Wellbeing

Dealing with disappointment

When you’ve pinned your hopes on something, it can be crushing if you don’t get it. Tania Ahsan looks at how to cope with disappointment.

“And the winner is…” not me. I had been nominated for a writing award and was at a posh dinner sitting with my best friend by my side listening to the winners being announced. My heart had been racing as my category was announced and the list of nominees read out.

I smiled – in what I hoped was a modest way – when they read out my name. But then the winner was announced and it was some bloke on one of the best broadsheets in the country and I had to do my ‘game face’.

This is the face that you see stars pull at the Oscars when someone else wins. It is the face of the good loser, the person who later says in interviews: “I was just honoured to be nominated”.

I don’t have a very good game face. My game face is a Vicky Pollard ‘Am I bovvered?’ aggressive, about-to-cry and can’t-handle-disappointment face. My best friend almost fell off his seat laughing at my struggle to stop my emotions showing.

“Thank God they aren’t projecting your face onto a screen for all the audience to see,” he said, unhelpfully.

Learning to cope

This little incident is not the first time I’ve had to deal with disappointment and it probably won’t be the last. We encounter disappointment daily from a latte that isn’t frothy enough to an email response in the negative rather than the positive to a proposal or work idea.

We also have to deal with the bigger disappointments life can throw at us like fertility problems or a love interest not being interested in us.

While the small disappointments irritate, the large ones can break our hearts, so learning to deal with disappointment is a key strategy for happiness in life.

Looking from a distance

Seven Suphi, consultant and author of Authentic Catalyst (£13.99, Odyssey Solutions) and More Than Men & Make-Up (£9.99, Capstone) explains why it can be so hard to overcome disappointment: “For some it is very hard; for others it’s very easy. Whichever camp you are in, as you get older generally your behaviour gets more ingrained so that for the first group disappointments become major knockbacks and for the second disappointments are dealt with in a heartbeat.”

She counsels stepping back from the situation and looking at it from a distance.“Consider what you have learnt from this experience. How much worse could it have been? How important will this event be to you in 20 years’ time? In the whole scheme of things how important is it really? If you were ever in the same situation in the future, what would you do differently?

Consider how all that learning is going to bring you closer to, if not get, what you desire.” All great advice but it can be difficult to remember this when you’re in the eye of the storm with a much-cherished dream dashed.

I remember once asking a man I fancied to go to a concert with me. I had VIP press tickets, there’d be a free bar and the show was one of the most anticipated of the year. I figured I had it in the bag. I refuse to ask men out and so this was a softly-softly ‘just good friends’ approach.

I formulated the invitation via email in my head (asking on the phone would have left me a fat-tongued idiot who wouldn’t have been able to get her words out) and then typed it out 20 different times in 20 different ways before finally pressing ‘send’ with my heart going like the clappers.

I waited and checked my emails every two seconds for about two hours before his response came pinging back. Opening the email I discovered that he couldn’t make it. Aaaaargh. I went from despair to mortification and back again, and a low level sense of disappointment was with me for many days. The problem here is one that is common to many women; we read more into things than we should.

I didn’t read his response as a straightforward ‘can’t make it’ in the way I would have if a friend I didn’t fancy said that to me. I read it as a rejection of me personally and of spending time with me.

He had no clue as to what I was obliquely asking him or of the agonising I had done prior to sending the email. He just thought I was a pal asking him, another pal, to a concert. End of story.

He didn’t know that by not being able to make it, he was dashing my hopes of seduction, eventual marriage and 2.4 children. (If I’m perfectly honest there was probably also a cottage by the coast that he’d have whitewashed for me on a hot summer’s day with his shirt off. Little did he know that his simple ‘sorry, can’t make it’ also destroyed the hopes of many a coastal estate agent.)

Fear of rejection

Seriously speaking though, this is an important point. We often make our disappointments much more far-reaching than they need to be because we’ve added a whole bunch of sub-text that the person disappointing us may not have intended at all.

I could have asked him to something else a month later but instead, my abject terror of being what I saw as ‘rejected’ again stopped me taking that chance. ‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘never’ and you shouldn’t let one disappointment stop you trying again. Ask any top level athlete and they will tell you how much getting up again after failing you have to do in order to reach the top of your sport.

‘No’ doesn’t mean ‘never’ and you shouldn’t stop trying.

The problem is that the closer we get to our goal, the more the disappointment stings if we’re thwarted at the last post.

Suppose you saw your dream job advertised and you got through to the second interview, your expectation of getting the job is raised by the fact that you’ve managed to make it through the first couple of hurdles. If you then don’t get the job, the disappointment is considerably more acute than if you’d had a letter of rejection right at the start, at the point of submitting your application.

Some people manage this sort of disappointment by not raising their hopes up too much or, worse, by not applying in the first place.

Rewarding failure

It may seem logical to protect yourself from the pain of being disappointed by never putting yourself forward, never applying for the dream job or never asking out the man of your dreams but this is not a solution.

The rot that sets in from never risking yourself is much worse than the temporary embarrassment or hurt of being disappointed. One of the best ways I’ve found to avoid the experience of disappointment closing me off to risk in future is to ‘reward failure’.

We are often told that we should only reward success but we learn as much, if not more, from our failures. By treating ourselves to something when we’re disappointed, it’s the equivalent of being given a lollipop when we’ve fallen over as a child.

It cheers us up, dries our tears, and makes us realise that we will live to see another day. I will ask that man out again and if it happens that he’s now got a girlfriend after all these months, I will rally myself with a fruit smoothie and wait for my ‘game face’ to stop looking like a smacked derrière.

Dealing with it better

We encounter disappointment daily from a latte that isn’t frothy enough to an email response in the negative to a proposal

Seven Suphi recommends these three core steps for dealing with disappointment: 1. Understand how you deal with disappointments Do you tend to blame others? Blame yourself? Get frustrated? Angry? Depressed? Does the depression in of itself become a disappointment building on itself negatively? Do you focus on what could have been and the loss of it? Do you dwell in the disappointment for a long time or accept the situation, take your positive learnings and move swiftly on? (Research has shown that men tend to blame something outside of themselves when things go wrong and take the credit to themselves when things go well. Women tend to do the opposite – taking the blame onto themselves when things go wrong and giving the credit to someone or something outside of them when things go well. The women’s pattern is also the pattern for those who are depressed!)

2. Set ‘achievable stretch’ goals

We are disappointed if our expectation is greater than the reality of a situation. Generally the greater the difference between expectation and reality the greater the disappointment.

This is why some recommend setting realistic goals or even reducing expectations to avoid disappointment. I do not agree because it may encourage limiting ourselves just so as to not get disappointed. The most effective thing to do is to set achievable stretch goals.

3. Expectation, preparation and acceptance Accept that setbacks are a part of life and expect curve balls as well as positive surprises. Be prepared for different outcomes rather than just one. When a disappointment happens, accept it for what it is, take the learnings and move on.

Article by

Tania Ahson

Article by

Tania Ahson