128. When People Let You Down (And What You Do With It After)

In this episode, Jenn Cody gets honest about what it actually means to be let down. In your personal life, in your business partnerships, and in the version nobody in the coaching world likes to admit: when you give your best guidance and your client goes a completely different direction anyway. She shares the nervous system patterns that disappointment quietly creates, and the emotional regulation work that has to happen before any tactical advice will actually land. You'll walk away with a clearer framework for expectations vs. agreements, a "protect forward" mindset, and a practice for separating your worth from other people's choices.

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Transcript

Welcome And A Thank You

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Create Your Day podcast. I'm your host, Jen Cody. Thank you so much for being here. I know I say that at the beginning of every episode, but this week is special. I need to shout out you guys for being just the greatest audience ever. I really shared some vulnerable information a few weeks ago on the$81,000 lesson, and you reached out with such compassion, such love, such grace, and really held space for my vulnerability in a way that was totally unexpected when I actually set out to create that episode. So thank you so much. I knew you were all here for a reason, and now I mean I know even more that you are my people and I appreciate you guys so, so much. Um that being said, this week we are going to continue talking about disappointment, which uh that episode, the$81,000 lesson, had a lot of disappointment in it, right? We're gonna continue that because disappointment's all around us, and we learn a lot of our lessons through disappointment. The problem is that we don't sign up for those lessons. That's not why we're there, that's not what we want to hear, and um it's it's not, you know, it's life not going the way that we want it to go. And a lot of times that can even bring on feelings of guilt because we want to believe everything happens for a reason. This is going to make me stronger, all those things. And that's just not always the case because our nervous systems, they are efficient learners. Our brains, our brains are cataloging every single thing. We're clocking what's going on around us 24 hours a day. And so when we get burned, that gets filed away. And the next time something out there looks even remotely similar, those alarm bells start going off, right? That's our biology, it's our bodies trying to protect us. And that protection does not always show up as fear. A lot of times it shows up as control. And what happens when that's how that mechanism shows up? Well, that's when you're really going to start micromanaging everything around you. You know, think about the last time you were working, um, whether it was, you know, at home, at work, a group project, whatever it is, but when you're with relying on other people and someone drops the ball, what happens? You start micromanaging. You stop delegating because I'm sure every one of you out there has said to yourself, it's just easier if I do it. Just easier if I do it myself. So we hold everything so tightly that we are clearly the bottleneck in our life. And we don't even realize that that tightness is the response to something that has happened to us in the past. Or, let's talk about it swinging even in the other direction. Do you keep giving people chances that they either haven't earned or don't deserve because disappointing others is absolutely unbearable to you? You can't imagine that you're going to be the person that people see as someone who maybe dropped the ball. So what do you do? You over-explain, you over-accommodate, you take on so much more than you're capable of actually handling, you know, efficiently. And then you resent everybody for not showing up the same way that you would show up. So, in both of those things, disappointment is what's running the show in your life. Or I should say, unprocessed disappointment is truly running the show in your life. So this gets tricky because disappointment should live in a certain place, but it doesn't, it does not stay in its lane. It feeds into, like it overflows into so many different parts of our life. Think about if you've ever been let down in your personal life, and again, this could be by anyone: a partner, a parent, a friend, a sibling, whatever. That does not just live in your personal psyche, right? It comes to work with you, it shapes everything about how quickly do you try to protect yourself when you're making agreements with other people? How um how much are you willing to rely on other people in general? If you have a team that works for you, how willing are you to rely on them? You know, how much emotional energy do you have left for the people that you actually love if you've spent your day managing something that didn't have to exist there at all? Um, this happens all the time in business. Like clients maybe come and go, or somebody ghosts to you, you have a partnership that falls apart, like my did a few episodes ago. Um, and then sometimes there's people that we invest real time and real energy into, and maybe they're not really interested in whatever we thought we were investing that time and energy into. You know, we we expect sometimes everyone to have the same goals as we do and have the same vision as we do, and at the end of the day, they just don't. It's so we bring all of that home with us, and then we are distracted when we're talking to our family. We're lying awake at night trying to sleep, replaying conversations. So the professional and the personal versions of disappointment are constantly feeding each other. So we want to develop an actual practice for moving through it so this way we're not stuffing it away, we're not spiraling around it, and we don't want to keep finding that same wound showing up every single day, just differently in different places. So I want to talk about the version of this that I don't hear a lot of people talking about because it really hits very close to the ego. But what happens when you do everything right as a guide, right? I'm talking right now to my coaches, my consultants, um, teachers, right? Any when you are doing everything right as a guide, you're asking the right questions, you're building the right strategy, you hand someone a clear path forward, and then what happens? They choose to go do something completely different. This is its own category