And most people, 90% of people can't or they aren't building discipline. They just rely on motivation to get things done, and that’s why after a few weeks, after a few months, they quit trying and then they just move on to something else. So stop chasing the next shiny object. Stop looking for something that seems nice, you have to keep doing things even if they're boring even if they’re tiring. You have to build discipline and built habits.

Okay so right now, I want to take some time to answer some questions from you guys. If you want to ask questions about motivation and discipline, if you want to ask questions about freelancing and best practices or anything in between please type in the comments below, and I'll go ahead and answer your questions. I mean just look at the comments here and we have a lot of good mornings from Pam, from Anna, from Charm from Misaki, good morning that’s a Japanese name. Shirley, good morning Alex, magandang buhay from Maria Cristina, good morning Blaine's, hey you're from Digos we're here in Cebu. Aimee good morning, good morning as well and so once again just ask your questions below. If there if there are no questions and we're going to end early but now is there time to ask questions regarding anything about this topic or freelancing.

I know some lot of you guys send me personal messages over on Facebook, but I can't answer all of them, because I get too many of them so I like answering questions at the end of the week, every Saturday instead. So I'm sorry if I don't answer PM’s, it’s I just get so many PM's like over a hundred PM’s everyday from our Facebook group of almost 70,000 members, so Saturday's are the best time to answer these questions. Good morning Jimmy, good morning Michelle, Rose, Jean and Elvira from La Union.

Q & A Highlights

Do you have your own program in building discipline?

Well, the thing is discipline, the concept of discipline is very simple and I'll give you the program right now for free. Okay I’ll give it to you  right now. Have a goal in mind, have your goal in mind. Let's say you want to be healthy and then from that goal identify one action, one action is, let's say jogging 30 minutes a day. Identify one action that you can repeat every day, and what you have to do is, like I said, maybe you can have a calendar on your wall, everyday you go jogging for 30 minutes a day, mark an X on that day, the next day when you wake up you'll see “okay, I marked X yesterday I have to do it again today” and just keep doing it. The thing with discipline, the thing with building discipline it's not so much that the concept is hard to do it's not a complex concept it's a very simple concept you just have to build habits you just have to repeatedly do things even though you don't want to do them. The difficulty is in you actually doing them okay it's not in understanding how to do it, it's not in the method, but it's in execution, The idea is so simple and ideas are nice but they're useless unless you actually execute, unless you actually do them. That's my free program on building discipline it's very simple but that's what you have to do.

Discipline should come from within.

That is right, well discipline is something that's built though that's something you can build discipline, motivation, you know,  people have different levels of motivation, but discipline is something that you can build and you can say “You know I'm not discipline, I can't do this”,  it's not true when you say that. When you say when you tell yourself you're not disciplined because you can’t build discipline, you just have keep going. You just have to keep pushing, that’s how you build discipline. Anybody can build discipline, anybody can be successful, anybody can see seriously make a hundred thousand, but you have to have lots of discipline and discipline starts by just building those habits every single day. Doing that thing that you don't want to do even if you're depressed, even if your dog died, you don't feel like doing it, you're crying the whole day. You say, “Okay I'm so sad today but I have to do this.” Even if God forbid, your husband or your wife leaves you and that's the worst thing in the world, that happens. Discipline is still doing what you need to do no matter what happens, no matter how you feel that day and the only way that you can build that, the only way  you can train your mind and train your body is just by repetition.

