[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello, my friends, this is Dex again, and welcome to this week's episode on avoiding disappointment. And I really reckon this is going to appeal to a lot of you out there, I hope so, because really, who loves disappointment? And by the way, thinking about what you, my dearest listener, might want to hear, I did check out my podcast stats this morning, and the most popular episodes are still the very first six from 2021.

[00:00:52] So if you haven't listened to episodes one to six, pop back and listen sometime because they will seed hope into your brain. And in them, I really deliberately addressed all the first things you need to know if you are approaching or in burnout. So this is both understanding what's happening to you and learning how to fix it.

[00:01:15] And by the way, the seventh most popular episode is Burnout Prevention released in June 2024, which is 3 years into the podcast. So I think that tells really quite a sad story about the state of play in the world today of burnout. And reading the Workplace Wellbeing Report for 2024, 66 percent of workers say they have experienced burnout in the last three months, as compared to 53 percent in 2022.

[00:01:46] That's not looking good. So here I am hoping that you will glean something useful from today in order that you can help yourself or come to me and I will help you because burnout is curable, but because it's curable, it's also preventable using exactly the same tools. And I'm going to coach you whatever stage you're at in burnout or pre burnout and keen for prevention in yourself and your team.

[00:02:15] Because burnout really can be a team sport if you didn't know. It's contagious, particularly down a chain of command or within a team. And if your team is burning out, listen to next week's episode when I'm going to talk about burnout prevention for teams. So back to my first six podcast episodes just quickly.

[00:02:35] Why are they so popular? I think it's worth explaining because first, because I talk through burnout 101, because you need to know what's going on for you in terms of your burnout experience. Are you in burnout or not? How did you get there? What went wrong? Why did those things go so wrong? How specifically are you suffering?

[00:02:59] And what are the most urgent problems to fix? And why haven't you been able to fix them by yourself until now? So then really if you can see all of that, if you think you're in burnout, it's how can you quickly reduce your suffering so you can function well enough, with enough energy and motivation to move through your burnout experience and come out the other side.

[00:03:22] So you can reduce fear, regain a little perspective, regain a little bit of energy and equilibrium, and feel better. And in those early episodes, I also outline a map of the future so you can see where you're going. Because burnout is predictably recoverable, and I'll show you how that can be achieved.

[00:03:45] There are key skills you can learn to reset yourself and find all that lost power and energy. And this will help you get back on the horse to be your tremendous, authentic, skilled and resilient self. Let's just say that I believe in you and I will teach you to believe much more wholeheartedly in yourself, no matter how you feel right now, provided burnout's your primary problem.

[00:04:12] So that brings us back to this episode about disappointment because Disappointment, frustration, powerlessness, futility, feeling thwarted and seeing oneself as failing, and the ensuing anger, loss of motivation, irritability and resentment are all central features of burnout that cause enormous pain, don't they?

[00:04:36] And this morning, I saw a definition of disappointment, because so many things, it's fascinating how often my understanding doesn't correspond with anybody else's. So here's the definition. Disappointment is a threat to organizational effectiveness as both a response and an anticipation of failure and an emotion that needs to be managed in order to prevent it from damaging organizational morale and performance.

[00:05:10] I think it's worth pointing out that disappointment is a feeling. It's a feeling you have in your mind and body. It's inside you. And humans perceive their feelings as positive or negative. And typically, every life will have a balance of emotions. Say, 50 percent positive and 50 percent negative. And when I was in burnout and I first heard that idea, this 50-50 of emotions.

[00:05:38] I was over the moon because mine were more like 90-10 against. 50-50 sounded wonderful. I'll take it. But anyway, we have various emotions and we can't avoid all of those. Emotions come and go all of the time in an unstoppable tide, but we don't necessarily feel like we can control them. And today I would really like to challenge that notion, especially for disappointment, because disappointment really means

[00:06:08] something happened that didn't meet our expectations. In effect, it shouldn't have happened, according to us, and what we think we deserve.

[00:06:20] So if someone eats the last Tim Tam, then we'll be disappointed. For overseas listeners who don't know what a Tim Tam is, Tim Tams are the quintessential Aussie chocolate cookie. So back in the day, I could eat a whole packet of them, FYI. It was a case of disappointment before I started, Eat the cookies.

[00:06:43] Disappointment at the end. Bit familiar, isn't that how it goes? So these days, thankfully, I have no further need for Tim Tams. If I'm looking for a Tim Tam, if I did not have the expectation that Tim Tams would be available, then I wouldn't feel disappointed . Disappointment is not getting something we want, or getting something we didn't want.

