Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 30: Managing Disappointment & Perceived Rejection as an Entrepreneur (with RSD)

Released: 05/15/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda unpacks the emotional realities of rejection, disappointment, and rejection sensitive dysphoria in entrepreneurship, especially for therapists who are used to being high achievers and helpers. She shares personal stories from launching her coaching business, navigating fears of failure and visibility, and the ways trauma, perfectionism, and nervous system activation can make business setbacks feel deeply personal. Amanda also explores how therapists can stop interpreting rejection as proof they are “not cut out” for entrepreneurship, and instead learn to regulate, reframe, and continue showing up even when things feel uncertain.

3 Key Takeaways:

1. Rejection and disappointment in business are inevitable, but they are not proof that you are failing or “not cut out” for entrepreneurship.
2. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria and nervous system activation can make business setbacks feel deeply personal, especially for therapists with trauma histories or perfectionistic tendencies.
3. The key to long-term success is not avoiding rejection, but learning how to regulate, gather feedback, and keep showing up after things do not go as planned.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:00)
Hey, hey, welcome back to the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist podcast. Today, we are talking about something that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime in the entrepreneur space. And honestly, I’m a little surprised by that because I know I am not the only one who has experienced this. We are talking about rejection, disappointment, and for some of you, rejection-sensitive dysphoria, which is a whole other layer that I can’t wait to get into.

Whether you’ve had a launch that flopped, a discovery call that ghosted you, a pitch that went nowhere, or a client who just walked away, this episode is for you. Because here is the thing. We talk a lot about strategy and marketing and raising your rates, but nobody talks about what happens after you put yourself out there and it doesn’t go the way you hoped. And I think that’s where a lot of people, a lot of high achieving

people who are so used to doing well just kind of quit. They just kind of give up on it and think like, well, I guess this isn’t for me and I guess I just shouldn’t have done that. And I don’t want that for you. So let’s get into it. First, I just want to name something. Disappointment is a normal, unavoidable part of building a business. Full stop.

And that might sound obvious, but I think a lot of us, especially therapists who are used to being the helper, the steady one, the competent expert in the room, are completely blindsided by how personal rejection feels when it’s your business, your offer, your face on the sales page. Like if a client says no to weekly therapy, you can usually separate that from yourself of,

you know, it’s not a good fit or I wasn’t really a specialist for what they’re looking for anyway or I didn’t really want to see them at 430 anyway. But when someone says no to a course you poured your heart into or a coaching program you built from your own lived experience, that hits really differently. And here’s why. Entrepreneurship requires a level of personal exposure that most of us weren’t prepared for.

And you’re not just selling a service, you’re selling your ideas, your story, your credibility and your vision. And that’s incredibly vulnerable. So the first thing I want you to hear is if rejection in business feels more intense, more personal, more devastating than you expected, that is not at all weakness or ineptitude of you can’t do this.

It’s a completely logical response to the fact that you cared, right? You cared about something and you put yourself out there and that takes a lot of courage and a lot of bravery and the gut punch when it doesn’t land, doesn’t lead to sales, doesn’t lead to clients, doesn’t lead to whatever. Like that’s real. When I think about my first launch, the very first time that I decided I wanna launch a coaching business, I wanna help other therapists,

charge premium fees, offer therapy intensive so that they earn more, they work less, their clients experience these massive breakthroughs and sessions. I poured so much into it. I did a lot of things I was uncomfortable with, like starting my own Facebook group from scratch, starting an Instagram from scratch, going live in my Facebook group and ⁓ weekly.

and trying to pretend like I was eloquent and knew what I was talking about and I was the obvious choice of who wanted to work with me and why. So truly, like I thought I was ready, right? I was like, you know, on paper, can I record some videos? Can I put a Zoom link together of where we’re going to have our group coaching calls? Can I put together the sales page? Like, yeah, absolutely. I can do all of those logistic things.

And I was really proud of the work that I cranked out. And ultimately, I did get five new therapists into my brand new beta cohort of my coaching program. And so like that felt good in the sense of, OK, it wasn’t total silence, right? It wasn’t total silence. I got five people to join and that was fantastic. But it really still wasn’t what I expected. I expected more people to.

want to sign up. I expected more people to want to work with me. I expected it to be like, my God, where has this program been living all my life? So the story that my brain immediately told me was the fact that more people didn’t sign up. The fact that it wasn’t easier to get these sales. It must be something about me, not about my marketing, not about the timing, which I launched my first coaching program in July, 2023.