S.M.A.R.T goal should do a vision board to make you feel motivated

S.M.A.R.T goals are good because you have something to look forward to and you have a vision board, but once again John and these are nice, these help you stay motivated. These are nice they're flowers and rainbows and butterflies these are very nice but even if you have a vision board, because I've done this I've had the vision board,  I've had you know nice quotes and nice sayings, but even if you have those there will be times when it's not enough. It's like the thing with motivation is like a fuel tank,  it's like a fuel tank in your car that you have to keep on filling, you know. You have to read a nice quote, you have to go look for videos to keep you motivated, you have to look at your vision board, but as time goes and you have to do more and more each time because you can't look at the same quote every day and stay motivated. You're going to get “oh I know this quote already, it's not working anymore.” You have to look for your things and you have to keep on refilling the tank, but it gets empty, that's a problem with Motivation, there are times when the tank runs empty or you're out of fuel, but discipline is slow. In motivation you know it's very fast, you can accelerate you can go on sixth gear and drive really fast but it runs out. Discipline is slow. It's slowly, you know, just very slow. It's like the tortoise in the hair right, it's like that the tortoise has disciplined, it's just walking slowly, steadily non-stop, not stopping for breaks, not making excuses even when he doesn't feel like it even when the hare is, you know, all the way ahead of him and he feels demotivated and you know the turquoise, the turtle says “oh I'm gonna lose this race” but he doesn't give up. He doesn't care if he's gonna lose the race or not, he just keeps going even though it seems like he’s gonna lose. Even though it seems like he's going to fail, he just keeps going one step at a time. That's what you should be doing. You can have all these nice things, I'm not against them you can have them, but they're gonna run out eventually and that's why discipline is so Important.

If I was hired and I said I can do the task in two hours,  but did not meet the deadline, will the client still pay me? if I finish the job more than the time specified?

So regarding this question, Ella, what you have to do is talk to the client. Say “You know mister client, I promised you two hours but I underestimated the time it's taking me four hours to do it,” and then just negotiate with a client. Maybe the client will understand and they'll say,  “it's okay don't worry, I'll pay you for the four hours” or maybe they'll say “you know what, you promised two hours I'm only going to pay you for that.”  The answer to this question will the client still pay me? Talk to the client first, just set their expectations because that's all it clients need they just need communication.

This is great. Been feeling depressed lately. Thank you.

You're welcome you're welcome. You know sometimes we feel depressed; we can't help it we're human beings, bad things happen. It's like so many bad things happen every single day, if we watch the news if I turn on the news right now I'm going to become depressed because if I watch TV Patrol, it's so depressing seeing these things it's so, you get angry, you get depressed but yeah you have to stay away from things that make you angry and depressed and just build the discipline. Keep going you know when you're feeling depressed today but yeah you know you have to do something, you have to apply for jobs, you know you have you know you have to do the work a client gave you, you know you have to go to the gym so just do it, it doesn't matter how you feel.

Newbie here hope to learn something new today.

Well I'm today I'm not teaching about freelance skills or anything that specific but what I'm teaching here is more important than the freelance skills. Because if you learn skills but you don't have discipline then you're still going to fail. But if you have discipline then you will know how to learn skills without even trying.

Has that happened to you before?

This is Ella’s question, she said that she told the client it would take two hours but it will take her more than that like four hours. Yes it has happened to me before where I've had to tell  a client, “you know what Mr.client to do a great’, and what I'd say is that to do I kind of flowered it up a bit and say, “to do a really good job to do a great job, meeting your expectations it will take me more time” and apologize you underestimated the time. It has happened to me before and most of the time clients understand in fact in my experience all the clients, I don't do that often, it's happened only a few times to me where I had to do that, but every client I've said “sorry you know I have to take more time” they've always been understanding, they've said, “okay no problem, I want to make sure that the job is done properly so  I'm willing to pay you more.”

What keeps you motivated to do all of these aside from the financial benefits?

One thing you have to understand about how I work, but you know a lot of people consider me very successful, but how I work is that I look at the thingsthat need to be done and I do them I don't care how I feel, I don't involve emotions at all. Sometimes, I mean sometimes I do get sad and kind of depressed and I don't feel like doing things but what you can do I guess sometimes is meditate, take a few breaths and just separate emotions. Don't think about the emotions as much as hard as you can, it's hard at first it'll take time for you to exercise that but through meditation you can do that, separate the emotions just be nothing be like a robot and look at your list of things to do and just do them so that's how I work.

How do you manage to work away from home, so you're traveling, pano po yung internet nyo if you’re in another country?

In most countries actually Pat, the internet is much much much better than what we have here in the Philippines. We have as a lot of you know, we have horrible internet. One of the worst for a developing country. So if you're traveling most likely, the internet is going to be okay. What I do usually is when I land in another country is I buy a SIM card and  well before that, sorry before I fly to another country I do research online and look for the best data like best data plans in these different prepaid providers and then I already know what to buy so when I land in a new country I just buy a SIM card, buy a data plan, enroll in the data plan and if you don't know how the people in the airport who are selling the sims can just help you out enroll in the data plan and I tether usually just create a hotspot on my phone and they use that when I'm traveling. But in most countries, their coffee shops have very fast internet. I was recently in Vietnam and they have there, I dunno if you guys remember, I posted when I was in Vietnam they had like carinderias with 20 Mbps internet, and these are like real carinderias okay, so and people were taking up their laptops in the Carinderias and stuff. it was safe nobody was really stealing the laptops or anything. You know it was very amusing and very shocking that carinderias had 20 Mbps internet and a lot of the coffee shops had like 50 Mbps internet. In most cases you're okay in most countries you'll be okay unless you're traveling like - to Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere in Africa but like in Asia in everywhere I've been in like Southeast Asia, East Asia in Europe, in the US, Canada the Internet is very good unless you're going to a very poor country.

What's the best discipline to build confidence in taking a job or project online?

So both discipline and confidence are related to emotions.  So what you have to do German is you have to separate the emotion, you have to be able to do things even though you don't feel like doing them. And you have to train yourself, same with confidence. You know confidence is very emotional but in order to separate confidence you have to say you have to know what you can do that say, “I can do this.” It doesn't matter how you feel you just know that you can do it and you can tell other people, you can tell clients that interview you, “I can do this.” Whether you feel happy about it or not it doesn't matter, but you know that you can do it. So the first thing I would work on is just separating emotions from being able to do things, and you can do that by building habits, building habits and meditation also helps.

How do you handle stress Sir Jason?

It's very similar John, to how I handle work. Stress doesn't matter to me, and well sometimes it does, sometimes I do feel stressed and overwhelmed then I have to stop working for a few hours and relax, but in most cases I separate stress as much from work so it's just I look at the things I have to do. Nothing else matters I have to do them nothing else matters how I feel, doesn't matter what happened five minutes ago doesn't matter. What will happen ten minutes from now doesn't matter. What matters is what's going on right now and right now I have to do this task.  That's how I should work, that's how I do work.

How much the best offer as full-time VA?

Depends on  how good you are, depends on your pitch, depends on so many different things. I'd say if you're doing a full-time VA work you should be earning at least 20,000 pesos a month. I know some people who can do it or like forty and fifty thousand pesos a month, but I'd say at the minimum twenty, that's I'm going to say but it depends on your skills. It depends on your pitch it depends on your experience but minimum twenty thousand.

Once again, so I’m gonna wrap this up. Thank you, everybody, for showing up this Saturday morning. Next Saturday we're going to talk about E-commerce, so that's very exciting. We do have a guest speaker with us because I'm not as active in the e-commerce area but we do have a guest speaker, we're going to talk about E-commerce, what you need to know about E-commerce very exciting. Once again if you're new please go to this website to learn about working at home and Freelancing. There we go freevacourse.com. And if you're from Cebu I hope to see you later 1 p.m. Coffee Bean, Ayala Center 4th floor I'll be there to meet you and just we'll just you know have coffee and talk, nothing formal, we have no agenda plan,  just meeting each other meeting other few answers and aspiring freelancers. Alright guys I will see you on Wednesday alright on Wednesday I think at 2 p.m. I'm going to be interviewing Charm Dizon, Charm I saw your comment here, who's a stay-at-home wife and freelancer so we'll learn more from her and I will see you guys next Saturday or on Wednesday on interview Charm. Goodbye everybody have a great weekend.