[00:07:07] And our animal brains are always going to follow that path due to the motivational triad of a survival. Animals are geared up, they're wired to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and save energy to ensure the survival of the species. So pleasure we're talking about heat, warmth, connection, food, sleep, sex, all the things that keep us alive.

[00:07:34] And pain we're talking about Illness, injury, attack. And saving energy is really using as little of our body's fuel as possible in case we can't get anything more to eat. In case there's a national Tim Tam shortage. So chocolate cookies come under that seeking pleasure. Food, sugar, energy. Our brains think we need them to survive.

[00:07:58] So we can't transcend this motivational triad. It will, in its purest sense, keep us alive It's just that we didn't need that last Tim Tam. That wasn't critical. And we have human brains. They're very clever. We can tell the difference. Possible exception in the current era, where the manipulation of our thoughts, desires, and needs by marketing gurus has perverted the way that we sense our needs.

[00:08:28] And it skewed us towards FOMO, compulsive and addictive behaviours. That's where we come unstuck. And that contributes to burnout.

[00:08:40] If disappointment then is simply an emotion, a wave of energy going through our body. It's information from our brain via our emotions that things aren't going our way. We perceive some existential threat in this. We see disappointment as a warning and we react accordingly. Disappointment then is an emotion that's different from other emotions.

[00:09:09] Let's use as an example grief. So when we feel grief, it's when we've lost something or someone that's dear to us. But we don't see that grief as a threat. It's just a signal that we have loss. Disappointment, though, is a signpost, I think. Something happened that, according to us, should not have. It might be that another person has acted out of alignment with our beliefs.

[00:09:37] Because we have a set of beliefs about how good humans behave, and they have operated outside of that belief. And really, we're going to receive that as either a herd level threat, talking about animal survival again, or a personal threat. And they might coincidentally, surprise, be having exactly the same experience about us.

[00:10:00] Seeing our actions as out of alignment with their beliefs. And they'll feel threatened, in which case we've got a fight on our hands, don't we? Each of us will then need to be right, and they might try to align our actions with their values, good luck with that, and we might reciprocate. Or we might dig into self righteousness and align ourselves more deeply with our own values and beliefs, retreat into them.

[00:10:29] And you might see that happen in your work life. At work, do you see a lot of injustice? Or disparity, unfairness, stupidity perhaps. Do you feel at times affronted or disrespected, ignored or railroaded? Because if we group all of those things under disappointment, something happened that shouldn't have, at that point we can choose to change our experience of that.

[00:10:58] We can rebalance the 50-50 of our internal emotions. We can in fact choose to respond differently to this other human who is, after all, just behaving according to their rules, not ours. We can actually take our power back because there are 8 billion people on this planet, give or take. But the only one really malleable to change by us is us.

[00:11:29] If disappointment is expecting other people to play by our rules, what would happen if we didn't have that expectation? If we simply let them be them, we can't stop them anyway. But we can stop the war. The war is mostly happening inside our own guts. That's where we feel it. Stress in our guts, our minds, our hearts.

[00:11:53] So what's happening really is we had an expectation of somebody, they didn't meet that expectation, and we're letting our own disappointment about that gnaw away at our insides, destroying our peace and our well being, often for weeks or months or years. All because another person has grown up with a different set of values and beliefs than we did, and they usually don't retract those beliefs and we don't retract ours.

[00:12:23] Could be a pretty long wait to agree with them then, right? And that's exactly why I work on burnout at an individual level. Because if you're waiting for your boss, or your organization, or your industry to help you out of burnout, you could be waiting a long time. Instead, it's more profitable to think, okay, how can you immunize yourself against the repercussions of disappointment?

[00:12:49] That's something that you can control. How can you use disappointment to fuel your growth rather than destroy your sleep and digestion? How can working skillfully with disappointment, with people, with the way life actually is, be, if you like, compost for your goal? What you're trying to achieve? Because when you don't allow yourself to entertain so many cast iron beliefs, that you need other people to uphold,

[00:13:20] you become a bit more flexible. Like a reed in a river, you're going to bend, not snap. The benefit is in the 50-50 of your emotion. If you decide to let people be who they are, as if you could ever stop them anyway, and you dismantle some of your own expectations, of them, the beneficiary is you. Because those expectations may seem like life preservers, but based on the number of expectations other people aren't meeting, do you really need them to survive?

[00:13:56] Or can you start surfing the waves of other people's behavior with a lighter touch, more equanimity? I was thinking this morning, a story I read about a bad tempered Buddhist monk, who was instructed by his master to sit by the gate of the city every day and pay coins to anyone who passed by and insulted him.

