Dealing with disappointment

You have big dreams, don’t you? Virtually every Life Coaching weekend seminar in a vineyard somewhere has featured a PowerPoint presentation that featured slides advising, “If you can dream it, you can do it” or “Every success story started with a dream.” We are encouraged endlessly to dream, to aspire, in order to achieve. There’s a kernel of truth in all that optimistic visioning, but there’s also a hard outer shell that is often ignored. That shell is disappointment, and you can easily break a hopeful molar on it as you bite in expecting the sweet soft centre of fulfilment. Yet, as soon as you set up the target of expectations then you have also opened the field of disappointment.

The bigger the expectation, the greater the risk of disappointment, and the zeitgeist these days encourages everyone to dream big. The reality is, however, that there can’t be 5.85 billion best-selling authors (that’s the number of people over age 15 in the world), any given suburb can only handle so many vegan cafés, and if everyone became a bitcoin billionaire the economy would dissolve. None of this should discourage anyone from dreaming, but the wise dreamer knows that disappointment is the other side of the aspiration coin. It is also true that disappointment does not just come with fanfare