Dealing with Disappointment 3 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello again.  I’m here with my third installment of four on the topic of dealing with disappointment and possible failure.  All of this, as you’ll recall if you’ve been listening, arose out of an email I received from our friend George.  I’m calling him George, that’s not his name.  He wrote about how he was struggling after 3 years of work, in a cross-cultural setting, in dealing with the fact that everything he did was wrong, everybody was critical of him and they didn’t like to do things his way.  He didn’t know what to do about it.  So…here we go.  We’re talking today about – I shouldn’t have bad feelings.  That’s one of the things that George sort of illuded to.  I shouldn’t be having these bad feelings.  A corollary to that is that I shouldn’t let other people know that I have bad feelings.  We’re going to talk about a number of things.

Where does this come from?  I think it comes from the ‘me virsus them’ concept.  Now what in the world does that mean?  Well it goes back to our expectations.  Our expectation is that it’s me virsus them.  Now virsus sounds pretty hard but you know it’s sort of like we want to be in a win-lose situation with those people around us rather than a win-win.  Why do I say that?  That sounds really bad.  Well, sometimes we have this attitude of – I can’t be honest with the people around me, whether they be teammates or local people.  They can’t see me as vulnerable.  I am their teacher, boss, consultant.  That is, I am essentially their superior.  This is a very subtle thing in most all of us.  In some of us it’s not that subtle, but it’s very subtle and it really gets us into trouble in that it sets us up to bring out the most defensive reactions in those people around us.  The fact is, we are here as co-learners.  George – you and I need to remember that all the time.  For me, I have a special problem with that because I’m a professional.  You may be a professional too.  You know, we’re here as co-learners.  I need to learn from them.  I need to learn from my co-workers and the local people.  We are here as humans.  We’re all human beings.  We share that distinction of being a gift from our Creator.  We are all here in the same boat and that humanity in us is both good and problematic.  We have many wonderful characteristics for each other but we also have many things that keep us apart and hurt us.  That goes both ways, from the local people and people like George who lives there doing a job.  That group and member are very important to us all.  Those kinds of things can give us real problems.   Hello again.  I’m here with my third installment of four on the topic of dealing with disappointment and possible failure.  All of this, as you’ll recall if you’ve been listening, arose out of an email I received from our friend George.  I’m calling him George, that’s not his name.  He wrote about how he was struggling after 3 years of work, in a cross-cultural setting, in dealing with the fact that everything he did was wrong, everybody was critical of him and they didn’t like to do things his way.  He didn’t know what to do about it.  So…here we go.  We’re talking today about – I shouldn’t have bad feelings.  That’s one of the things that George sort of illuded to.  I shouldn’t be having these bad feelings.  A corollary to that is that I shouldn’t let other people know that I have bad feelings.  We’re going to talk about a number of things.

We’re here – remember this – we’re here as happy and hurting together.  Everything happens as a purpose.  I believe that, but I also know that I’m going to have good times and bad times.  I have that here at home.  Why would I expect that I wouldn’t have that when I live in a different cultural context?  I don’t know.  I don’t know that we often think about it that way, but I’m trying to think through some things here with George so that we can understand what some of those underlying things are.     What do we do about this?  I think we learn from our mistakes.  George feels that people are contradicting him.  He feels that he then does things wrong.  We’ve talked about ways in which he can gather input from the people around him where he can use them as his teachers as opposed to him only being the teacher.  We also learned that when we’re thwarted, or prevented from doing something, so many times we may think that not making progress is to lose progress or lose forward motion.  I think sometimes being stuck in something gives us a special insight into that situation.  It helps us to learn about ourselves and it helps us to learn about the context that is occurring locally.  I don’t look at being thwarted or being prevented from doing something as necessarily a failure.   

Should we have bad feelings?  That’s what is goes back to.  I want to focus on that now.  It think to say that we shouldn’t have bad feelings is to say that we can’t be human.  To be human, to be who we are, means that we experience life and all of life in its subtleties and it’s various and wonderful aspects.  We’re going to be happy, we’re going to be sad.  We’re going to be glad, we’re going to be tearful.  We’re going to be frustrated, we’re going to be angry.  We’re going to be anxious, we’re going to be wonderfully quiet, we’re going to be noisy.  Everything in life we’re going to experience and we’re going to experience that wherever we are.  Certainly some things, if you look at the metaphor of pots on the stove, some things are going to get moved to the back burner.  We may not be as loud as boisterous in some contexts as we could be at home, but we still are going to be happy and boisterous in maybe a more contained way.  Why?  Because we can’t help  it.  Should we have bad feelings?  Yes, because we can’t help not having bad feelings.   

Now, the question arises, ‘Well, then what do we do with the bad feelings when we have them?’  That’s the problem.  In George’s case, I want to ask George, ‘What do the bad feelings do to you?’  For some people that I’ve talked to, the bad feelings set us up for a feeling of being in an extremely negative place.  Everything is interpreted from that bad feeling perspective.  For example, if George had been mistreated, had some money taken from him or felt that he had gotten a bad deal in the marketplace, he might develop an attitude that he generalizes to everybody in that market.  That may not be accurate.  Somebody maybe did take advantage of him, but he needs to contextualize it and say, ‘I’m going to have to be more careful in my negotiations.  As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to have to have one of my local friends come with me, negotiate, help me, watch me and give me feedback because I need the help and concern of local friends.  I need them to help me figure out what I’m doing wrong’.  Here we’re getting back to that teach me attitude that was so apparent in previous sessions.  So George needs to ask, ‘Am I carrying an unreasonable or a negative attitude about those people around me?’  This doesn’t just happen to be with local people.  It can be with people on the team that are from George’s place where he lives, his home.  He can decide that certain other people are lazy, they don’t care or they have poor standards, and it may be that that’s what they do, but maybe not.  I don’t think that he should focus on what they do and use that as a wedge to be driven between him and his teammates.  I think it has to be worked out.  Things have to be worked out and talked through and while George did a great first step of reaching out and talking to his support network through email, he needs to take some of that back to the people that were really involved with him and that worked with him on a daily basis.  

Should I have bad feelings?  Yes.  You can’t get away from it.  You’re going to have bad feelings.  You’re going to be angry, you’re going to be hurt. You’re going to be hostile, but that’s all part of the package that lets those other people there know that you are human too.  If our goal is to live where we don’t usually live and to be in situations where we are presenting a picture of difference and wanting people to consider that, then they need to see the whole package of us.  They’re not going to reject us out of hand.  Most people will say, ‘Oh, okay, you’re just like me therefore I can approach you’.  So as we deal with all of this, George, don’t let the disappointment get you down too much.  It’s okay to be disappointed, it’s okay to be hurt but you’re reaching out.  Keep reaching out and learning.  That’s going to make a big difference.   

Talk to you next time!