On being disappointing
A mini-series about a personal hell
Even when I was trying to make a schedule, I could already see how it was really just a list of the things I was going to fail to do that day.
This is my client Max, describing a life of being disappointing. It’s one of the best descriptions I’ve encountered of what it feels like to experience to this particular brand of personal hell.
I think being disappointing is different from being a disappointment. Being a disappointment sucks, but at least it’s done and dusted. As in: whelp, the jury’s back and I’m a disappointment. It’s not happy news, but at least maybe I can move on.
But being disappointing is an activity. It’s practically a lifestyle, though it’s one we never chose and we’re desperately trying to un-choose. It’s day after day after day of hoping we can be better and making the schedule and even as we’re doing that already knowing we’re going to fail.
It’s committing to deadlines and making promises and hatching plans—even though we have tried and failed so many times before—because we are so desperate to not keep being this person, this person who is always disappointing themselves and everyone else. So we have to hope that this time, somehow we’ll figure out how to be different.
And then it’s missing the deadlines and not completing the plans and forgetting the schedule—and then starting the whole fucking business all over again. In short: it’s a cycle, from which the only real escape seems to be giving up entirely.
Freeing people from this cycle is one reason I’m a coach, and I’ve had a lot of success at it.
But our brains often have their own convictions about what will make us Not Disappointing, and they don’t always let go of these ideas easily. In fact, it took a few weeks of full-on wrangling of my client Max’s brain before it was willing to let us come at the problem differently.
But after we got his brain to stop fighting us, we eradicated the cycle. Max reported Friday that he feels calm and steady. He slept for an entire day, and when he got up, he was able to actually plan and do his work. He no longer feels like any schedule he makes is really just a preview of impending failure.
It’s the kind of change one client described as a ‘brain wipe’.
In this mini-series of deliberately bite-sized (!!) emails, I’m going to take you step by step how we create this kind of change. I’ll be focusing each short entry on one step only, so you can really see each part with clarity.
So I’ll show you why we unknowingly fight to hold onto this cycle, just like Max did. You’ll see how our brains usually want to solve this problem, why that solution doesn’t work, and what makes our brains cling to it anyway.
Then I’m going to unpack exactly what we did to shift things for Max, so that the cycle of being disappointing was over for good.
As I’ll demonstrate, different kinds of hope are key to this process—both at the stage at which our brain fights us and the stage at which we actually get to leave the cycle behind.
So along the way I’ll be identifying these different types of hope and role they play. You’ll learn how to tell them apart, so you can understand when this feeling is serving you and when you might want to interrogate it further.
Tune in next week to find out why our brains fight to keep the being-disappointing cycle going and how we can convince them to try something else instead.