So right the middle of summer, which in theory is when everyone’s traveling and not many people are even checking Facebook or whatever it is, I didn’t think it was a matter of timing. I didn’t think it was a matter of messaging. I thought it was about me. Like, okay, well, I only got five people. So clearly I’m not cut out for this. maybe I just shouldn’t do it. And that was just the first thing that I’ve launched. There’s been lots of other things I’ve launched in the past three years of running my coaching business where

Even like a $29 offer, I’m like, why are other people not joining so much? Or even the first retreat that I held, quote unquote, only three people signed up for. Like it is so easy to take it personally when something doesn’t go the way that we want or the way we would have hoped it. But that is the trap, right? And it’s the one that I want to help you get out of today.

This is something back in December, 2025, I did a VIP in-person coaching day with my coach who we’d only been working together for like six months at this point, but I knew I was gonna walk with her long-term and I was like, I have to peel back this mask that I’m wearing about I’m always fine and like everything’s great and yeah, I’m ready to just keep pushing forward. I was like, I need to be a lot more vulnerable with her about what comes up for me personally when things aren’t going the way that I expect.

and what we talked about as we’re walking through New York City and it’s like 20 degrees and it’s freezing and we’re sniffling and trying to enjoy our hot coffees ⁓ while talking business and mindset. And I told her like it does feel personal when something doesn’t go well. And you know, it could still go amazingly. It can still lead to sales, lead to clients. But if it doesn’t, if I don’t knock it out of the park, it feels like rejection.

And she really helped me remember and clarify that that’s not actually what’s going on. Like things strategy-wise are working, but my brain tells me that it’s me because of my history of CPTSD, because I was bullied in middle school, because I had so many very real experiences of rejection that my parts, my system, my brain is just prone to look for where is it?

my fault, what should I have done better? I’m clearly just not likable. And she gave me this feedback of like, you know that you’re, you’re really magnetic and you attract a lot of people, right? I’m like, no, that’s clearly not true. And part of my work in 2026 from a mindset side that is, you know, it’s both therapeutic as a part of my therapeutic work that I’ve been working on, but it’s also helping my business is to embrace that I’m really good at what I do. And people do pay to work with

me over someone else. And that feels really hard to say as someone who struggled with bullying and physically and emotionally abusive parents. Like there’s just so much that doesn’t feel true about that. And yet again, this is the biggest thing that gets in most of our ways is I’m going to be rejected and I can’t let that happen. So either I self-sabotage or I take longer than I want or need to, but

Again, is what we’re going to shift out. So when I’m talking about rejection and disappointment, obviously there’s this aspect of us being high achievers and us being very intelligent. All of us at least have masters. Some of us have doctorates. Some of us have multiple degrees. But now I want to talk about something more specific. And if this resonates with you, want you to hold on to it because understanding it really changed things for me too.

So rejection sensitive dysphoria or RSD is commonly associated with ADHD, but it can also show up in folks with anxiety, trauma histories or other neurodivergent presentations as well. And here’s what it is if you have not heard. It is an intense emotional response often described as almost physical to the perception of rejection, failure or falling short of a standard.

And the key word there is perception. You don’t even have to actually be rejected. It’s the anticipation of possible rejection that is enough to trigger RSD. So for entrepreneurs, RSD is kind of a nightmare fuel situation because entrepreneurship is literally a series of putting yourself out there waiting.

and not always getting the response you hoped for. Some signs that RSD might be showing up for you in your business are these. You hit send on an email and immediately feel dread, like something bad’s about to happen. I know I felt that so many times. You refresh your sales dashboard obsessively during and after a launch. Hello, if you listened to my behind the scenes of my most recent therapy intensives launch, you would know that I was.

Frequently refreshing that sales dashboard one negative comment or one no Completely eclipses five yeses, right? Oh my god. I remember experiencing that since school, right? Like why did I get a 98 and not a 100 beat myself up for the two points lost as opposed to the 98 points one You avoid launching pitching or posting because the possibility of silence or rejection feels un

bearable. Yes, I have in so many ways been like, I’ll do that next year. I’ll do that next time because I’m afraid that something’s not going to go well. I’m afraid that something’s not going to be successful and that I’ll have wasted time or wasted money or worse both. If after something doesn’t work, you spiral into I should just quit territory fast. I have been here so many times. You all may have heard in other podcast episode.

there was a point in 2024, like late 24, early 25, where I literally did think about quitting this coaching business because things weren’t going the way that I needed them to go. Not even the way I wanted them to go, but financially for what I was spending on ads and different team members, like a setter and a closer and things like that. Like I just literally was not in the financial place I needed to be in, much less wanted to be in. And

I thought about quitting and the more I actually had conversations with my coach about that, the more it was a problem of like, it’s not the work I’m doing that’s a problem, it’s the way I’m doing the work that’s the problem. So again, the way I was doing the work made everything feel like a personal rejection compared to, you know, the work that I was actually able to put out there and the way that I was helping therapists. If you personalize everything, right, slow email response.

