Disappointment

In How to Keep Disappointment from Derailing Our Dreams from  Cool Cat Teacher Blog by coolcatteacher@gmail.com, Victoria A Davis challenges us,

“Today, as you pursue excellence, think of your most recent pain. Are you processing that pain in healthy ways? Or are you revisiting it to feed your anger, self-pity, and resentment?”

I have a hard time dealing with disappointment. I see disappointment in the same way I do failure. I try to look ahead and see if I may be disappointed. I sometimes don't even try if I feel that way.  I guess I see disappointment as equal to failure and it shouldn't be.

Whenever I get disappointed I get angry with myself. I start thinking that maybe I didn't try hard enough, or I didn't pay attention good enough, or I didn't have the best skills to do what I wanted to do. I see a failure to succeed as a personal failure that I can control.

I think I should learn to try things and not worry about being  disappointed. If they don't work out the way I had hoped, I need to think about finding other ways to succeed. I should look at disappointment as an opportunity to find other ways for success.

Disappointment makes me feel angry at myself and I wallow in self-pity. At times I look for others that I can blame but then I turn it around and blame myself more than others.

Maybe it has to do with the way I was brought up. I know I've mentioned this before, but my parents expected me to do my best next. I don't think they are different than most parents, but I think their values in addition to the pressure I put on myself made me want to be perfect. Anything less than perfect was failure to me.

As I write this, I wonder if my students feel the same way. Many times, I've been told I'm an overachiever, so I don't see others feeling the same way I do. I don't know why I think I can be the only perfectionist in the world. Trying to be perfect is a losing battle because no one is perfect.

Once I get over the anger, self-pity, and resentment, I need to reflect on the whole situation that caused my disappointment. I need to own up to being disappointed and I need to look at the reasons why I am disappointed. Is it something I did or is it something that others did or did not do? Maybe it was the situation and I didn't have the right equipment or supplies. Maybe I didn’t have enough information. I need to look at the whole picture and not just my feelings.

How do you deal with disappointment? How do you help your students deal with disappointment? Please share.

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