Workplace Disappointment Quotes

I should know; perfectionism has always been a weakness of mine. Brene' Bown captures the motive in the mindset of the perfectionist in her book Daring Greatly: "If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame." This is the game, and I'm the player. Perfectionism for me comes from the feelings that I don't know enough. I'm not smart enough. Not hardworking enough. Perfectionism spikes for me if I'm going into a meeting with people who disagree with me, or if I'm giving a talk to experts to know more about the topic I do … when I start to feel inadequate and my perfectionism hits, one of the things I do is start gathering facts. I'm not talking about basic prep; I'm talking about obsessive fact-gathering driven by the vision that there shouldn't be anything I don't know. If I tell myself I shouldn't overprepare, then another voice tells me I'm being lazy. Boom. Ultimately, for me, perfectionism means hiding who I am. It's dressing myself up so the people I want to impress don't come away thinking I'm not as smart or interesting as I thought. It comes from a desperate need to not disappoint others. So I over-prepare. And one of the curious things I've discovered is that what I'm over-prepared, I don't listen as well; I go ahead and say whatever I prepared, whether it responds to the moment or not. I miss the opportunity to improvise or respond well to a surprise. I'm not really there. I'm not my authentic self… If you know how much I am not perfect. I am messy and sloppy in so many places in my life. But I try to clean myself up and bring my best self to work so I can help others bring their best selves to work. I guess what I need to role model a little more is the ability to be open about the mess. Maybe I should just show that to other people. That's what I said in the moment. When I reflected later I realized that my best self is not my polished self. Maybe my best self is when I'm open enough to say more about my doubts or anxieties, admit my mistakes, confess when I'm feeling down. The people can feel more comfortable with their own mess and that's needs your culture to live in that. That was certainly the employees' point. I want to create a workplace where everyone can bring the most human, most authentic selves where we all expect and respect each other's quirks and flaws and all the energy wasted in the pursuit of perfection is saved and channeled into the creativity we need for the work that is a cultural release impossible burdens and lift everyone up.

It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women. In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals. This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine. Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.

Expecting less from your boss can lead to being pleasantly surprised instead of horribly disappointed. Once you stop seeing him or her as an all-knowing supervisor who should be mentoring and supporting you without criticism, you can accept them better for who they are — as fallible, human and petty as everyone else, prone to bad judgment and hamstrung by the limitations of their education, experience and ego.

Third on my list of must-haves is GRIT, which cowboys call “Try.” It’s that quality of steely resolve ~ that mental toughness ~ that keeps you pushing toward your goal in spite of the struggles and setbacks. Although the word “grit” was long out of vogue, social scientists have recently brought it into today’s lexicon. Studies have discovered that grit is more essential to long-term success than talent or I.Q. What’s more, that’s been found to be as true for children in school as it is for adults in the workplace. People with grit are better able to handle trials and disappointments of all kinds. They realize there is an upside to failure, in that it can motivate you to redouble your efforts or try a different approach. Beyond that, learning how to cope with life’s inevitable upheavals is how you develop grit in the first place.

Another source of stress and disappointment is the expectation that the workplace is an extended family. People want their jobs to provide a sense of belonging, to feel they’re taken care of, to bond with colleagues. But they’re looking for things the company can’t supply. They should keep the company role in perspective. The first expectation to kill is that big families are fun and supportive. Romantic, but untrue. Anyone with a big family can tell you there are always people they don’t like among their own relatives.

We must experience enough good rewards to keep enduring disappointment of “failure.

You are possessed of an instinct—a spirit—that orients you toward the highest good. It calls your soul away from hell and toward heaven. And because it is there, you find yourself frequently disillusioned. People disappoint you. You betray yourself; you lose a meaningful connection to your workplace, boss, or partner. You think, “The world is not set right. It is deeply troubling to me.” That very disenchantment, however, can serve as the indicator of destiny. It speaks of abdicated responsibility—of things left undone, of things that still need to be done. You are irritated about that need. You are annoyed with the government, you are embittered and resentful about your job, you are unhappy with your parents, and you are frustrated with all these people around you who will not take on responsibility. There are, after all, things that are crying out to be accomplished. You are outraged that what needs to be done is not being done. That anger—that outrage—is, however, a doorway. That observation of abdicated responsibility is the indication of destiny and meaning. The part of you that is oriented toward the highest good is pointing out the disjunction between the ideal you can imagine—the ideal that is possessing you—and the reality you are experiencing. There is a gap there, and it is communicating its need to be filled. You can give way to fury, in consequence, and blame it on someone else—and it is not as if other people are not contributing to the problems. Or you can come to understand that your very disappointment is an indication to you from the most fundamental levels of your being that there is something wrong that needs to be set right—and, perhaps, by you. What is it, that concern, that care, that irritation, that distraction? It is not the call to happiness. It is the call to the action and adventure that make up a real life.

