The title of this post is a phrase borrowed (okay, stolen) from Andy Vargo, who shared it in a discussion he led on the Friendship Bench recently.
The gist of Andy’s thinking is that disappointment teaches us resilience, revealing our capacity to adapt and grow through setbacks. It can sharpen our self-awareness, forcing us to confront our expectations and align them with reality. (We should lower our expectations but not our standards.*) It can foster empathy by enabling us to relate to others who’ve faced similar struggles. Processing disappointment can help us with emotional regulation and problem-solving. It can motivate us to do more or to do better. And disappointment can strip away our illusions, grounding us in what’s attainable and pushing us to refine our goals or our approaches. It may hurt for a while. But it teaches patience and perspective.
Perhaps surprisingly, disappointment has a seemingly counterintuitive relationship to happiness. According to Felicia Zerwas, PhD, in a press release from the American Psychological Association:
There are plenty of societal pressures, at least within the United States, which encourage the fallacy that people must feel happy all of the time to achieve greater well-being … Overall, allowing yourself to experience your Emotions, whether they are positive or negative, with an accepting attitude could be a useful tool for pursuing happiness and increasing well-being … Having high expectations for one’s happiness can be detrimental because it makes it more difficult to achieve the level of happiness that we are expecting from a positive event.
In the words of Dr. Johnny Fever, “That’s so deeply warped, even I understand it.”
Keep On Keepin’ On
The resilience and perseverance we can learn from disappointment can be self-perpetuating: When we overcome challenges, we build confidence. Maybe we acquire skills that make it easier to handle future difficulties. That confidence and those skills create a positive feedback loop that builds mental toughness for the next challenge. Studies in psychology, like those based on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, show past successes increase our sense of capability, fueling still more resilience.
I wrote a story about perseverance in my book, Random Thoughts: A Writer’s Notebook. It’s called “What I Learned from Boss Pig”, and it’s about the Education I got from playing the video game, Angry Birds 2, on my iPhone. Here’s an excerpt:
Angry Birds 2 taught me to persist, to endure, to recognize the temporary nature of frustration, and to realize the conquering power of tenacity. By its addictive nature (or mine), the game compels players to keep coming back, regardless of the seemingly impossible adversity — to think, to examine, to analyze, and to find a way to move on. To find a way to move on. Think about that. Moving on, determining to move on, finding a way to move on, settling for nothing less than moving on is the modus operandi for a rewarding life. It’s the remedy for procrastination. It’s the antidote for Anxiety. It’s the defeat of paralyzing Depression. It’s the answer to the age-old philosophical question: Why are we here? To move on. Period.
As Will Rogers put it, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
A Word About Humility
When thinking about resilience and perseverance, humility may not leap to mind. It should.
Humility allows us to remain open, to learn from failure, to acknowledge our mistakes, limitations, or weaknesses without defensiveness, to recognize setbacks as opportunities for Growth, not threats to our egos. It makes us open to feedback and support, to accept help, to collaborate with others, to recognize we don’t have all the answers. Humility and self-awareness help us temper the arrogance or overconfidence that can lead to reckless decisions, thereby undermining our resilience. And they can make it easier to align perseverance with purposes beyond self-interest.
Hats off to Andy for the conversation and to Melissa Hughes for inviting him to lead it.
* This is another expression I stole from Andy. But I promised him a footnote when I stole it.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
