Finding Joy in Disappointment
Dear Reader,
I recently had to work through disappointment. Through this whole experience, I was asking myself, how can I actually find joy at the end of this negative experience? This is what I did.
When I look back on it, the first thing I did was, I recognized this feeling of disappointment. I gave it legitimacy. I was disappointed and this is the reason why I was disappointed. In my case it was losing a specific client, and it made me feel disappointed.
But then, as I was going through it, I thought to myself, okay, how can I now unpack this and how can I make this better so that we can all learn from this example?
This is what I came to conclude: I put this particular disappointment in the context of my life at this stage. I have a ton to be thankful for. How did this fit in with the other stuff? Did it really have this massive impact on my life? It felt terrible at the time, it felt negative and it felt, I don't know, it just broke your motivation. But then, within a couple of days, how will this fit - in the context of all the other things that are so positive in my life - what is the context of it?
The next thing I thought was, let's look at the bigger picture. Where's my faith? Where’s my purpose in life? And how does this fit in with this? This one little disappointment, this little, shall we say, negative step? How did that break all of these things? It's really insignificant if you look at the bigger picture.
The last thing was, once I had the distance there and I had it all unpacked, I could sit back and say, what did I learn from this experience? Maybe my expectations were too high. Everyone loses a client once in a while if you have several clients. My expectation was too high. Maybe I should go out and find more clients, maybe there's a sign there. Maybe, if it's a project that I had these high expectations for or a hope and a dream that didn't come through, maybe I can make an adjustment there. In this way I can work with my expectations and make adjustments. And then that's the learning that comes from it.
So there you have three simple steps, maybe four, to deal with disappointment.
The first one is to recognize it.
The second one is to put it into context.
The third thing is to look at the bigger picture of your life. How does it fit and how does it influence?
And the last thing, how can we learn from this?
Hopefully this will help you find joy at the end of it.
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Hope you find this useful. More of the same can be found on nicohuman.com or by following me on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube.
See you next week. Let's work through those disappointments this week and become better, together.
Best wishes, |
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nicohuman.com
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