Handling Disappointment

In this raw and empowering episode, Carrie takes us behind the scenes of a life-changing moment at a Toastmasters speech competition, where an unexpected disqualification could have crushed her public speaking dreams. But instead of letting disappointment define her, Carrie chose to rise.

She opens up about how she leaned into emotional intelligence, reframed the situation, and made the courageous decision not just to move on, but to compete again—stronger than before.

This episode is a masterclass in turning setbacks into comebacks and a powerful lesson in resilience, leadership, and effective communication. Carrie shares the importance of feeling your emotions, seeking wise counsel, and turning adversity into fuel for growth.

If you're facing a challenge, a disappointment, or a roadblock, this episode will inspire you to stand tall, pivot with purpose, and keep moving forward. Because you can’t let one moment define you.

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Transcript

Welcome back to coffee and tea with Carrie V, I'm Carrie V, your biggest fan, the person who will believe in you until you can believe in yourself, and then I'm still going to believe in you. This podcast is all things communication, leadership, confidence, clarity. It's all things life. And today we're talking about when life disappoints you, when something disappoints you and happens to you, and especially when you didn't see it coming. Although I don't know that we ever really see disappointment coming. How do we handle that? How do we navigate how do we move forward? The thing is, a lot of people will stay stuck in disappointment for a long time, and I totally understand that there is no judgment. I used to do that all the time. I would sit in the disappointment, sit in those feelings forever, just kind of giving myself a huge pity party. It's easy and it's comforting, quite frankly, to give yourself a pity party. It's actually very comforting to do that. So how do we how do we navigate through it? How do we not stay in the disappointment? How do we move forward? How do we make decisions post disappointment? And this is coming up due to an experience I had last weekend. I was, I was competing in a Toastmasters competition, and I had made it up a few levels, and I was at the next level, which was the district level, which required me to travel a distance to get to a conference and stay in a hotel. So I paid for the conference, I paid for the hotel, and I didn't mind at all, because I was so excited to be moving up the ranks in this competition. Last time I competed in a Toastmasters International speech competition was in 2020, and I have not competed since then for a number of reasons. One is one year I was the area director in Toastmasters, and you can't compete if you're holding a leadership position. There were just a number of reasons that I took a few years off from competing, but when I came back this year to compete, I really put my all into it. I put my heart into it. I worked so hard on the presentation, on making sure that I was emoting the right emotions, and that it was connecting with the audience. Because speaking from people, from two people from stage is you don't want it to sound like a lecture. You don't want it to be a you don't want it to be something that you are not connecting with your audience with, because you want to be able to leave them with emotion and with a message. And I worked with a coach, and I just was so excited to be competing in the competition this year, and so I traveled to this conference, and I competed, and I gave it my all. Now here's the thing, if I had not placed, because I went over time, so in a Toastmasters competition, for those of you who aren't familiar, there are rules you have to follow. You can't reference another, another speaker of the day in your speech on the stage in the competition, you cannot you cannot use someone else's story without their permission. It has to be your original work. It has to be coming from your experiences. You if you quote someone and you don't give them credit in the speech, you can be disqualified also if you go under or over time. So in that particular speech, you can, you have to go at least four and a half minutes. You cannot go one second more than seven minutes 30 seconds. It's a five to seven minute speech, and you have that 32nd window on each side of that time. So those are all reasons where you could be disqualified. If you go off the the part of the stage where you can stay in, it's, it's, there's a lot of things to think about when you are competing. It takes a lot of work to compete in this competition, because there's so many things you need to think about so that you don't get disqualified. So being up on that stage, I gave it my all not placing because the judges just didn't like what I had. It just wasn't what they were looking for. That I can handle you. You are not going to have not all 10 people who went up on the stage were going to place in the top three or the top two or the top one. It's impossible. You are going to have people who place and people who don't, and that is fine. I that's what that's what competing is all about. And then you get up, if you don't make it in those top two or three or one, you get up and you do it again. I'm I'm okay with that competing and not placing. That's just part of the that's part of the competition game. You know that you're always putting yourself out there for that risk. However, in this competition, I