A matter of mindsets

On handling disappointment

Disappointment is a fact of life, says Ed Chapman MSc CMDip: “I was once told,

‘if you never have any expectations then you can never be disappointed’ . Although there is something quite stoic and zen about this mindset, I also find it nihilistic and pessimistic. Emotions are a part of life. ”

So what has prompted me to write this piece on handling disappointment? I was due to move to Melbourne and take on the role of DirectorofGolfatMetropolitanGC,aroleIaccepted in September 2021. But fate had other ideas. And by fate I mean bureaucratic red tape of the Australian immigration department. I won ’t bore you with the finer details but five months after my visaapplicationwentin,andpotentiallyuptoanothertenmonthsuntilitmightbeprocessed,thedream was over and no move Down Under would be happening.

When I had the call, and I wasn ’t blindsided, the conversation about this possibility had been had with the visa processing issues Australia was facing, I handled the call professionally. There was no other way to handle it. I had a gut feeling that this call was aboutendingtheagreement,whichmadeiteasierto receive the news. There ’ s a Latin saying that I keep close to my heart, ‘Amor Fati’ , which translates as ‘love your fate ’ . I use a medallion with this embossed on as my ball marker which helps to keep me sane on a bad golfing day!

Fiveyearsofstudyingstoicphilosophyhashelped arm with me ways of dealing with bad experiences/situations. Does this mean it’ s easy? No. Just easier. We can choose how we view situations. Our default might be to think: this is unfair; why did it happen to me; I’ m so unlucky; or maybe some choice words about the Australian immigration department!

However,isthisreallythebestattitudetohelpget over a disappointment? In ‘When Breathe Becomes Air ’ , a tragic memoir about an oncologist who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he acknowledges the

‘ why me ’ question with the answer as simply being, ‘ why not me?’ . When viewed this way life isn ’t fair or unfair, it simply is. Acknowledging this as being the real state of affairs allows us to choose a positive mental attitude (defined as: ‘the correct mental attitude in a given situation…not always thinking that life is full of rainbows and unicorns ’) and moving forward.

SebastianJunger(award-winningauthorofTribe, and director of Restrepo) only got into writing and filmmaking because he nearly lost his leg in a chainsaw accident at work. This gave him the inspiration to write and film about dangerous jobs. This only happened because a ‘bad’ event occurred. He explains, ‘ you can only know if something is good or bad in the fullness of time, even if right now it seems to be a bad event’ . Or as Steve Jobs put it, ‘ you can only connect the dots looking backwards ’ , after acknowledging being fired from Apple led him to discoverandlearnskillsthathethenneededtomake Apple the company it is today.

The probability tree. We often think of outcomes as being inevitable once they happen, which if you subscribe to the ‘block universe theory ’ it is. However, if we think of every outcome and situation as being assigned levels of probability to the likelihood of the outcome, then we can see that nothing is inevitable. Looking backwards we can see that whathashappenedcouldeasilyhaveturnedoutbetter or worse than it did and at the time we had no way of knowing, not 100% anyway, of exactly how it would turn out. We might know the probability of a certain outcome but most outcomes are not 100% knowable.

None of this means I was, or am, happy with the outcomeofmyvisanotcomingthroughintime.But it is simply what happened. Not good, not bad, just is. Why did it happen to me?… Why not me? Why someoneelse?Lifeisn ’taboutnotgettingknockedto the ground, it’ s about how we get up, dust ourselves off, and move on with the next step. And whatever my next step may hold, I know it will be exciting. How do I know? Because I will make it exciting and that’ s my choice of mindset. <