Turn your frown upside down.

When one door closes, another one opens.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

There are a lot of clichés out there to help us deal with disappointments in life, not to mention a slew of titles on the non-fiction list encouraging us to do the same. The sheer volume of advice underscores how challenging this part of the human condition truly is. While disappointment inevitably shows up in our lives, no one enjoys the feeling. We all look for the best strategies to avoid it, and then, when those strategies fail, cope with it. Try though we may, no one gets off scot-free.

 

This past week, I dealt with some professional disappointment myself. A few newly admitted students whom we really hoped would come to Colorado Academy made other high school choices. The next day I learned that a teaching candidate we were recruiting decided to take a different job. In both of these examples, I was disappointed that the effort extended to bring people to our community did not pay off. For reasons both selfish and institutional, I wanted these situations to work out the way I planned.

 

How to deal? Well, after feeling bad for a short time, I had to re-group and focus on what I needed to do next. (For one thing, I went back to the stack of applications for the teaching position.) I also needed to re-focus my attention on the positives that were right in front of me, namely that we had just landed a really great new faculty member the week before, not to mention we would soon be enrolling 35 really amazing new 9^th graders from multiple schools in the area. Many would be coming from new-to-CA families who would add to our community in many positive ways. While some analysis of the disappointing situations could help me learn, there was no sense spending too much time on the “what ifs” or “why nots.”

 

So what do I advise parents to do when their children face disappointments? In some ways, that depends on the kind of disappointment; clearly, some situations and circumstances require more time and attention than others. But in general, the process I encourage parents to follow is similar. First, validate the feelings and empathize with the emotion behind it. Minimizing or brushing off the feelings of disappointment won’t help much. Second, help the student sort out what is in their control and what isn’t. Some disappointment (like college admissions, for instance) is the outcome of a tough and impersonal process over which ultimately they do not have much control. They need to learn from that experience. Eventually, they will get through it and build resilience.

 

Other situations may be the outcome of something that they can still take steps to mitigate or remedy. This is when a parent’s experience and wisdom can help their child make sense of what has happened and what they might do next. That said, I strongly encourage students and parents not to jump too quickly into “let’s fix this” mode, even though it is every parent’s natural instinct. Let your child have every opportunity to live with the outcome and, if possible, problem solve on their own. Some disappointments a student faces might truly be unfair or based on some miscarriage of justice. They need to learn how to manage that as independently as possible. Most situations, however, are the inevitable examples of students not getting outcomes they desire. Whether it’s a low score on a test, not getting a lead role in a play, or making the JV team instead of varsity, these are some of the school-related disappointments that just come with being a teenager. A calm, patient, understanding parent can really help their child cope and learn.

 

At CA the opportunities to succeed are plentiful and some of our standard practices like “no cuts” in team sports or test corrections help buffer our students from some of the disappointments that might befall students in a larger, more impersonal setting. Still, even at our school not everything can or should go exactly the way every child wants. There are competitive programs in our Upper School (Mock Trial, REDI Lab, CLT, certain global travel experiences, just to name a few) that cannot accommodate every student who wants to be part of them. That is part of what makes those programs strong. Students can learn a lot from getting into competitive programs, and maybe even more when they don’t. Those experiences help them understand what high standards are all about and to prioritize what really matters to them.

 

So back to the well-worn advice of the ages. I recall a Peanuts cartoon in my mom’s office that read, “In every life some rain must fall.” An umbrella-less Charlie Brown looked pretty miserable as he was getting soaked in the picture. Yet we know Charlie Brown persevered despite his many disappointments. While I don’t wish for every student to suffer quite as much as he did, I do wish for them the occasional rain fall, and the intermittent disappointments that make up life.