today we're going to be talking about how to deal with disappointments in life
it's much more than just taking lemons and making lemonade
hi everyone in today's video we'll be talking about something that we all experience
disappointments and things in life that don't go the way we plan and what are some ways in which we
can cope with disappointments in life in a healthy and productive way i'm going to be discussing
four principles to help you effectively cope with disappointments and setbacks in life but before we
get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province
of british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended
as a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional now
with those things out of the way let's start talking about disappointments
so uh the way i wanted to start is to share a little story with you now one thing that you
might not know about me is that i run marathons now this isn't this hasn't been something i've
done my whole life but something i took up relatively recently in the last few years
running my first marathon the vancouver marathon in may of 2019 then through a remarkable stroke of
luck i won a lottery to get into the new york city marathon which i subsequently ran in november 2019
then the world hit the global pause button in the spring of 2020
and there were no marathons or races to be run but i continued to run regularly imagining a day
when i would be able to run another marathon with thousands of people and so i ran consistently
multiple times a week high levels of mileage for me without any planned marathon to run
but then this past january i decided to run the vancouver marathon again in may with the hopes and
expectations of how good it would feel once again to run a marathon with thousands of other people
the thing about marathons though is that they're not just something you decide to do last minute
at least not for me the whole marathon is a process that involves all the months of training
and preparation that all come together on one day and those last 42.2 kilometers
so i was really looking forward to it really looking forward to it
and then in april just a few weeks ago i was diagnosed with a stress fracture in my foot
marathon over all that planning hope an expectation built up over the past two years
gone due to hairline fracture in a little bone in my foot
and it's really disappointing really disappointing
so what i wanted to share with you is how i deal with disappointments in life from the psychologist
from the perspective of a psychologist um but just to give you a heads up even though
i know this stuff based on psychological principles disappointments still suck
so the first principle of dealing with life's disappointments that i wanted to talk about
is to validate the disappointment and to validate how much it actually sucks if i didn't care about
running the marathon if i didn't put hundreds of hours into training and if i hadn't thought about
it and looked forward to how it would feel to run the race that day i wouldn't be disappointed
disappointments by definition suck they're not fun and you shouldn't have to
feel bad about being disappointed one of the pitfalls i often see in my clients is that
they tend to downplay disappointments in their lives comparing themselves to other people
and pointing out how much worse other people have it than they do
it's almost like because someone else might be suffering more and maybe experiencing something
objectively worse than what i'm dealing with then i shouldn't be upset or disappointed
by what i'm going through it's almost like i don't have that right
the problem with this approach though is that it's a no-win game
you'll always find someone whose life and whose circumstances
are worse off than yours and so if you hold this attitude no disappointment
no setback nothing that goes wrong in your life should ever make you feel bad because there's
bound to be someone else in the world who's dealing with something much worse
look i understand that me not being able to run
a marathon because of a stress fracture is not a major life problem
it's not a job loss it's not a divorce it's not the loss of a child it's not poverty etc etc
but disappointments are all subjective and they relate to our subjective experience
of life so the point here is that i'm not comparing me to having
to miss out on running a marathon to someone losing their job they're not the same things
and one is worse than the other clearly but that doesn't mean that it's indulgent or petty
or selfish for for me to feel disappointed about my situation if we don't acknowledge
our disappointments and allow ourselves to feel disappointed we invalidate how we feel when we're
disappointed and then just beat ourselves up for being so petty which just makes us feel worse
so that's the first principle of coping with disappointments allowing yourself
to be disappointed even if it's something that you think is relatively small or insignificant
in the grand scheme of things in the grand scheme of life
and that leads us to our second principle of coping with disappointments which is
putting the disappointment into perspective now once you acknowledge that you're allowed to feel
disappointed or sad or hurt by whatever problem or setback you're experiencing
the idea isn't to focus or dwell on it rather the idea is to think about what is a reasonable level
of disappointment in this situation so for me not being able to run the marathon because of a stress
fracture is disappointing but i probably shouldn't be reacting in a way that i'm utterly devastated
and distraught by this if i'm responding in a way that would be similar to how i would respond
if i suddenly lost my job or had to declare bankruptcy or one of my children passed away
then there's probably something wrong with the intensity of my emotional response
