Don’t Give Disappointments the Wrong Kind of Power
Recently my 14 year old lost her entire gymnastics competition season because of a knee injury. This is somewhat expected and normal for gymnasts - but what’s not normal is missing the previous season for a pandemic and the season before that for an elbow injury. Her comment as we drove away from the orthopedic this year…”I’m not sure why I even train in this sport… I never get to really do it.”
Parenting this moment was literally impossible. What great wisdom do you offer at this heartbreaking moment? It’s been 3 years since she’s gotten to enter the competition with her warmups, salute the anthem, wear the rhinestone leotard, compete, and stand on the podium and receive medals. Three years where she trained 20+ hours a week not knowing she’d never get to feel the reward of that work.
BUT- Parenting this moment is probably one of the most important things we face in her adolescence! Disappointments should not be given power over our energy, hope and drive for the future. Learning to learn, see reality vs emotion and put a plan in place to overcome is a lifelong skill we all need! How many adults do we see (or maybe it’s us) that have disappointment and then they back off or even give up.
We are a family of faith, so we believe there is always purpose in our journey- even when it sucks. BUT how do you teach this to a child? … one conversation… one prayer at a time.
What I’ve learned from this experience is that it’s not the BIG conversation you have as you leave the orthopedic- consoling their sorrow and encouraging the HUGE comeback that you believe will happen for them… It’s the thousand of tiny conversations, comments, gestures, and moments that KEEP happening over the next months. It’s teaching her how to walk through disappointment- and as I teach her I am learning so much myself.
We don’t outgrow disappointment. It’s not like at 30 or 40 we suddenly are immune to the feeling of things not going as we’d hoped. In fact, it may be that more and more potential for disappointment happens in our 30-60’s as we go for bigger goals and have more invested in the risks we take.
Learning to deal with disappointment isn’t something that happens in one moment. I’ts not a nice clean, calculated, rational process. Disappointment is emotional and often reality becomes very irrational.
It haunts and screams lies into our ears for hours, days, weeks and even longer…
You never could have done it…
You didn’t have what it took…
You gave up too soon…
You should’ve fought more for this…
Someone else worked harder…
Someone else deserves it more…
If you had only…
What if you’d…
These are just a few of the lies that get planted in our minds when we are disappointed by an outcome. The truth…? This moment is something you get to learn from, grow from- and then… MOVE FORWARD FROM! We are not designed to sit in that disappointment and let it define us! We are designed to take a setback and launch forward into far greater things BECAUSE of it!
The more we live life full out the more risks we take. That’s a good thing! We need to look at disappointment as minor setbacks- teachable moments -
For a 14 year old, that means learning to train because you love the sport - not the rewards of it. It means seeing parts of the process that are amazing that you might have missed otherwise- like a teammate going through a similar issue, or becoming stronger in other areas while you wait. It also means that sometimes there is something else you need to see- like the fact that you love choreography, coaching or something totally different like singing or art. If we are too caught up in one thing we can totally miss something else that we were literally designed to do! Disappointments can actually be a way to get us on the path we were meant to be on in the first place.
I challenge you to re-read that paragraph above and translate it to “for me this means…”
It’s so hard to watch your child be disappointed… especially for this long- AND YET- I firmly believe there are lessons in the disappointment that will be far longer reaching than any gymnastics victory could have been. (I’ve just not fully convinced her of this yet).