Don't Let Disappointment Turn into Atrophy!

by Rick White, President 180BIZ                                                      (Estimated Read Time 5 minutes)

Last week I talked about rest, recharge, and reset. Why did I talk about that? Because for you to be able to grow the business of your dreams, you must have hope. You must believe that there's something better out there, and the alternative to this is atrophy. Let me explain to you how this works. You go down a path. While the path starts out fine and then something doesn’t go the way you wanted it to.  You get disappointed. You have a setback. Life happens and you get disappointed, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with being disappointed. It's what you do with the disappointment that makes a difference.

Doubt keeps you staring at your problems.

When you wallow in disappointment, you start to doubt. You doubt yourself; you doubt your path, you doubt all of it, and that’s dangerous. That doubt causes inaction, which makes it worse. It keeps you staring at the problem. You didn't get a result you were hoping for. You're disappointed. That's okay. It's when you wallow in it that it becomes a problem because it turns into doubt, and then that doubt, it turns into disbelief. This is where you think, “Oh my gosh, I can't do this. Whatever made me think I could do this. This is ridiculous. There's no way that this could happen. What was I thinking?”

Disbelief is the opposite of hope.

And then that disbelief turns into the opposite of hope, which is despair. Despair is where you believe that nothing's going to change. This is as good as it gets. That despair turns into apathy. Apathy basically means the absence of emotion or drive. Think about that for a second. John Maxwell said it the best. He said, “When there's hope in the future, there's power in the present.” When you are in despair, there is no hope. When you are in despair, there is no future. You're basically just stuck where you're at. The despair, the doubt, the disbelief, all of that is simply a perspective. It’s a dangerous perspective because when you have the doubt, disbelief, and despair, they all stem from disappointment.

The result is no action. When you have no action, it's because you're staring at the problem. Your problem is bigger than your potential. I don't ever want to see your problem bigger than your potential. You can overcome anything. Sometimes it means adapting. Sometimes it means accepting, but you can overcome.

Despair causes a lack of excitement and ultimately an emotional disconnect.

Despair is a perspective. It's kind of the slippery slope. You just can't get excited about anything, and then there's no connection. There's no emotional connection to where you're at or where you want to go. That is scary. When we feel bad, we don't want to feel bad anymore. Most of the time, and I'm guilty of this as well, instead of dealing with what's making me feel bad, I shut down. I check out. You can't just disconnect from the bad feelings. You disconnect from all feelings good or bad. The inaction is dangerous because it creates a lack of drive.

No focus is because you don't have any emotion about it and no connection again, because there's no emotion. You want to stay away from it, and the result of all of this is apathy. If we go one step further than apathy, we get atrophy. Atrophy is where you start to shrink and die. This is where you give up on your dreams. This is where you give up and you become the antithesis of what Benjamin Franklin said. He said that most people die when they're 25. They just don't fall over until they're 75.

Depression and anxiety are going to start to kick in. In that process, it leads to a life that is so much less than what it could be. You are either green and growing, or you're ripe and rotting. You don't ever want to be ripe and rotting. You never want to be in a situation where you have an absence of hope. That would be despair. Understand that you will get disappointed. Don't ask yourself why? Because when you ask yourself, why am I disappointed, your brain will come up with things like, you're not good enough, you're not smart enough, you're not pretty enough, you're not handsome enough, you're not healthy enough, you're not young enough, you're not old enough. That will cause things to get worse.

When you're disappointed, don't ask why.

When you get disappointed, I want you to ask two questions, and this is going to be a game changer. I want you to ask:

1. What's the lesson?
2. What am I going to do about it?

When you can recognize the disappointment, it's critical that you are aware and monitor your emotional engagement, your level of excitement and belief and hope. That is what will change things. Disappointment. It's part of life. It's part of growing. It's a good thing. It helps us want to get better. It's built into us.  But when you get disappointed, don't ask yourself, why couldn't I do it? Why didn't I do this? Why questions are bad. What I want you to do instead is ask, what's the lesson and what am I going to do about it? Those two questions keep you solutions-focused.

Be aware of your emotional engagement.

Be aware of your emotional engagement, be excited. Be expectant of a positive future. That's the beauty of a new year. It's a new beginning.

Please share this video.  We have our Shop Owner’s Round Table, on the second Thursday of every month, 7 p.m. Eastern, and we would love you and your friends to drop by. Shop owners only. And then we have our upcoming Pocket Business Genius webinar on the second Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time. 

God bless. stay safe, have some fun, and go make some money.  Take care.

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