I’ve always been a dreamer. I have high hopes for what I’d like to do with my life — but recently, I’ve realised that something has always held me back. I realised that, as opportunities approach and I have a chance to start marching toward my ideal life, anxiety was stopping me in my tracks, and it asked, “But what if it never happens? What if I imagine my ideal future and work so hard for it, and I never get there?”
I realised I had a fear of disappointment — and it was a pattern that had plagued me as long as I could remember. I’d shy away from opportunities, assume the worst, and let myself down before anything else could do it for me.
But luckily for me, I’m also a problem-solver. Indeed, disappointment can feel like a crushing blow, but it’s not insurmountable — and it certainly doesn’t need to scare us away from our ambitions.
Coping with disappointment requires three major actions: understanding our response, broadening our perspective, and reconnecting with our deeper, underlying passions.
Understanding our response
When our expectations aren’t met and our emotions start to run high, it’s important to look inward. Wisdom from fields like mindfulness and self-compassion invite us to recognise when this is happening, and to take a moment to sit with those feelings, without judging ourselves or trying to ‘fix’ our reaction. Instead, we can be curious and ask: what emotions am I experiencing? What thoughts are running through my head?
Often, a disappointing event will leave us feeling melancholy at a missed opportunity, or feeling ashamed after a hit to our ego. We might find ourselves looking unfavourably on our self-worth, our prospects, or even the world in general. By becoming aware of these feelings, we take the first step toward processing them and eventually letting them go.
However, feelings like sadness and shame can be intense and difficult to process – and as a result, they’re not always our most obvious reaction to disappointment. As a form of unconscious defence, these feelings might get pushed aside. Instead, we might feel angry and start divvying out blame to other people or influences. Or we might just feel apathetic, and figure that the event doesn’t really matter. While these reactions might lessen the blow in the short-term, they can put our wellbeing – and the wellbeing of others! – at risk in other ways and hamper our attempts to truly process the disappointment.
Whatever our reaction might be, looking inward to feel, observe, and label our emotions can help us to get clarity.
Broadening our perspective…
When a disappointing event occurs, it might be all we can think about. We can be laser-focused on trying to explain what happened, why, and what it means for the future. With our attention narrowed, that event becomes our whole world! We’re likely to ruminate, getting caught up in the ‘what if’s, and overestimating what that event says about us, about the future, and about the world. With intense feelings like sadness, shame, anger, and apathy lingering about, the conclusions we come up with can be quite dismal.
To break out of this rumination, we need to relax our laser-focus by getting in touch with the world around us, taking on new perspectives, and remembering how much more there is to life than our disappointment. For example, tried and true methods include…
Talking over the experience with a friend
Expressing gratitude and giving to others
Spending time in nature
Engaging in humour and play
Prayer and meditation
Broadening our perspective… of ourselves
Negative events can leave us feeling pessimistic about ourselves and our prospects — but we have more going on than just this disappointing event! Spending time focusing on our strengths, passions, and relationships with others is a great way of breaking out of that thinking. Recall experiences that left you feeling satisfied, proud, or connected with others. Tune into your sense of purpose and motivation, and remember that you have the autonomy to make choices and create impact outside of that event.
Broadening our perspective… of the event
We never have full control of the world around us — if we did, things would probably be a lot more dull! But this means disappointment is inevitably going to happen sometimes. Accepting this might seem a bit bleak, but it keeps us from ruminating on the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if only’s, and from searching desperately for something to blame when things go awry. Mistakes happen, entropy persists, and random chance doesn’t always play out in our favour. Even incredibly successful people can relate!
This doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from our experiences — in fact, it helps us to do so! When we accept a disappointing event and understand that our control just can’t be absolute, we can reassess what happened without judging ourselves or others. This is a far safer environment to look for opportunities to improve, think creatively, and plan our next attempt.
Disappointment also presents us with the opportunity to practise looking after ourselves. We have the chance to set a precedent for how we cope with negative events, and others — bosses, co-workers, partners, children — could learn from our example. We can take the opportunity to look after our wellbeing, and help create healthy norms while we do it.
Defence Against Disappointment
A key aspect to building my defence against disappointment was to reconnect with my mission — what I truly wanted from my life. This might seem counter-intuitive — wasn’t that the source of my fear in the first place? But that’s not quite true. I realised that what I had was a goal.
Goals are specific, planned, and hold us to account. They’ve either happened, or they haven’t. If I kept my eye on a specific goal, it would become my whole life, and any disappointment would be devastating. In order to keep my perspective broad and defend against disappointment, I needed to tap into a more sustainable source of motivation: my mission.
My goal wasn’t my underlying motivation. My life dream wasn’t for one event to go well, or to have a specific role or certain salary. That alone wouldn’t leave me feeling satisfied and content at the end of every day from here on out. So what would?
I needed to take a step back and examine those goals, and to keep asking myself ‘why?’ until I tapped into what genuinely made me happy – until I had defined my mission. And I realised that what I truly wanted, my mission, was right in front of me: I wanted to problem-solve, and to promote health and happiness. That’s not dependent on a single metric, and it’s not so specific that I need to attain a certain career objective to do it. it’s not something I have either ‘attained’ or have not, and it’s not crushed forever by the outcome of one disappointing event. At the end of a rough day, I can still dust myself off, expand my perspective past my current goals, and keep living my mission.
By boiling your passions and values down to a mission statement, you give yourself a sustainable, adaptable source of motivation and purpose. You ensure that you can chase your ambitions without fear of disappointment, because you know what really matters to you — and one disappointment can’t stand in the way of you living that out.
Ultimately, disappointment hurts, and we need to allow ourselves to feel that. But like all emotions, it’s a signal which is trying to tell us something. If you ask me, it’s telling us that it’s time to take a rest, and to reconnect with our mission, our people, and the world around us. In doing so, we can break out of negative spirals, and re-equip ourselves with motivation and creativity, ready to give it another go.
Author: Jamie Otten (She/They)
Occupational Psychology graduate
