Disappointment’s Doorway to Deeper Determination
Dealing with Disappointment and Coping with Hoping
I have both a fight and flight response to disappointment. After giving my best efforts and dispensing myself of time, energy, and emotion toward something or someone I highly value (my fight response), my coping mechanism is to avoid, avoid, and avoid (flight) when my efforts fall short of my desired outcome. As a guard to my emotions, I delve into hopelessness and ignore the apparent evidence that everything is not okay. I love hard, which makes me such a competitive person.
So, whether I witness a team or athlete I coach fall short of an achievement, watch my favorite team lose, or experience a loss of my own (a Peloton workout, missed opportunities, et cetera), I don’t take it well initially. Fortunately, my wife challenges me to be honest and present with disappointment and live in the present.
Perhaps you’re the person who can experience profound disappointment and move on with your life. If so, stop reading, and please explain yourself in the comments because I cannot relate to it (no, seriously, I want to know how you do it). But if you’re like me and are wading in despair because you’ve lost something meaningful, keep reading.
After a recent personal disappointment, it made me think of someone who experienced life’s biggest disappointment and fear—the prospect of death. Her name is
and she wrote a book titled Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.It is a book about her journey with cancer, and not the kind many people live to write a book about. So, I picked up this book to read again to hopefully gain a better perspective on my disappointment. Here are a couple of takeaways:
“I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead,” Bowler writes. “I must learn to live in ordinary times, but I don’t know how.” I’ve written much about living in the present, especially regarding performance or competition. Often, I forget that this applies to our everyday lives. Monday mornings are a blessing no matter how much we don’t “feel like it.”
When speaking with her doctor about the possibilities of ending chemotherapy, Bowler admits, “I have come to the end of what I know how to do. I know how to suffer. I know how to make the best of things. But I don’t know how to do the most basic thing—I don’t know how to stop.” “‘What would you do,’” she asks her doctor. “‘I’d go to work,’” he responded.
“‘We’re all terminal,’” the doctor continues, and it answers Bowler’s unspoken question. “How do you stop? You just stop. You come to the end of yourself. And then you take a deep breath. And say a prayer. And get back to work.”
Here lies the secret of enduring disappointment. You lean into ordinary life, stop fighting when it’s time to stop, don’t run, and accept the reality of the work ahead of you when it’s time to start again.
So when it comes to disappointment, we don’t “skip to the end of it,” as one of Bowler’s colleagues suggested to her. “Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place,” Bowler writes. “And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined.”
In the end, whether you’re an athlete or a coach who may be coming off of a disappointing season or performance, or just someone navigating one of life’s many disappointments, please know it isn’t something we can always outrun or fight through. Things will fall apart, and the disappointment will hurt, especially when we put our best efforts forward. But here’s the beauty of life: we don’t have to dismiss our disappointment or bypass our hurt. Yet, we also don’t have to let it overwhelm us. Perhaps we can learn to live in the ordinary moments that seem insignificant but hold the power to carry us forward.
Like Kate Bowler, we can let go of what we can’t control and lean into what’s right in front of us—even if what’s in front of us is a wall of disappointment. If you’re staring at that wall, take a deep breath, pray if that’s your way, and get back to work. Disappointment will always be a part of life—as will new joys and happiness. In time, we find strength not by avoiding the valleys but by learning to walk through them, one step at a time.