Being Disappointed is not a Bad Thing

Both in my professional and personal life many people perceive the act of being disappointed as something negative. Most often, disappointment is perceived to be harmful. Just let me be very clear: It surely is not harmful. Being disappointed is a very normal, ordinary thing. The act of disappointment can be a good thing, actually.

Disappointment as an emotion is a driver to many aspects of personal and professional maturity. Nonetheless, it often is being left out in professional life. Interestingly and completely incomprehensible, it’s the leaders and executives who don’t seem to care about it.

A few years ago I was a lead developer / architect on a project. Some of the managers in there advised me to be cautious about my “emotions”. They enjoined me to silence and “temper my emotions”. Those managers surely had good intentions, yet chose inappropriate actions for their intent.

They obviously wanted to me to refocus on facts. It’s absolutely understandable to strive towards a constructive and fact-oriented work. Yet, in my opinion it’s not very helpful to check one’s passions in order to reach objectification. It’s quite the other way around.

An employee being passionate and expressing his emotions on the job is actually desirable. Most often, he’s wholeheartedly committed to his tasks and objectives. He brings in his complete know-how and personality to the table. That’s nothing negative. In fact, it’s a very positive thing. What’s important here actually is the right contact with such a passion and consequently a directed, constructive channelling of emotions.

The Art of Disappointment

I want to focus a little more on disappointment as an emotional state. Most of my friends and fellows tried to cheer me up after knowing that I’m disappointed and sad about my failure. I’m very thankful for them and I’m glad to have people around me who do care. However, I do believe that it’s not only important to cheer the disenchanted up again but to go along with him through his sadness.

See, in my job I do a variety of things. Among those, I coach managers, head of’s, team-leads, scrum masters, developers, testers and more. Most of those responsible and creative personalities need to deal with disappointments in daily life. Regardless being their own disappointment or those of others.

Almost all of the leadership persons I have coached so far concentrated on motivation and cheer up of the disenchanted. Even experienced managers hardly knew more than just ‘bringing the comrade back to road’ by motivation.

Well, that’s cool, but it’s only half the battle. I think that one needs to live through this stage of discourage. One needs to undergo the negative emotion of disappointment in order to negate it and leave it behind.

As for the affected person – which in this case is me – this effectively means that the emotion of disappointment needs to be faced. Ideally, one reflects all the efforts, wishes and expectations made so far. Of course, the disappointment is being lived as well with various consequences like sadness, being annoyed of all or even shedding a few tears. In this very moment, it’s important to allow the emotions to happen instead of blocking or ignoring them. Yes, it’s crucial to experience the emotion.

In contrast, the caretaker / minder – which in this case is … – has a very different perspective. He first of all needs to accept that the peer has a negative emotion to carry and furthermore should prepare himself to get involved to this situation.

In the very best case, he’s able to create an environment of safety and trustworthiness, so that the affected person is able to live through his emotion in a safe and intimate manner. While enabling this emotional environment, the caretaker participates in that emotion in order to be able to guide and channel the emotion towards a positive and constructive view.

Now that the emotion of disappointment is being lived and experienced consciously, a chain of concurrent activities happen: all the efforts, thoughts, actions leading to the current disappointment are being checked in mind again. This reflection is an essential catalyst to gain insights. At the same time, this recap of events are a very first step towards objectification.

Once this phase of “experienced disappointment” is being put into practice, the second step of motivation and cheer up can be seeded. I’m not going to dive into the motivation topic right now since I could write a book about it. Let’s just stick with the fact that motivation and cheer up is needed as well.

It’s noteworthy that the duration of disappointment depends on many parameters and is quite an individual thing. It’s essential to realize that this duration is no direct indicator for the intensity or “severity” of disappointment. It just varies from person to person. Some individuals may live through disappointment very intensively and fast, others may undergo their disappointment in stages and relatively slow. It’s just an individual, most often even situational dimension of the whole process of disappointment.