They hate you. No sales on day one, your offer’s trash. Someone unfollows, you replay everything you said lately trying to figure out what you did wrong. So if any of that feels familiar, I wanna be clear, I’m not diagnosing anyone with anything today, but I am a therapist and I can tell you that I see this pattern constantly in the therapists and entrepreneurs that I work with. And there’s a really interesting reason for that.

Like I’ve said, therapists are often high achievers who have been trained to read rooms, anticipate needs, and manage relational dynamics at a really sophisticated level. If you also grew up and have CPTSD, you’re even more advanced. And when you put that skillset into entrepreneurship, where you’re constantly reading the room of your audience, your analytics, your open rates, and then something doesn’t land,

that hyper awareness turns on you and it can feel devastating. But the good news here is that understanding that this is a nervous system response, not a sign that you’re not cut out for this, changes everything about how you can work with it. Right? Just because what’s like one of the cheesy things we say in therapy and especially those of us who follow some act principles, it’s like, it’s not the thing that’s the problem, it’s the reaction to the thing.

that’s often the problem. Like even if it was something about you of, okay, I’m not marketing well enough, or I seemed bored talking about my own offer. Those are skills that can be improved, sure. And it’s probably an overestimate how much we are putting the full onus of why something didn’t go the way we wanted it to on ourselves. So either way, we can work on things.

So here’s the clinical piece I want to offer you because I do think it’s genuinely useful. When you experience rejection or disappointment, especially if you have any history of emotional sensitivity, trauma or perfectionism, your nervous system can interpret that as a threat, not metaphorically, actually like the alarm bells go off inside of our head. Those of us who are trauma therapists know this, like our amygdala is on fire.

And when you’re in that threat response, your brain does something really unhelpful. It hunts for evidence that the threat is real. So it replays the launch, it reviews the email, it zooms in on one sentence that maybe didn’t land right. It compares you to someone who seems to be doing better. It builds a case against you. And this is not any kind of character flaw. And again, this does not mean that it is true.

This is just your brain trying to protect you by understanding what went wrong, but it’s doing it in a way that isn’t actually helpful or accurate. And so here’s what I’ve learned to do in my own therapy, it’s something I’m still working on in my own therapy, as well as in my coaching sessions. And it’s what I teach my coaching clients and my therapy clients too, when I’m in that spiral. Step one.

Name it as a nervous system response, not a truth. When I notice I’m in that loop, I say to myself, my nervous system is activated right now. What I’m feeling is real. What my brain is telling me is a story, not a fact. That separation for me even matters so much. To say, right, this is a story. It is a story based on, my therapist used

uses a lot of IFS, so we talk a lot about parts. So my parts have stories about when we were seven and doing something, you know, did mean something catastrophic. Or when I was 15 and had a question in class and how that was responded to by a teacher. Like, your parts are going to tell you stories and they may be factual in the sense of like something did happen, but any of this meaning making, these are usually.

You know, stories, not actually facts, right? What does it actually mean if something didn’t go the way I wanted or if something is a perceived failure? It’s helpful just to slow it down and remember that stories and facts are not always exactly the same. Step two, do not make any decisions while dysregulated. And this is huge. Do not cancel your launch. Do not rewrite your entire offer. Do not send a panicked email to your list. Do not quit.

give yourself a window, usually like 24 to 48 hours before you take any action based on the spiral. You all, if you listened to my behind the scenes of a launch episode, would have heard how many times I was checking in with my coach of, sales slowed down, what can we do? As opposed to sales slowed down, should I just end today? Even if, you know, maybe a part of me did want to just end early, you know, to be able to

talk something out with someone who gets it, who knows how I think, who knows why, ⁓ roughly why I haven’t shared all of my like therapy stories with her, but she knows roughly why my brain thinks the way that it does. Having to just, having the ability to just talk that out with someone instead of being alone in it and feeling ashamed in it helps me to number one, validate, hey, everything’s working, everything’s still doing great.

Nothing is broken here. Yeah, there’s some things that we can tweak. There’s some things that we can edit to improve it, but do not make those decisions alone. Give yourself some time to come back into your regulation window. Those of you who know like polyvagal theory, we want to be in our little green ventral vagal state before just acting on something. Step three, come back to data, not feelings.