of disappointment. And it's one that I've had to get really honest with myself about because there's a version of this that's a that's totally appropriate. We want people to have autonomy. If I'm working with a client and I'm saying, here's how I see this going, what I would suggest is that A, B, and C happen, and then they decide that it's gonna go C, B, and A. I don't have to agree with it. I my job is to share my perspective, have them hear it, and if they decide to go another way, that is certainly their right. That's the whole point, right? They're the CEO of their business, not me. My job is to give them the clearest possible picture, but not to actually make the decision for them. And I have to be honest, there are times when a client doing that does feel a little bit like a personal rejection. Like, wait a minute, if they didn't follow my recommendation, my recommendation must not have been good enough. Or is that saying something about me and whether or not I'm actually good enough at what I do? That reaction is not about them. That reaction is about me. That's my worth getting tangled up in my work, and that doesn't serve anyone. So this happens a lot. I hear people when I'm talking to you guys, and you're telling me about, you know, these things where you're you're trying to, maybe it's with your kids, right? You're trying to show them that's all we can do, right? Is show them, be the example. Here's what looks like it might be the next natural step for you. That doesn't mean they're going to take it. So it's important for us to understand that our job at home and at work is not to be right. Our job is to give the people that we love, the people that we serve, the most honest, grounded guidance that we can. And then just hold space for them to make their own choice, even if we think it's the wrong one. This is so hard. Especially when we can sometimes see the outcome before it happens, especially if you've been watching the same pattern play out over and over again. And most especially when you care, which I know you guys all care. Like that's why you're doing what you're doing. And there's a certain level of maturity that is needed to handle this situation. Because if that person does come back to you after this the decision they made didn't go the way that they hoped, what's your job? It's certainly not to say, yep, told you so, I knew this was gonna happen. Your job is to still show up for them, still help them figure out what to do next, and still be the most useful person that you can be to them. That's it. We have to take our ego out of it. I told you so, and knowing this is gonna happen do not belong in this relationship. That takes real emotional regulation. The disappointment that we feel when someone does not follow that guidance that we're offering can really turn into a wall if it's not processed. Because eventually what happens? You're like, I'm not even gonna tell them how I feel. They're not gonna do what I say anyway. Okay, but stop there. Is their job to do what you say? Not really. You know, so you don't want to start pulling back, you don't want to start giving less. That's really what happens. I've seen it. You'll start hedging everything you say because you've learned that when you say the direct thing, it doesn't always lead to what you've hoped. And that is when we stop being effective at being good friends, being good coaches, being good partners. When we just give up and say this conversation isn't going to get me where I want to go, we're not really seeing the point of the conversation anymore. So I want to slow down when we get to this part because I don't want to miss the mark here. There's there's no shortage of information and content out there about how to handle disappointment. This is not groundbreak, groundbreaking conversation. Set better expectations, right? Have the hard conversation, let go, move on. All of it. It's very true, it's very useful. But none of it works if your nervous system is still in that state of feeling threatened. When we do experience disappointment, especially the kind that's attached to like a bigger wound, trust, worthiness, abandonment, all of that. Our bodies don't distinguish between the logical reality and the emotional one. Our brain doesn't care whether it was a client and not your father, doesn't matter. Your brain doesn't care that it was a business partnership and not a marriage. It just registers the loss, it registers a betrayal, and it's going to respond according to that fact that it thinks is in front of it. So this means that before you can have any more conversation, before you can, you know, clean things up and give be honest about your feedback and any and make any sort of decision about the relationship you're working on, you're going to have to regulate yourself first. You have to get out of the threat response and back into that all of your good judgment lives in that prefront prefrontal cortex. That's where we have to get back to. So for me, this happens if I move my body, right? Like I need to talk out loud to somebody that I trust before I make decisions. I need to move my body a little bit. Ask myself, is this situation actually dangerous or does it just feel familiar? Because I've been here before. Those are very different things. And the answer is going to change how you respond. So think about it this way. What if disappointment is just information? It's not a verdict, right? It's not a decision maker. It's just information to help you make that decision. When someone lets you down, there's really only a few things going on. Maybe they weren't capable of what you needed. Maybe there was an expectation that was never really stated clearly. Or maybe they made a choice that prioritized something or someone else. And that tells you something useful about this relationship. What it doesn't tell you is that you are useless. Okay? That's the important context that I think is missing. If a client doesn't follow your guidance, the information is different, but the principle is the same. Maybe the guidance didn't land the way you intended it, or maybe they didn't need it yet. Maybe they weren't ready for it yet. Maybe there's a gap between what they're telling you and what they are actually willing to do, which, by the way, is one of the most important things you can learn about a client. And it truly informs everything about how you work with them. None of these things require you to shrink back. None of them require you to decide that this person is unreliable. They have