By Tricia Kidd
Things happen that can make you feel disappointed. I’m talking about small disappointments, the kind that appear a bit petty, they are so small that they are not worth acting upon; you have too many other things to attend to. But these petty disappointments can strike at any time at home or at work. They may seem small individually but left untreated they add to each other and create a negative mass of their own.
Small disappointments pile up
For example, if you are in any way disappointed with yourself, maybe your appearance, something you said but can’t take back, something you failed to do, something you lost, every little disappointment with self, builds up to a mound of self-loathing, or a loss of self-esteem. Each little drip of disappointment has lingered at the back of your mind, you have suppressed it and failed to banish it completely, because at some future point in time, the last little disappointment arrives,
your pile of disappointments reaches a critical mass, and you feel in a fit of frustration that you really hate yourself.
Alternatively, you can be disappointed in a small way, by a friend or a colleague or a family member. The things they are doing or saying are individually not a reason to take offence about, but over time, all those little un-banished disappointments build into a simmering pot of resentment. Eventually your resentment boils over and something small appears to trigger an outburst of hatred that is really disproportionate to the scale of the offence.
You can be disappointed by something inanimate and conceptual like your house, ‘the world’, ‘the system’, ‘the government’, ‘those people’, the news. Something happens or you hear something that finally gives the tipping point to a mass of little disappointments and the world is suddenly an overwhelmingly odious place.
Triaging your disappointments
Picking up disappointments as you go through a working day can happen without you realizing it. But beware, if you don’t get rid of them, you can be building up an unhealthy mass of negativity. Arguably, people who are easily disappointed have ‘high expectations’ maybe they are ‘unrealistic’ or ‘perfectionist’. But people who do have high expectations are often driven to succeed, so ‘expecting nothing’ from life, in order to not be disappointed, is not always the right solution. You don’t need to drop your high standards; you just need to triage your disappointments.
Voicing your disappointments
Try to catch yourself being disappointed (identifying the moment of disappointment will take practice at first) and then tell yourself that you are disappointed and give it a name. You can catch the smallest thing and voice it to your inner monologue. It goes like this: ‘I am disappointed that…’. Deliberately voicing your disappointment is validating it, it is acknowledging that the disappointment exists. You can then be the master of your happiness by triaging it. If you really think it’s small and petty, or not really in your remit to change, you’ll be amazed how quickly it vanishes the moment
you say it.
By voicing it to yourself you banish it, and no longer can it linger and add to a mass of negativity. What you are doing is acknowledging your own demanding nature, rather than suppressing it, and without giving up on your standards, you find yourself letting go of little things that would otherwise slow you down. Give it a try!
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