Dealing with Disappointment - Work-Life Balance Articles

Dealing With Disappointment by Sharon Teitelbaum

I'm impressed by the degree to which we humans expect our lives to always go well. When they don't, we feel like failures. We forget that our life is not a short story, but a long story. I came across this quote from Barack Obama, regarding his unsuccessful attempt to unseat Bobby Rush in the Illinois House of Representatives in 2000:

"I was completely mortified and humiliated. It's a very public thing, which most people don't have to go through. Obviously, the flip side of publicity and hype is that, when you fall, folks are right there, snapping away."

Needless to say, that lost campaign was not the end of Obama's story. Without knowing how the larger arc of his life would go, he recovered from this loss and kept going. How do you interpret your disappointments?

One of the most powerful lessons I've learned as a coach, both from my training and from working with clients who already knew this, is that one essential key to success of any sort is being able to get up after a fall and keep on going.

The mistake that many people make -- and this was certainly my natural response, before unlearning and replacing it (and I still have to be very vigilant with myself or I slip into my unconscious pattern) -- is to interpret the "fall" or the "failure" to mean that THEY are a failure in this realm. If Obama held to this, he would have come out of his 2000 race with the conviction that he was a failure as a politician and had no business campaigning for office ever again. It's easy to see how that would have been a ridiculously short-sighted conclusion. Instead, Obama chose to LEARN FROM the experience (he did some serious, effective de-briefing) and give himself another chance.

What should you do when you suffer a disappointment, a fall from grace, a lost opportunity? Ask a trusted friend or colleague to do a de-brief with you. Get help if you need it to reframe the experience into an educational event. Look at it from 80,000 feet. Find stories of other people who took a fall and then went on to better times. Write up the Top 10 things you learned from this. Make sure that the language you use to talk about it -- with others and with yourself -- is the language of learning and development, not the language of failure.

At the Harvard conference I recently attended, I heard about a study done with high achievers (senior executives I think.) The study found that after a significant "adverse event," a factor crucial to the person's later success is the way in which he/she processes it. Those who examine the experience with appreciative inquiry, that is, asking, "What can I learn from this?" later looked back on the experience as one of the most valuable learning experiences of their career, one that their later successes depended upon. Those that got stuck in the shame and blame of the "failure" not only missed out on getting traction from it, but also allowed it to be a stigma that undermined their confidence going forward.

If you have a "failure" you're not completely OVER, I strongly recommend doing a de-brief with a trusted someone in your life: a friend, a colleague, a spouse. If there's no one you would feel comfortable revisiting a disappointment with and that disappointment still has energy for you, consider a short round of coaching.

And even if you learn that the direction you've been heading in is not going to pan out for you in the long run and you need to make a major course correction, consider the words of J.K. Rowling, who went on to become the author of the Harry Potter books: "Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in this one arena I believe I truly belong. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized and I was still alive. I still had a daughter whom I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. So rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life." -- J.K. Rowling, speaking at Harvard in 2007

Copyright 2009, Sharon Teitelbaum.