[00:14:19] So for years he sat there, silently paying them. Finally, he returns to the monastery and one of the monks reprimanded him and he burst out laughing. He said, thank you brother, that's wonderful. I've been paying people for years to do that and now you're willing to do it for free. So really, I think disappointment is a signal to let go and let God.

[00:14:44] Or however you conceive that. Perhaps it's teaching us that we don't need to cling to our expectation. Monks, after all, live a life of renunciation. And whilst we don't need to do that, we might see how little we truly depend on others for our emotional safety and well being. How remarkably little we do need to feel okay.

[00:15:11] Because as adults, we can create the safety we need inside of ourselves, where it becomes a permanent resource to us. Always available. And then we can release our expectations that other people are responsible for how we feel. We can notice our desire for control and safety. And we can treat ourselves so beautifully that we feel safe in our own bodies.

[00:15:36] And to some extent, this is how I operate in myself. I've learned those tricks and this is why I don't need packets of Tim Tams anymore, to be honest. Because I feel safe in my own body. And if that seems like a lofty and abstract sort of principle to you, I will say that I teach each and every one of my clients this skill.

[00:16:02] And once we realize that we're perfectly capable of maintaining our own equilibrium, we will naturally release this childlike expectation we hold that others are responsible for our well being and must effectively save us. So when I do this with clients, this is really when I start seeing them smile a lot.

[00:16:23] And they're deep smiles, peaceful smiles, like they found an unshakable source of goodness, which indeed they have. I teach them how to like themselves, how to see their own good hearts. Respect themselves. Be kind, compassionate and generous with themselves. Teach them how to take care of that fearful inner part of themselves that feels so vulnerable.

[00:16:51] Teach them to champion themselves and retain their personal values regardless. And I'm going to include the podcast episode on championing yourself in the show notes if you want to listen to that. But let's look for a second at the different kinds of disappointment associated mostly with professional burnout.

[00:17:12] I think primarily, number one, disappointment in yourself, feeling like a failure. And this is really trying to align ourselves with who we thought we were supposed to be. This is trying to live out the whole Manbox concept, or our professional status, or for a woman being the emotional caregiver, the over giver.

[00:17:34] Because if you could agree with yourself that you're a good enough person as a human being, not based on what you do, wouldn't you remove the possibility of ever being disappointed in yourself? If you simply liked and approve of yourself as you are. And that's what I teach my clients. You'll see some other podcast links in the show notes if you want to pursue this.

[00:17:59] So basically I teach people to self approve and never need to be disappointed in themselves. The next kind of disappointment I think is career disappointment. So many of us have experienced letdowns in our careers, and we didn't get a job or a promotion, a client, a project, or a result that we wanted, or others disrespect the value of our work or our professionalism.

[00:18:23] Maybe we've been sidelined, demoted, made redundant or fired or put on a spurious performance plan or subject to takeover. Or we've got a new boss we don't get on with, or we gotta do the boss's dirty work for them, or we're no good at managing up, or we can't satisfy the boss's demands or meet our targets or others complain about us, or maybe we can't squeeze good results from our teams.

[00:18:53] Maybe there's division and infighting, lack of teamwork, or they're quiet quitting on us. Any of those could have happened to any of us, right? But if we choose to let go of expectations and simply work with what is, because what other choice is there much of the time? We have to work with what is.

[00:19:14] We can't change other people. Assuming that you've already learned to champion yourself, that you're no longer seeing yourself as vulnerable, attacked, helpless, or wrong, resolving situations like this really becomes a practical matter where you can apply logic from a neutral emotion, rather than trying to win an argument,

[00:19:36] wrestle for control, punish, or gain approval. Because any situation we're in will seem either positive or neutral, so we want to keep it, or negative and we want to leave it. And I think if it comes out as negative and you feel the urge to leave the situation, ask yourself a whole bunch of questions. And you're going to need to be really forthright with yourself here, really honest.

[00:20:04] And sometimes that means you need to enlist help to make sure you're not thinking from your negative emotions. Simply trying to prove yourself right and the other person wrong. So you need to take the heat off your ego. So here are some questions you could ask. What internal expectation do I have that's not being met in this situation?

[00:20:27] And then you can say to yourself, okay, is it really true? Is that really true? And if it is, okay, what am I afraid is going to happen? And is that thing I'm afraid of, is that a deal breaker? Maybe yes, maybe no. What is the probability of this worst case thing happening. And what do I need to do, finally, to work with this situation as it is, not against it?

[00:20:54] Can I create some inner safety for myself and let some of my expectations go? How would I need to see myself for this not to be a problem? How would I need to see the other party? Can this situation be remedied? And if so, what do I think the next best thing is that I can try to help move this situation along?