gave it my all, and I knew that I was connecting with the audience. I could just tell from the feedback they were giving me and how they were with me. I knew I was connecting with the audience, and when I left the. Stage, I was feeling really good about the the way that I competed, and the way I showed up, and I showed up for myself, I showed up for them, and I literally got up that morning and prayed, God, this is yours. This is yours. I want to serve this audience, and however, this turns out, this is yours. Now that's important to remember as I continue on with this story, at the end of the competition, they all the judges, ballots are collected, they're they're taken out of the room for counting, and then they come back in and they announce the first, second and third, well, third, second and first place winners. And as I sat there, it took, it took quite a while, much longer than it should have taken, for them to bring that envelope back in to announce the winners, and they announced the third place, and then the second place and then the first place, and my name was not called. Now, part of me felt like, wait a minute, I did a really good job, but then, but then I, I really reminded myself, everyone up on that stage did first, second, third place. All deserved their all deserve their spots. It would have been. I would not have been. I would not have wanted to have been a judge in that competition. To be honest, everybody worked hard, everybody was fabulous up on that stage. And so I just kind of thought, Well, I'll try again next year. Not a big deal. I was here. I am proud of myself for showing up and practicing and giving it my all, and I will do this again next year, and I'll keep going. If it takes me till I'm 100 to get to the finals and get to that first place World Championship ship of speaking person who takes that final crown, then that's how long it takes, and if I never get it, but I keep trying, that's okay too. It really was okay with it, and I was happy for the people who took those spots, because they were really, really good, and you could tell that they really worked at their speeches. They were well prepared. Everyone was. But as I was sitting there, one of the gentlemen from my Toastmasters club came over and see he sat down next to me, and he said, so you were disqualified through no fault of your own, that took me down. You were disqualified through no fault of your own, and it ended up being a it was a technicality. I could not have changed it. I could not have seen it. I knew nothing about it, but it disqualified me from placing. That was really hard not placing because the judges just didn't connect, or it wasn't what they were looking for in this competition is fine, but finding out that I had been disqualified through something I had no control over, that hurt and that hurt deep. It cut deep. It almost sounded like dirty pool. It was something that could have been fixed weeks before I traveled to this destination weeks before I put in the time, the effort and the finances to be there. It could have been fixed. It could have been changed. But and I'm, I'm, I'm really guarding my words, because I don't want to give Toastmasters a bad name. Every organization has honest people and dishonest people. Across the board, you're going to find that anywhere you go, so I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. But what happened was something that never should have happened, and it almost felt contrived. It felt planned. It felt like they were just waiting until I got there to compete and then and then bring this little technicality to the forefront that I could have known nothing about, and I could have done nothing about.
It was It hurt. It hurt deeply. And so when the conference was over, and this was at the very end of the conference, I really just needed to get out of that room. You know when you have that feeling. But I just really needed to be by myself, and I I ended up ordering in dinner so I wouldn't even see anybody in the lobby, not because I was embarrassed, but because I was hurt, and that hurt was very quickly moving to anger. Very quickly, moving to anger. I wouldn't even cared if I didn't place in the top three, if I wasn't disqualified, but knowing that I never even had a chance because I was disqualified, because something that was totally out of my control and could have been brought to the attention and changed before I ever walked up on that stage, before I even drove to the destination, it could have all been taken care of. Mm. So only one person had to say something, but only one person waited until, literally, until the balance had been collected and then, and then they went over to the table and said, Oh, by the way, this, it just was contrived. I'm convinced of that. I don't know why. I don't know why. So I, I was I stayed alone that evening in my hotel room, and just really thought things through, and my first reaction was, I will never compete in this again. In fact, I'm I'm going to leave. I'm not staying in this organization. I am done. I'm walking away. I'm done, I will never do this again. That is how I felt. That is how hurt and angry I felt. An organization I've been a part of for a long time, which has really taught me a lot about leadership skills. It has given me leadership opportunities. It has allowed me to delve into skills that I didn't know I had. I have met amazing, fabulous people. I have learned, I have learned how to how to give someone feedback when they speak, and how to help them