How to minimize the impact of disappointment
Lower expectations and collect data
I came across this idiom:
“To think that someone hung the moon and the stars.”
An expression you use when you think highly of someone. To consider someone to be extraordinary, the best, or exceptionally wonderful.
This is especially true when it comes to children. Their parents are perfect. They expect them to be good at anything and know the answers to every question and problem.
With age, they quickly realize that this couldn’t be further from the truth.
When reality kicks in, they see that their parental ‘heroes’ are also fallible and far from perfect.
But this is also true for life in general. Sometimes we think too highly of people or overvalue situations, leading us to deep disappointments.
Why do we experience disappointment?
Expectations.
What are expectations?
Anticipations.
It is believing that someone is or will behave or that something will work out in an imagined Hollywood-like way.
But there’s is a problem with expectations: it never lives up to anything.
The thing with expectations is that, in most cases, we don’t evaluate things or people with realistic data. We have scenarios in our heads of how things will unfold and how people will behave without reality-checking if the Hollywood scenarios in our minds really have an equivalent to our lived reality.
Most of the time, reality has nothing to do with the script in our heads.
So, two tools I used over the years to prevent disappointments are the ones Jodi Picoul summed up in a crispy quote:
“There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.”
Every time I’ve experienced setbacks, I asked myself why I was so disappointed by people/situations and the answer was always that I was too naive, too unrealistic, and my expectations were too high.
I realized I had to change something, so, I learned to see things a bit more hardheaded.
The funny thing is that over the years, I improved my reality and lowered my expectations intuitively without even knowing that Picoul’s quote seems like an actual concept to live by.
Without further ado, here’s how I apply them:
1. The first tool is to lower my expectations in every way possible.
Every time I get to know someone or an opportunity presents itself as very ‘attractive’, I try not to have high expectations. I contain myself by suppressing my first impulse of enthusiasm. “Easy!”, I’ll tell myself.
The other day I came across this Charlie Munger quote which was like a broad hint that I was on the right path:
“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life.”
Lowering my expectations was really hard for me because I was taught to ‘think big’ and my teachers and friends thought a great deal of me. But to have low expectations doesn’t mean you sell yourself short, it’s just being aware of what is actually possible and realistic at the very moment.
I do this by focusing on the present moment and try not to think too much ahead because if I do, I know my mind starts getting lost in the know-mans-land.
Being in the present moment means for me listening and observing very closely. I try to understand what is actually said and done.
Also, what really helps me is to follow my own thought pattern and look if I really observe the person/situation or if I make assumptions too quickly.
2. The second tool and most effective is improving my reality which I call ‘collecting data’.
It helps me to be brutally honest about my reality to ‘ease the pain’ of disappointment.
I ask myself if the thought I have is just wishful thinking or facts.
I ‘collect data’ before I come to a conclusion that the person I fancy is THE ONE for me, or if the job, I think will make me happy, really suits my personality or my lifestyle.
‘Collecting data’ sounds weird and like out of a Sherlock Holmes movie but in fact, it’s an unbelievably useful tool.
It puts things into perspective because most of the time, we act on autopilot.
We have belief systems and behavior patterns that evaluate similar situations we experienced before and make assumptions in the same old way.
Collecting data means running your thoughts through a ‘realness’ scanner or spam detector.
When you know that your brain generates 70.000 thoughts in one day, you quickly realize that not every single one is or can be true. Your mind would explode if this was the case.
My spam detector question is: “What evidence makes this thought true?”
Absolute game changer!
And with this question, I can quickly detect what goes into my inbox and what goes into the spam folder.
Collecting data means filtering your random thoughts so, you can decide not based on autopilot thought systems, but based on solid and logical evidence.
At the end of the day, we will all experience disappointment in some way. We can’t prevent that, but what we can do is minimize the impact on our lives.
We don’t have to suffer. We can be sad and mad but we don’t have to be devasted.
Thanks for reading,
Yours Hatice :)