[00:21:17] Or if I don't think it can be remedied, What other choices present themselves to me? I was working recently with a very experienced doctor who was on a performance plan. Heartbreaking, but not unusual these days. And the difficulty was that my client believed her boss was against her and was going to sack her.

[00:21:40] Of course she was very angry. So we worked on self support and letting go of both expectations and assumptions about the situation. And it turned out that the boss himself had recently been on a performance plan. He had a lot on his plate. He felt very pressured managing this performance issue and the resulting conflict.

[00:22:01] He failed to communicate well and he just wanted the problem to go away. So we worked through this. The doctor continued working. As together we reduced her fear and improved her ability to remain calm at work and deliver her naturally excellent skills and her strong commitment to service. Finally, the two people got together at the end of the plan.

[00:22:24] Turned out they were like minded in their desire for excellence, and they found a way to work very productively together on a new initiative.

[00:22:32] So at work, really, I think this illustrates that, especially when we're in burnout, everything is not as it seems. Our catastrophizing and fearful brains get carried away and focus only on danger, threat, suffering, and what's gone wrong. Our amygdalas are constantly pumping out stress hormones, That paint every scene black.

[00:22:56] And that distorted picture is quite hard to resolve. There we are, just floundering in it. But really, if a lifeboat's upside down, it can't rescue anyone. We need to right it first. In fact, I think we need to convert it to a self-righting lifeboat. That's going to reduce our lightning fast tendency to panic.

[00:23:17] Paints the storm blacker than it needs to be. So we can be that lifeboat for ourselves. That's what we do in Burnout Recovery. We stop this flight to panic and despair, and in its place we create this inner confidence, self assurance, self empowerment. Because no human is designed to dwell in permanent fear.

[00:23:39] In burnout, it's a self perpetuating cycle, but I can help you recalibrate to a degree that will shock you. The sun will shine again, you will be much less susceptible to fear and panic about the events in your world or your workplace. Because the good is in you, and together we'll find it. There's another case which is an extension of the disappointment with your boss scenario, and it's the disappointment in leadership or your organization, or maybe even the whole industry.

[00:24:14] And this is often political, maybe just office politics, capitalist pressures or maybe there's a leadership that's divorced from team performance dynamics that threatens team morale, cohesion, creativity, engagement, willingness to contribute. All the things that are cultivated by psychological safety.

[00:24:37] And I read a book quite a long time ago now, but it's still one of my favorite books. It's by Shawn Achor, who's a Harvard researcher and it's called Big Potential. And it's about how to create high performing teams through not just psychological safety, which is essential to enduring success and profitability, but also the power of diversity and how to bring out the best in people, uniting them with the carrot, not the stick.

[00:25:05] And the carrot's not money. All things being equal, money is rarely a professional's first reason to take a job. You have to like the job and want to do it. And be in an environment that fosters positivity, performance and growth. For the large majority of professionals that I've met and hired and coached, the best motivation is working for a good boss who has leadership skills

[00:25:35] and gives talented people the freedom to express their genius and passion in a harmonious team, pulling in the same well defined direction. Good leadership requires much more than technical skills, experience and strategy. It requires emotional intelligence, which is another one of the skills that I teach in burnout recovery, since most of my clients are leaders with big hearts, people with a natural inclination to mentor and serve, and foster a fair and supportive environment that yields 

[00:26:10] high satisfaction as well as excellent results. It's doable. And if your brain doesn't agree, a brain in burnout never will. Recovery is the way to go, so if you want the lights to come back on in your leadership, highly recommend that part. Disappointment. It's an emotion. We can influence our emotions

[00:26:33] with our thoughs, once we calm down our fear response. So if you're feeling downtrodden and hopeless, disappointed by the whole caper at work, exhausted, I want to assure you that the story's not over. That better things await. And I do hope you've learned something useful here that will help you. But if your brain is fried, you might need more support

[00:26:56] to come good. And I can show you how. If you're flat out disappointed, most of the 

[00:27:02] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:27:25] Hello, my friends, this is Dex. Welcome to this healing episode on surviving the holiday. By which I mostly mean

[00:27:33] time in burnout, the good news is it's reversible. So I invite you to come and talk to me for free and let's make a plan for you to recover quickly and sustainably to get back to your best performance. leadership, success, and most of all, enjoyment inside work and out.

[00:27:52] You can book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this episode, please do help me reach more people in burnout by rating and reviewing the podcast and sharing the podcast with your friends who are in high stress and burnout. Thank you so much for listening. And I'd love to hear from you, by the way, SMS me your thoughts via the link in the show notes.

[00:28:16] And to the last person who reached out and said, how can you get in contact with me? Go to DexRandall. com, book an appointment, come and have a chat. Okay. Talk to you next time. Bye now.