become a better speaker. That's part of what Toastmasters does. Is not just about speaking. It's about leadership and it's about communication. It is a fabulous organization, and I was ready to walk away. I was that angry. I was done. I even told the gentleman who would come and talk to me, I'm done. I'm done. And a couple of days after, I received an email from someone who has been a part of leadership and Toastmasters for a long time, and she sent me a beautiful email letting me know that this was was under an investigation, not that it's going to change, but to please think things through before I walked away, because people did have my back. So I decided by the end of the week, by the by about five days, six days, after all of that happened, I decided that not only would I stay in Toastmasters, but I would compete next year, but next year, I will go through every rule book for the International speech competition with a fine tooth comb to make sure that there is nothing that anyone is I'll put this in air quotes missing. Nobody missed anything. It just was something that happened. And so then I started to sit down. I gave myself a journal and time to think things through of the lessons that I learned from this entire situation. One, I literally prayed that morning that God would do exactly exactly as he wanted with that competition. When I really realized that. And when I thought about that, I thought, well, then the whole point of this was for me to learn and for me to deep, dig deep into my own feelings and to be able to help other people. And so I accepted that. So that was one lesson. Another thing I learned was to allow myself to feel every feeling this was. This was something that was reiterated to me more than, not more than the word learned. It really reiterated to me. I allowed myself to sit in those feelings for a short time, the disappointment and the anger, the sadness, all of it. I allowed myself to feel all of it, and I allowed myself to be alone, to not to not accept any invitations for dinner, knowing that what I needed was some time to be alone, to think and to pray, to really allow myself to process this. I allowed myself to feel all those feelings, and I also reminded myself This is lesson three, to not make any major decisions, any decisions while you're sitting in those emotions. Because the decision I would have made while I was sitting in those motion emotions is I'm done with Toastmasters, and I'm never looking back, and I'm never going back screw them, is how I felt. But if I'd made those decisions in that moment, I would be making a decision based only on emotion and the emotion of the moment, which is never wise. And the final thing I did was to seek advice from others and to listen and talk with people mainly listen who knew more about what was going on than I did. I knew this much. You have been disqualified through no fault of your own. That's how much I knew. But there are people who knew far more than me, and when I listened to their counsel, and I. Listen to them, and I learned more about what was going on, it was easier to make a definitive decision, which was, I'm staying and I will compete again, because I'm stronger than the person who or the people who put into place the series of events that happened that weekend. I'm stronger than that, I'm better than that, and I will keep going. I'm not going to stay down. I guess there's another lesson. I'm not staying down. I will get up and I will try again, because this is what I coach my clients on. This is what I teach from the stage. In fact, the speech that I gave that weekend, last weekend at Toastmasters, was what about when people say bad things about you, when they say bad things to you, when they do bad things, it's reframe, reframe the situation, and refuse to let their words define you. This was the lesson that I gave from stage, and the lesson that I got to put into place immediately following the competition, reframe it and refuse. Refuse to let them define me. They do not define me. They do not get to keep me down. They do got, do not get to knock me down and then keep me down. I get to choose to get back up, and then to reframe it. I can reframe the entire situation into my superpower. My superpower is I take this entire situation, I make a speech about it, I make an entire lesson plan around it, and I start speaking on it. I get to turn it into my superpower. That was the whole idea of what I spoke about, and now I get to put it into action. But if I'd made decisions based on the feelings that I was feeling in the exact moment when it happened, and that evening, I would have made very, very different decisions because I would have been making decisions while I was sitting in disappointment, sadness and anger, and those are never a good time to make decisions. Allow yourself to seek counsel. Allow yourself to get past those feelings. Move past them. Get back up. Get back on the horse. You're better than the people trying to keep you down. You are stronger than the people trying to keep you down, and you are stronger than any situation that knocked you down. So get back up. Reframe the situation and refuse to let it define you. I love you. I am your biggest fan, and your journal prompt for this week is what has knocked me down, and What decisions did I make? What did I learn from it, and do I want to change what I learned I will see you next week, and I hope you're having a fabulous, wonderful day, because you deserve it. I love you, I really do until next time bye.