so the idea is to think about the disappointment in the perspective of your whole life
the one question i like to ask to try and tap into this perspective
is what i like to call the five-year question five years from now will this be that big of a deal
five years from now will i be thinking about this situation any differently than i am right now and
even though i'm in the disappointment right now i know that five years from now this probably isn't
going to be that big of a deal and i'm probably not going to feel particularly upset about it
it's just a different perspective it's putting this disappointment
and setback in the context of my life more generally while at the same time
acknowledging that it's okay to feel some level of disappointment in this situation right now
the third principle of coping with life's disappointments is to think about the ways in
which you can learn from the disappointment all problems setbacks and failures provide us with
feedback that we can then learn from and use to potentially make changes and grow in the future
so the idea is to think about what can i learn from this disappointment what can i do differently
in the future how can this make me better in my stress fracture example what i learned is that for
over two years i ran injury-free with high mileage never had any significant problems
however in gearing up for the marathon i increased the number of fast or more intense training runs
that i did as i tried to push myself to go harder and faster
and i did really well i ran personal bests in uh 10 kilometer and five kilometer time trials
just over a week apart at the beginning of march
but it wasn't long after that that i began having pain in my foot i went too hard i pushed myself
beyond what i was physically capable of doing and if i had just stuck to the same approach
i'd been taking for the previous two years everything would likely have been just fine
the idea here isn't to look for blame or to beat myself up for making a mistake but rather
to see it as an opportunity for me to learn that i can't do those types of intense hard runs so close
to one another and expect that my body is going to be able to tolerate it is going to be able to
have the time to recover so what i've learned is to stick to how i was running for those
two years injury-free and be very cautious about increasing the intensity of any training
run so close to the marathon this principle is really about taking taking in the setback
and disappointment not getting caught up in the negative emotion and feeling associated with it
but rather examining and debriefing it to figure out what i can do differently moving forward
and the fourth and final principle is to look for any possible opportunities
in this disappointment now you've probably heard the old adage that when life gives you lemons
make lemonade the thing is i don't really like this adage and i don't think it's a reasonable
or healthy way to think about disappointments in life you see the thing is why do people like
lemonade well they like it because it's it's good it's positive it's sweet it tastes really
yummy so the underlying message of this adage is that you can take something sharp and bitter and
sour and make it wonderful and good but that's not realistic this principle isn't about taking
something bad taking a disappointment and making it something wonderfully positive
because that's not always the case and that's not always possible
so if you hold this belief that you can take any negative event and turn it into a positive thing
you might be setting yourself for you might be setting yourself up for unrealistic expectations
and guaranteed failure this principle isn't about having to find positives and
disappointments because sometimes there aren't any but if there are it's useful to look for them
so in my example the positives that i gain the positive is that i i gain some important
insights into ways of training that are less likely to cause injury
and i also discovered the benefits of cross training as i got an exercise bike since i haven't
been able to run with my stress fracture so when i eventually return to running i'll be able to do
some cross training on the exercise bike on my days off as a way of enhancing my fitness
and that's something i probably wouldn't have done that's something that probably wouldn't
have happened had this not occurred look it's not a great outcome but it is a positive thing
and that will likely help me prepare for my next marathon which is in chicago in october because
apparently i have an uncanny knack for winning entry lotteries into world major marathons
so you don't have to necessarily turn disappointments and setbacks into wonderful
positive events but often there are some small positives even in the setbacks and disappointments
you just need to look for them
so those are the four principles for effectively dealing with life's disappointments and setbacks
validate the disappointment and acknowledge that it's okay that it sucks put the disappointment
into the broader perspective of your life think about lessons that you can
learn from the disappointment and look for the possible opportunities in the disappointment
by taking these four principles into account they may not fully remove the sting of life's
disappointments but they will help you more effectively deal with the disappointment
and bounce back from it as strong as possible
so i would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this if you have any ways of
dealing with life's disappointments that you found helpful i'd love to hear about them so
please leave me some comments in the comments section down below if you've been enjoying my
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thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one