Phil Town on CNBC's The Millionaire Inside (Photo credit: Phil Town)

How Dealing With Rejection Helped Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Ann Corcoran is a highly successful investor, consultant, and businesswoman. She is famous for being a shark investor on the ABC show Shark Tank.

Throughout most of her life, Barbara Corcoran felt that she has been most shaped for her business endeavors not by her successes, but by her failures and her rejections. Everybody fails, but she stresses that the important part of failure is not letting it affect you in a negative way. It is the staying down part that will hurt you the most, not the failure itself. It is important to get back on your feet again and prepare to go after the next potential client, instead of sulking on the failure and letting it ruin your outlook.

She describes the ability to successfully do this as the rejection factor. As she began to develop a very successful real estate business, she noticed that her most successful peers and colleagues were the ones who were able to get over rejection and continue moving forward.

Corcoran shared a personal anecdote about a highly successful agent who was doing remarkably well in China. When the market for real estate crashed, however, she expected that this agent's business would topple as well. She left her numerous messages but did not hear back from her for a long time. She was worried and was hoping that her colleague was doing well. However, when the agent showed up at her office, she was not prepared for what she was about to hear. The agent had taken advantage of the collapse to relocate her efforts in Manhattan, where she was met with tremendous success.