TO BE ALIVE IS TO KNOW DISAPPOINTMENT

Periodically I think about people who have disappointed me, and people that I have disappointed. I wish disappointment were not so common an occurrence in life, but the fact is it is. The older we get, the more disappointments we accumulate. We are always disappointing each other, and in turn we are always being disappointed by others. In some cases, the disappointment we feel is unreasonable. In other cases it is eminently warranted from whatever the perspective.

To understand disappointment, we have to understand another important emotion—expectation. We come into most of our relationships with high expectation, and sometimes our expectations exceed good sense. We are expecting more than the other can possibly deliver.

Often our attitudes toward our parents include such unrealistic expectations. We expect our parents to be perfect. Because they are human beings, perfect is something they cannot be. Even their deaths are sometimes experienced as a disappointment. We find it hard to get over what we see as their abandonment of us.

High Expectations in Romantic Involvements

High expectation and even unrealistic expectations are also true in our love relations, that is, in our romantic involvements. We do not pursue a romantic relationship with the assumption that we will be mistreated or hurt in the process, nor do we pursue such a relationship with the intention of hurting the other. We enter into such relationships full of optimism. Sometimes, however, mistreatment is exactly the result, and the cause may be an obsession we dwell on for the rest of our lives.

Workplace: Source of Much Disappointment

In the last 30 to 40 years the workplace has become a source of many of the disappointments in most of our lives. This is partly the result of the fact that the workplace is not an isolated entity, but part of a dynamic known as the economy. As the economy has become more and more global in nature, we may experience in our individual workplaces the results of events that originated on the other side of the world.

Layoffs or reductions in force, also known as RIFs, are the painful economic phenomena that come readily to mind. These workplace disappointments always have a personal side to them. When we are laid off, we feel considerable anger towards other members of the rejecting organization, the survivors of the massacre and especially the boss, that is, if he is one of the survivors.

Trust, A Feeling Related to Expectation

Like the parent child relationship we knew growing up, the workplace presents us with a relationship hierarchy where trust, a feeling related to expectation, is assumed. Our assumption is that the boss, the parent substitute in the workplace, will treat us well. For example, we take for granted that promises made to us at the time of hiring will be kept.

We take for granted that the boss will make wise decisions with respect to the hiring of others with whom we have to work and with respect to the expenditure and allocation of limited resources. We do not assume that the volatility of the greater economy will be adverse to our own situation, and we do not assume that we will be victimized by leadership or management problems within the organization itself, such as one misguided decision after the other driving the entire organization into ruin.

Expectations of Those We Hire

In turn if we are the one doing the hiring, we have a feeling of trust in the people we bring on board. Something impressed us in their resume and the interview when we were considering them, and we have high expectation for their performance with us. We assume that they will give us their best effort. We do not deliberately choose people who have a drug or alcohol habit and thus, it may be assumed, will exhibit a high rate of absence or, worse, will steal from the organization to support that habit.

During the last years of a long career as an employee, I experienced both satisfaction and disappointment in abundance. I was working for a branch of a university that specialized in career education. Given our mission we were expected to be more entrepreneurial or business-oriented than is normally the case with universities.

Start Media-Rich Educational Program

I had the satisfaction of starting my own program involving the creation of computer-delivered media-rich applications and guiding it through to financial stability, but then I had the pain of seeing my good works squandered in an ill-conceived reorganization and a series of very poor hiring decisions and other poor management choices, all engineered by someone whose glibness I had previously admired and long mistook as a sign of intelligence and good judgment.

To teach in the program, I had hired several very capable instructors. I also taught in the program. With the loss of the program, these jobs were no longer tenable. Some of those I hired were resentful toward me, but there was nothing that I could do to intercede in their behalf. Thus what had been a very good relationship turned more than a little ugly. I, the founder of the program, had disappointed them.

How do we cope with disappointment? First we must accept that to disappoint and to be disappointed are part of the normal process of living. As long as what we did or what was done to us was not the result of intention or malice, we need to make ourselves get over it. Even if intention or malice was a factor, we need to practice acceptance. If we are the victim, we need to remember the importance of forgiveness. If we are the perpetrator, we may need to forgive ourselves.

Embrace the richness of possibility that is life at its fullest and move on. Yes, we must forgive.

You can reach the writer at this address: Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft