Bouncing Back After Setback and Disappointment

Bouncing back after you have a setback or after a major disappointment starts with acceptance. You need to be able to accept where you are right now. In order for a ball to bounce, it needs something to bounce out of, right? So do you. If you want to start bouncing back after a setback or failure, you need to put your feet solidly on the ground of reality.

A natural reaction to setback and disappointment is denial. Escape is common reaction too.

One of my favorite ways to avoid accepting failures is to binge eat. When I'm hiding in a box of cookies (not literally, of course), it may feel good in the moment, but I always feel worse later. Many people hide in drugs, alcohol, shopping, gambling, and many other forms of addiction or self destructive behavior. Unfortunately, none of these actions will help you bounce back.

You must be willing to accept the mess you're in. If you want to whine about it while you're accepting it, that's fine. Whine. Cry. Gnash your teeth. Do whatever helps you really feel and accept the pain of what you've lost. Once you've faced the mess, you're ready to start bouncing back from it.

The next step in bouncing back is developing optimism. You can't go from what you don't want to what you want if you don't believe that you can. Optimism is the fuel that will get you moving to make a change in your life.

Of course, it's tough to be optimistic when you've failed yet again. When the setbacks and disappointments pile up, it can feel like optimism is an idiotic state that only the totally clueless can be in.

Believe me, I know how hard it is to be optimistic when you're starting over AGAIN. As an author who has racked up over 2000 rejection letters in the last couple decades, I've experienced many times when I thought optimism was totally impossible.

So how did I find optimism again so I could bounce back and try again?

I learned to find faith.

"Keep the faith," is often used to encourage people to stay committed to a religion or spiritual practice. But that's not the way I'm using the words faith and keep the faith.

To keep the faith when you're starting over means to remember a very important fact about life: the past does not predict the future. Just because something bad happened in the past, just because you failed the last 100 or 1000 times you tried something doesn't mean you'll fail again. If you remember this, you can find faith that something good can still come your way even after you've experienced a whole bunch of bad.

When you apply optimism and faith to your life, after you accept your situation, you have done what you need to do so you can start bouncing back.