Speech is Silver, Silence is Scrap

Another very important aspect to disappointment is communication. Let’s take myself again as an example for a disenchanted person carrying disappointment. I didn’t keep my emotions for myself but told my friends about it. I told them that I’ve been smacked back to grounds and that I missed my goal. I told them that I’m disappointed, disenchanted and disordered. I even tweeted about it and now I’m blogging it.

The reason why I do this is essential from various perspectives. First and foremost, talking, communicating about disappointment and failure is yet another vital component to translate those negative emotions into a fact-driven objectified view. Second, it serves as an important signal for the environment. It signals ‘I am having a pressing and present emotion to deal with.’

This communication is especially important in our professional life. In software engineering, you have to deal with a broad variety of personalities. Most often, different and varying emotional states come face to face. Even for team members who have been working together for years it’s difficult to immediately recognize the emotional situation of the peer. Sometimes it’s even close to impossible. Think of phone calls and chats.

A very professional and and constructive approach to improve such a situation is just as easy as communicating one selves emotional state concisely. Just as simple as:

“Right now I’m disappointed. I tried to achieve a professional goal, but I failed. I just wanted to let you know.”

It often works miracles.

Just as a side note, you surely have noticed that the strategy of “stating your emotion” is being used in agile meetings as well. In retrospectives, the “emotional state” is being used as check-in. It’s very sad that both developers and managers undervalue this very helpful approach.

Living Transparency

I want to focus on another aspect of active communication: transparency. Transparency is a great value, especially in agile working environments. Naturally, transparency does not come for free. Investing in transparency starts with your very own invest in communication. A very simple, yet powerful insight.

The sad thing is, the striking simplicity of this rule doesn’t seem to help many managers and team leaders to remind and apply the rule. At least most managers I know are somewhat ‘agnostic’ to this fundamental law of transparency. Instead of permitting and communicating emotions, disappointment, grief, anger or anxiety, most managers dissemble their feelings. In consequence, transparency and insightful experience are being hindered.

In defense of the management guild: it’s very understandable that they most often cover emotions behind curtains. The everyday business life of many managers is characterized by contracting, strategic thinking and action and very specific communication. Managers not only take responsibility but obligations as well.They are in charge of both company and employee interests, which may require them to dissimulate weakness and emotion for certain situations.

Nonetheless, it’s quite sad to say that most of the managers I had the pleasure to work and go along with were trained to only do that rather than adjusting their level of communication depending on the scope of action.

Let’s repeat: Transparency starts with one’s very own invest in communication. Further more, it’s crucial to gain and strengthen the level of trust between all team members – managers included. There’s one rule of thumb, which I always give managers and team leads as food for thought:

The one who is strong enough to display weakness is equally strong to convey strength.

Despite of the fact that I mostly mentioned the manager as an example, I surely don’t exclude any other role or position to care about transparency and communication. The only reason I’m overly talking about the manager in this case is that the manager has a special, added responsibility and interest to establish and foster transparency.

My Personal Disappointment

Finally, I want to get back where I started and loose a few words about my own disappointment. As already mentioned, I’m disappointed because I failed to reach a goal in my professional life. That’s surely disappointing, but naturally even annoying and demotivating. It’s disillusioning that something I’ve been fighting for truly is not happening like I wanted and wished it to be.

As most probably every professionally experienced person has been disappointed from time to time, I surely experienced a few disappointing things as well. I remember back in 2004 where I started to learn and apply agile principles & XP practices. I wasn’t aware of how important a conscious experience of emotion is for me professional life. Now, being a coach for years, an experienced management consultant and agile engineer I pretty much know that the soft skill of living emotions consciously is a hard criteria for agile working environments.

My intention with this – a little lengthy – article was to encourage those who have to deal with disappointments in their professional life and somehow are stuck or don’t really know how to deal with it in a positive and constructive way. It’s not easy to judge yourself and face yourself consciously with the negative emotion of disappointment. Rest assured it’s both desirable and helpful as long as you keep in mind your own capabilities, values and dignity.