And this is where my therapist brain actually helps me as an entrepreneur. I ask myself, what do I actually know right now versus what am I interpreting? One slow day of not making sales, not having discovery calls booked doesn’t mean that your launch failed. One person saying no doesn’t mean no one will say yes. A small email open rate doesn’t mean your content is bad.

come back to the actual data, not the story your brain is spinning. That is again why I time and time again refer to my spreadsheets as my emotional support spreadsheets because I can look at data, I can see what’s working, I can see how I’m comparing to industry standards of sales page views and open rates and click rates and ad spend. And remember like, okay, yeah, I’m doing great, right? Could it be better? Sure. And I am doing

Great, even if my brain is saying, no, you’re not. Step four, external regulation. And this is the one most people skip. So when you’re dysregulated, you need co-regulation. That might be calling a friend, venting to your therapist. And yes, every therapist entrepreneur should have a therapist. It might be your mastermind group or a business coach or someone who can just generally…

hold the bigger picture when you’ve lost it. You are not meant to process any of this stuff alone, right? This is just how the nervous system works is we need to be able to talk with people who actually get it. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard from people, like I’ve tried to talk with my spouse or I tried to talk with someone in my group practice or I tried to talk to someone who doesn’t know what it’s actually like to hold this type of business and it wasn’t helpful.

Right? They might say something with the very best of intentions in mind of, you know, well, maybe you should just stop or it seems like it’s stressing you out. Why don’t you just quit? Why don’t you just go back to therapy? And it’s not that that’s not valid. Right. And it’s well intentioned. But a lot of us are choosing to try and successfully scale outside of therapy for a reason. And there is plenty of space for all of us. We just need to be able to talk with people who get the ups and downs.

of this type of entrepreneurship. So that’s where I really value shared spaces where I can connect with people. A lot of that happens in masterminds. A lot of it happens in even one-to-one business coaching. Okay, so I wanna now talk about what rejection actually means in business because I think we’ve been taught a really distorted version of it. We treat a no like it’s a verdict, like it’s the market telling us something final and def-

definitive about our worth or our ideas. But here’s the reframe I want you to sit with. In business, a no is almost always information, not a verdict. So when someone doesn’t buy your course or sign up into your coaching program or whatever it is, it could mean the timing wasn’t right for them. The messaging didn’t speak to their specific pain point. They hadn’t seen enough of you yet to trust the investment.

The price point wasn’t accessible to them right now. They were interested but got distracted and the window closed. They actually weren’t the right person for your offer, which is fine. It could literally mean a hundred things that have nothing to do with the quality of what you built. Now, sometimes a launch underperforms because something in the strategy needs adjustment. And that’s also just information.

It is not a character indictment. It’s feedback you can work with. And that’s why with my coach on my during my last launch, I was looking at one of my spreadsheets of like, huh, it seems like our sales, not our sales page, but our checkout page isn’t performing as well as it did last time. So what might we tweak? What might we change? Is there something we did different from launch to launch? Right. I treat it as

information and something that I can get feedback on and get tweaked compared to, my God, this offer is just not going to sell anymore and everyone hates me or no one wants to buy it or I’m just being annoying, whatever that might be. So I want to tell you something that took me a while to really internalize, which is the most successful entrepreneurs I know fail more than the average person. Not less, more.

because they’re in the game more, they’re putting things out more, they’re taking more swings. The only way to never be rejected is to never try. And I don’t think that’s the life any of us actually want. A lot of us believe in trying and pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone. But then when we do it, and it doesn’t lead to an immediate win, that’s when we start to wonder, did I just waste my time? Do I suck? Is there space in?

the coaching or the retreat role for me. And yes, right? As cheesy as it is to say, because I know as a therapist you’ve heard it, failure is information. But if you never try, then you never get the chance to fail, then you don’t know, right? If it’s your offer or is it the pricing or is it the timing or whatever it is. Coming back to my own example of in October, 2025, I hosted my first retreat.

on my own and honestly like I did it because I was excited about it and I wanted to do it and I want to do it again in the future but I did not have the time and capacity that I really needed to do marketing a retreat justice and so it was really easy for me to back then to think about clearly no one wants to do this and clearly this sucks and I should just stop and I should only do these offers with a number of people who are like

my God, tell me the next time you’re doing a retreat, like the next one I want to go on or tell me the next time you’re doing your mastermind. Like people are still interested in the offer. Oftentimes it is the timing, whether it’s I signed up for too many coaching programs at once or I spent too much money on retreats this year or whatever it is. But I would never know that. I would never get that feedback if I didn’t put offers out there and if I didn’t learn.

