People Building

There are different kinds of disappointment and depending on your own attitude and mindset you may experience the more severe kind more often.

There’s the kind of disappointment that has you think “wow that’s really disappointing” and gives you a sinking feeling in your tummy. Then there’s the kind that punches you in the stomach like a sack of bricks and has you use a choice few expletives in your mind or even out loud!

The good thing with the more mild kind of disappointment is that you can easily reframe it. If not at the time then some short time later. By this I mean apply the attitude of “every cloud has a silver lining” so you might notice something in hindsight that shows you why you are better off having been disappointed than having been fulfilled. Or you might get a better opportunity as a result of not getting the one you missed out on.

What I want to focus on today is dealing with the sack of bricks in your stomach kind of disappointment.

The first thing I would say is consider time. If you’ve experienced a major disappointment it can feel like a physical bruising. It doesn’t matter how positive you are, bruises don’t go away immediately. They do however get better and better every single day. So keep your focus on the fact that you might be on the floor winded right now but you will get up again. And when you do you will be better armed should a sack of brick come swinging in your direction again. You can notice the signs earlier on that the someone or something that disappointed you before might happen/do it again. It would be easy to say that you would never be in that situation again and maybe you won’t, but remember life keeps offering us opportunities to grow stronger so even if the circumstances are not exactly the same, I can guarantee you life will serve up something less savoury than you’d like one day and you can use the current disappointment to help you mentally prepare for when it does.

Talk it over with someone. When you’ve been disappointed the facts and emotions start swishing around in your brain like soup. It can be difficult to separate the two. When you talk it over with someone else it can be easier to make sense of what has happened. You can begin to be more objective as you unravel the thoughts from the emotions.

If there were other people involved, imagine what it would be like to be in their position having the thoughts and reactions they had or are having. Being able to understand others points of view might give you some additional tools to get through it or even to begin to make some logic of any decisions that they made that impacted upon you or which lead to your disappointment.

Vow to make it through despite the thing or people that have disappointed you. Maybe not exactly as you had planned, maybe not at exactly that time, but absolutely pick yourself up and move onwards and upwards. Because when you know what is right and you commit yourself wholeheartedly to a result, whilst the circumstances and timeframes you had in mind may change, *you* can be the one continuous driving force and you deserve to be successful.

Gemma Bailey is a hypnotherapy and NLP trainer who offers one to one therapy and coaching for adults and young people using both her qualified skills and a whole load of experience developed from her unusual and challenging life events.

By Gemma Bailey
www.hypnotherapyandnlp.co.uk