The air in my car’s tires has been low for weeks. Today, I finally got around to fixing that issue. I have no idea what’s going on with the weather any more. It’s up and down and just all over the place. Anyway, while I was doing this I had some thoughts. The thought started with the idea that we should be able to disappoint people. This is something I’ve always struggled with. The fear of disappointing people has led me to be a people pleaser. It got to such a level that I would get anxiety and go into hero mode.

This was especially evident when at work. We could never let a project fail or not resolve something no matter how poor the documentation was. You need RAID monitored by SNMP, (yeah I know, what), I’m the one to figure it out. If I have to find the MIB and read it to get the values and so on I’ll spend the hours to do it. We’d get poorly scope projects or things that our company didn’t do and the extent that we’d go to get them done was crazy. Sure we’d push back internally and complain to the CEO and Sales team, but at the end of the day we’d knuckle down and spend far longer than had been scoped. The fear of disappointing clients drove my body into anxiety induce overdrive. Sleep became impossible. I’d toss and turn in fear. My body would sweat, while I felt freezing cold. The knots in my stomach would cause me to have to stress poop. TMI?

While I was thinking about this I started to wonder where this came from. When I was younger, and honestly up until I was probably 35 or 36 there were few things more devastating to me than my parents being disappointed. Please, please, just be angry or something. For some reason I could tolerate that. Disappointment though, that was crushing. It would destroy my confidence. The intensity of the guilt and shame could leave me feeling like Atlas with the weight of the world on my shoulders. The anger I could handle. Just be mad please. I know that’ll pass. I won’t feel as though I’ve let you down.

Now that I’m a parent this makes me wonder. Am I the only one who would rather have my parents be mad than disappointed? This goes into my other relationships too, at work, or personal ones. Will our kids be better off if we don’t tell them we’re disappointed? We can be disappointed and there will be times we are, but how do we properly explain that to them without crushing them. Do we need to explain more why we feel the way we feel, or what we wish they would have done? For me this doesn’t feel like it solves anything. As a parent I think, me personally, I would rather try and cope with my own disappointment in my children and explain to them that I understand the will make mistakes. It’s part of being human and learning. Can we be disappointed without putting that guilt and shame on our children? Can we do that as adults, kids, or teens in our daily lives? As people we will disappoint other people. Everyone has their own expectations set of others. We can’t control how other people will react or what they will do. Isn’t this really leads to the anger and disappointment anyway; our expectations not being met? Doesn’t that put the onus on us to some degree? Expecting outcomes that we have no control over? Does it make it fair to put that on others? How do we balance our own feelings of disappointment in the things we can’t control with the impact that might have on others. To some degree it’s us dealing with our own feelings while attempting to not cause other people to feel things that they may not need to feel.

Back to being a parent though, now that the tables are turned and I am one. I hope I’m able to mentally handle those times when my own uncontrollable expectations aren’t met and that I don’t crush my children under the weight of expectations that may not be necessary nor attainable. The challenge will be not passing that on, setting expectations that can be achieved, and understanding that they are their own person who will, and should, make their own choices. Those choices may lead to actions I don’t agree with. That doesn’t mean I should be disappointed right? It will require taking the time and understanding both sides of it. Why did I expect something and why did they do something different. Did they learn something from it? Can we talk and make sure we’re both ok. At the end though, how do we all get more comfortable disappointing others in our relationships (be it work, personal, or other), and work through it together. There will be, and should be times where we have to disappoint someone else. We shouldn’t have to carry the weight of their feelings of disappointment all the time.

Be disappointed in me. Let me disappoint you. Disappoint me. When all is said and done though can we talk and make sure we’re both ok. It shouldn’t be one sided. None of us should silently carry either side of this. We will all make mistake or be unable to meet someone else’s expectations that they have no control over. We make our own choices and those choices can’t always please others at the expense of ourselves, or fear of how that may impact us.