So the question here really becomes how do you build the kind of relationship with rejection where it doesn’t knock you out of the game every time? Because that is the real skill, not avoiding rejection, but learning to move through it faster. So let me give you some really concrete things that have helped me and that I teach my coaching clients. Number one, celebrate the attempt, not just the outcome.

This sounds really cheesy, it generally and genuinely rewires things. After every launch, every pitch, every scary post, I acknowledge the fact that I did it. Regardless of what happened after, you sent the email, that’s a win. You got on the sales call, that’s a win. You showed up, that’s a win. The outcome is not fully in your control, but the action is. Number two.

Create a rejection log. And I know that maybe sounds terrible, but hear me out. When I started keeping track of rejections and then what happened next, I noticed a pattern. Rejections were almost never the end of the story. That person who said no to the group coaching program signed up three months later. That launch that felt slow ended up converting better than one I’d been more confident about.

The log helps you see the longer arc, which you’re nervous as that absolutely cannot see when you are in the middle of it. So again, this is where I love tracking literally everything so I can get out of my head and just feel confident and continue moving forward. Number three, shrink the gap between attempt and attempt. One of the best antidotes to rejection sensitivity is momentum.

The longer you wait between putting yourself out there, the bigger each individual attempt feels and the more devastating a no becomes. If you’re only pitching once every few months or once a year, every pitch carries enormous weight. But if you are consistently showing up, one no loses some of its power because there’s another attempt already in motion.

And to combine that with strategy, because this one is a little bit mindset, to combine that with strategy, there’s such a thing as live launching something as well as having something in evergreen format. So I, for example, live launch my Therapy Intensive Academy program, usually two to three times a year, but I also have it running in evergreen. I have ads that run to it. I have a recorded webinar that leads to a sale for the program.

So there’s still sales happening in the background, even if I’m not live launching, because like those are also, I mean, it’s an attempt that I do in the sense of I had to record it, I have to promote the free trading, I have to promote ⁓ lots of different things like that. But right, it means when this launch that I just had, even though I wish 50 people had enrolled, it makes it.

land a little softer when I got 37 because I’m like, well, I know this is not my only chance to get people to say yes, right? I’ve got other things in place. Number four, know your come back to center practice. For me, it’s movement. It’s a walk, it’s a workout, something that just gets me out of my head and back into my body. For you, it might be journaling or calling a specific person or sitting outside for 20 minutes.

You should know what this is for you before you need it, not be trying to figure it out in the middle of a spiral. So literally that might be putting into your calendar, call this person, do this activity, whatever it is, but make sure you have that to return to. I was very intentional about when I scheduled my exercise classes during my launch because I knew I didn’t want to be checking my computer or my phone all day long. So I had to intentionally

Set time aside to get away from the screen. Number five, work with someone. I truly believe that entrepreneurs, especially therapist entrepreneurs, need support structures. A coach, a mastermind, a peer group, someone who can help you hold the bigger picture, reality check your spiral, and celebrate the wins you’re too activated to notice. This isn’t optional for me anymore. It is essential.

as much as I have gone back and forth over the years of seeing business coaching as an expense, right? Generally, I do believe it is an investment, truly. It’s not just a cheesy thing I tell myself, but yeah, there is a part of my mind that’s like, ⁓ but I could save X amount per month, but I need that person. I need that long-term support person to help me with it. My friends won’t get it. My partner won’t get it. Like I need someone who can actually hold.

the business in a way that she truly gets it and she really gets me. And Kim, if you are listening, I love and appreciate you so much. Okay, so let me land this plane. If you took nothing else from today, rejection is survivable. Disappointment is survivable. And neither one of them means what your brain is trying to tell you they mean at two in the morning when you’re spiraling through your analytics.

You built something, you put it out there. That is incredibly brave work. And the willingness to keep doing it even after the hard days is the thing that actually separates people who built the practice they want from the people who stay stuck. I’m rooting for you like genuinely. If today’s episode hit home for you, I would love to hear about it. You can find me on Instagram at Amanda KB coaching.

And if you are in a place where you’re ready to build that support that actually supports your life, where the strategy and the mindset piece are getting worked on together, I’d love to have a conversation about what that could look like for you. I have some openings for my mastermind in the fall. I will link everything in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. But thank you so much for being here and I will see you in the next episode.