autonomy, remember? But you have to be honest with yourself about what you expected, about whether that expectation was clearly communicated, and about whether you actually got your sense of self-worth tangled up in someone else's choices, because that is not a good place to be. If you have people that are working for you, or if you have people in your family that you are expecting things from, there is going to be disappointment. And I need you to understand that there's a difference between expectations and agreements. Expectations are the things that we want from people. Agreements are the things that have been agreed upon and discussed and committed to. Those are not the same thing. That a lot of our disappointment lives in the gap between those two things. We expect certain things from people, but we've never actually had a full conversation and committed to those things with those people. So there's definitely going to be times where people do really break an agreement. But more often than not, I want you to think about when you're in that space where you feel like somebody disappointed you because they broke an agreement. Think about whether or not there was ever an agreement there to begin with. Or was it just you housing an expectation in your mind and never having that other person actually commit to that expectation? Before you get upset with someone, you need to get honest about whether you made a request or you just had a hope. That distinction really does change a lot of the reality of the situation. And then we have this move that I think of like protecting forward. Instead of closing off after you've been hurt, get more specific. We protect forward by closing off. We're like, okay, forget it. I'm just not going to do that anymore. That's not really going to get us anywhere. Getting more specific, getting more clarity, that gets us further. That actually does protect us in a healthy way. Can we make clearer contracts? Can we have more explicit conversations? Can we have better defined agreements about what you're responsible for, what I'm responsible for? You know, use the disappointment as data to build better systems, not as evidence to like construct these walls around us and put boundaries in place that are not protecting us, they're actually harming us. And for those of you out there who do guide others for a living, learning to separate your value from your clients' choices is super important. Your worth as a consultant, as a coach, as a leader, it's not determined by whether or not somebody takes your advice. It's determined by the quality of the guidance that you offer and the integrity that you deliver it with. What they do with it is theirs every single time. That is such a hard place to land. We want to do it for them. We want to make sure that they get the results that we want for them by literally making sure they do every move that we could see would benefit them. And we can't do that. It sounds simple, but it's so not easy. It's so, so hard. And I want you to think about this in all areas of your life. Like I said, you know, it's not just those of us who are coaching. Um, I work with a lot of people who are teachers, they're shaping minds and guiding people and children every single day. What about our own children, our own families? We care about what our families are going through. And if somebody is having a tough time and we want to help them, it's natural as somebody who is a helper to immediately start strategizing in our brain. Okay, well, maybe they should look at it this way. And if they have this conversation, this can change for them. And I can help them, I can help them, but we can offer guidance, but we cannot take it personally if they then choose to do something else. Those are their lessons to learn. And we can't wrap our self-worth into other people's lessons. Maybe those lessons are necessary for them to learn in order to grow. We can't protect everyone that we love and everyone that we work with from ever learning any lessons. Think about it that way. You know, like if we made sure that they always did what we knew they should do, right? We think that we know exactly what they should do. If they all did that and the result was what we're thinking, that okay, they're going to avoid any pain and any conflict, where would any growth be for them? So that's a little bit of a reframe, also. So I want you to think about this as you move through life, as you start to notice those times where you're feeling disappointed, you're feeling like you can't believe that you know you reached out and really shared what you thought should be the way that a situation was handled, and then it was handled differently. It's not a reflection on you. Did you show up with that guidance authentically? Did you deliver it with integrity? Did you have their best um self? Were you protecting them as best you could? Great. That's the only thing you can do. It is still up to them to make the choice. And now maybe your role is to be there for them, either to celebrate that their choice had an unexpected outcome, unexpected to you, right? You didn't think it would work if they didn't do things your way. Maybe it did. Then your job now is to celebrate that with them. And if it didn't, then maybe your job is to hold space for them in that moment and see what they need in order to move in a different direction. So I think all of this really needed to be said. I don't hear a lot of people talking honestly about the disappointment that comes with us tying our self-worth into guiding other people. And there's so we can care about someone's outcome so, so much, but we still have to hold it loosely so that it does not become about us. That's the balance, right? Being fully present, being fully honest, fully invested, and also completely unattached to being right. If this resonated with you, I want to tell you right now, you are not too sensitive for this work. You're just doing the harder version of it. And that's what we're naming here, because there's a space for everyone. There are people who don't feel this disappointment, and great, they're able to detach a little bit better than I am. But if you're ready to, you know, really go deep into this and let this um sit with you, then I really think that you will be able to come out on the other side on having a better understanding about why you feel the way that you do. So, until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other. I will see you here next week, and I really appreciate you being here. Thanks again. Bye bye.