You are possessed of an instinct—a spirit—that orients you toward the highest good. It calls your soul away from hell and toward heaven. And because it is there, you find yourself frequently disillusioned. People disappoint you. You betray yourself; you lose a meaningful connection to your workplace, boss, or partner. You think, “The world is not set right. It is deeply troubling to me.” That very disenchantment, however, can serve as the indicator of destiny. It speaks of abdicated responsibility—of things left undone, of things that still need to be done. You are irritated about that need. You are annoyed with the government, you are embittered and resentful about your job, you are unhappy with your parents, and you are frustrated with all these people around you who will not take on responsibility. There are, after all, things that are crying out to be accomplished. You are outraged that what needs to be done is not being done. That anger—that outrage—is, however, a doorway. That observation of abdicated responsibility is the indication of destiny and meaning. The part of you that is oriented toward the highest good is pointing out the disjunction between the ideal you can imagine—the ideal that is possessing you—and the reality you are experiencing. There is a gap there, and it is communicating its need to be filled. You can give way to fury, in consequence, and blame it on someone else—and it is not as if other people are not contributing to the problems. Or you can come to understand that your very disappointment is an indication to you from the most fundamental levels of your being that there is something wrong that needs to be set right—and, perhaps, by you.

The cruelty of unrequited love isn’t really that we haven’t been loved back, rather that our hopes have been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone whom we will have to keep believing in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free. In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the ‘incumbent problem’: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations. When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well. The corrective to insufficient knowledge is experience. We need to mine the secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better than the incumbents we already understand.

Liam,” he sighed. “It’s terribly disappointing to see you treat your time so carelessly. That’s seven minutes that you’re now late by. What a terrible example to set for these young ladies.” “I don’t give a shit,” I said with a grin, and Roberts damn near choked. “Excuse me?” he spluttered. “How dare you–” “No, you can shut up now,” I said. “You’ve treated me like shit for years, and I’m done. I don’t need this job. I don’t need you. So today was my last day here. I quit.” Roberts’ eyes bulged so widely I thought they were going to pop, and he sat bolt upright as his gaunt face reddened. “You cannot just walk out on the spot,” he spat. “I require four weeks’ notice, or you will lose your pay! I have that power, you know! Your pay will be withheld if you just–” “That shitty wage?” I snorted, even as I knew for damn sure it would be illegal for him to pull this shit. In fact, I sort of hoped he did so I could hand his ass to him later. For now, though… “I don’t need that, either. Keep it. Use it to buy higher quality gel that makes you look less like a greasy weasel.” I heard the murmur of stunned colleagues behind me as Roberts stared at me with pure fury in his beady eyes. His hands shook, and the sight made a wave of adrenaline wash over me. This was the most fun I had ever had in my workplace. “I’ve rented the floor above you,” I said casually. “My own business has really taken off, and I’ve hired these ladies to join me. They’ll be leaving your company immediately.” “We can’t wait to work for Liam,” Kali said firmly. “This place is stinky!” “And has uninspiring vibrations.” Ash nodded. “It feels like a prison,” Cleo hissed. “And I do not like your mustache.” “I think that about sums it up,” I snorted. “So yeah, I quit. I’m not coming back, and I hope your shitty business goes under. See ya around!

Perfectionism People with social anxiety tend to be perfectionists. A degree of perfectionism is generally seen as a good trait. It makes people strive to do the best they can. Perfectionists have an eye for mistakes that often escape the notice of other people. They are very successful students and do well in the workplace. However, perfectionism can be taken too far. If you are a perfectionist, you probably set unrealistic goals for yourself. When you are unable to meet your expectations, you feel let down and depressed. You may feel that no matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough. Social anxiety becomes worse when you are a perfectionist. Expecting to act perfectly in every situation puts great pressure on you. If you feel you need to make a great impression every time you meet someone, if you want to say something brilliant every time you open your mouth, or if you want everyone to love you, you are setting yourself up for great disappointments. The pressures associated with perfectionism and social anxiety can keep you from succeeding and being happy. They result in the fear of making mistakes, stress from the pressure to perform, and extreme self-consciousness. Perfectionism also causes tension, frustration, disappointment, anger, and sadness.