Self Improvement

So what are we all so afraid of anyway? Sometimes it's losing what we have, sometimes it's being embarrassed, but mostly we are afraid of being disappointed... of feeling bad.

This idea of disappointment is something that most of us learn as children. At school we go to the careers officer and say "I want to be an astronaut" and they say "no I think you should be an electrician" and our parents for all the most positive motivations possible help us to protect ourselves from disappointment. They go, "well maybe you shouldn't do that because, you know, you don't want to be disappointed." We build this idea of disappointment up to be a game changer, something really, really horrible that we just don't want, we feel must avoid disappointment at all costs.

Actually when you think about it, disappointment is just an emotional response to a set of circumstances and what we know about things like that is whilst it's not always easy, they are something it's possible to change. We can choose our emotional responses to a set of circumstances. If someone was to bump into your car right now what would your emotional response be? Maybe it would be anger, maybe it would be frustration, maybe it would be sadness, maybe it would be fear, maybe it would be curiosity about who this person was that bumped into your car. For lots of people it would be different and that's because we all learn over our life time different emotional responses to things.

So what that tells us is disappointment is something that we have learned to do. Something we've chosen to do and actually you can choose not to do it. The reality is if you're going to try and get what you want in your life, if you're going to go after what you want, if you're going to say that something is important to you, if you're going to go for this thing and say I want to get it and I'm going to move towards it, then for sure it's not all going to work all the time. Things aren't going to always go smoothly; things are going to go wrong... It's not all going to work.

So, when it doesn't work, as it inevitably won't sometimes, what will you do? How will you respond? When you think about it like this you realise... actually disappointment just isn't going to be very helpful for you in these situations. You probably want to be more interested in what went wrong so that you can fix it for the next time or proud of yourself that you tried or accepting that the path is not totally straight and perseverance is important, anything else that's more constructive and useful to you than disappointment. Disappointment just isn't that helpful.

If you're going to have the bravery to try stuff, it's not all going to work. So make sure that when it doesn't work you don't feel disappointment, that you choose to feel something else, you go - ah well never mind, I'll try again, I'll do the next thing. It's also important to not allow other people's attitudes to failure and disappointment to affect you (that's their problem). Disappointment is something you can choose not to have, you can choose something else instead and you know when you look at successful people, this is something, in whatever field that they are working they have pretty much always been able to do.

Thomas Edison famously had 10,000 goes at making the light bulb. He didn't give up and wasn't disappointed after 'go seven' when he failed, he kept going and said "ah it's interesting that it doesn't work", and when asked by a journalist how he felt to be such a big failure he said "I know 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb - what do you know?" James Dyson the guy that famously made those colourful vacuum cleaners that are different to the other traditional ones tried 5,127 different prototypes of that vacuum cleaner. He kept going, he didn't get disappointed, he didn't go "oh my God I've failed, I'm so disappointed" and feel awful about it. He knew that difficult things require perseverance and he kept going. Michael Jordan famously says he's missed more than 9,000 shots in his basketball career... he knows to score a lot of baskets he's got to miss a lot of baskets. You've got to try stuff to do stuff and this is true for all of us.

So have a big dream, have a big ambition, try things, do things, make things happen and don't feel disappointment when some of them don't work, it's just not helpful and it just doesn't matter. Choose to feel something more constructive instead.

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Thanks and see you there
Stuart