Healing from Vocational Disappointment

We don’t tend to celebrate vocational failures.

When we do, they’re usually framed as failure-on-the-way-to-success anyway. Who doesn’t love a good comeback story or even a redemption arc?

But we don’t celebrate failures that just stop there, in the wreckage.

Many people have experienced vocational failure, and the lessons learned have not catapulted them to later career glories.

The cafe proprietor who ends up declaring bankruptcy and going back to a nine-to-five job that she hates.

The stay-at-home mom who tries to “have it all” by continuing her career part-time, but never really gets the momentum back at work.

The carpenter who gets permanently sidelined by a debilitating injury.

The engineer who keeps getting shunted into roles below her ability, no matter how she tries to find her niche.

The PhD working retail while getting rejection after rejection for research positions.

These kinds of failures are not just bumps in the road. They can be the end of a road someone has traveled for a long time.

Vocational disappointment can be bitter. It can be a wound.

[Thanks for reading. This post continues our series The Work of Healing. Check out our other posts on faith and work and emotional health for more resources on living an integrated Christian life. Subscribe to get the next post in the series in your inbox.]

To take just one example, about one in four unemployed people experiences at least some symptoms of depression.

For some of those would-be workers, their journey ends in a death of despair. Vocational disappointment is a life and death issue.

So how do we heal from vocational disappointment?

We don’t need a pep talk about how we’ll come out on top somehow. We need grace to meet the pain we really feel. We need reassurance that our most basic needs will still be met, even if not in the ways we first expected. And we need guidance to help us find our way forward when we come to the end of the road.

Unearthing Our Expectations

Disappointment is always related to our expectations. No expectations, no disappointment.

But developing hopeful expectations is part of being a healthy human. Our expectations help us make good decisions and contribute to our sense of well-being. A “no expectations” mindset stunts personal growth. It’s hard to learn something new if you don’t believe there’s a chance the lesson will be worth the effort. Nobody goes to trade school, starts a family, or even picks up a book to read with no expectations.

So, to state the obvious: If you’re experiencing vocational disappointment, it’s because you have vocational expectations. Vocational expectations are a healthy part of any career. When you’re in the middle of a career failure, healing begins with grappling with the expectations that fuel your present disappointment.

That’s easier said than done. Our true expectations, like our true motivations, are often buried beneath the surface, not immediately accessible to our conscious awareness. We have to do some digging to unearth them.

Here are some questions to help you do that digging:

• When I started down this road, how did I imagine my future?
• Am I angry at anyone? What’s the unmet expectation behind that anger?
• If I could go back in time and change one decision, what would it be? Why?

Expectations and Needs

As you brush the dirt off of the expectations that you’ve dug up, you can take a good look at them. How did they develop in the first place? What do they mean to you?

As I hinted in one of the questions above, anger and disappointment are so intertwined that investigating the sources of our anger can often help us understand the expectations that led to our disappointment, too.

There’s a helpful psychological model for the causes of anger summarized in the acronym AHEN:

• Anger comes from being
• Hurt which comes from an unmet
• Expectation which comes from a valid
• Need

(Therapist Faith G. Harper has popularized this model; I originally learned it from coach and pastor Karen Miller.)

What’s helpful about this model is that it points to the deeper needs underlying our expectations. Our vocational expectations may or may not have been reasonable and healthy. But the needs they’re connected to are real.

For example, one vital psychological need for all human beings is a sense of agency. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains the concept of “locus of control” and how it relates to well-being:

some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

In other words, it’s not great for your mental health when you feel like you have little influence over your own fate. When you face a vocational disappointment, you don’t just feel the loss of a particular job or career path. You also feel a threat to your basic ability to pursue a long-term course of action successfully.

Meeting Needs After Disappointment

But there’s good news: The particular unmet expectation that has led to your present disappointment is likely not the only way to fulfill the more basic underlying need.

In a fascinating study of American lawyers, sociologist Ioana Sendroiu and her collaborators found that lawyers who didn’t make partner had greater depressive symptoms the greater their previous expectation of making partner had been. That’s an intuitive research result! A would-be partner in their moment of disappointment must sometimes say to themselves, “I thought I had what it takes.”

The expectation of making partner is connected with the need for personal agency. Many up-and-coming attorneys no doubt possess a strong, internal locus of control. It helped them get through law school, pass the bar, and land a job at a firm. All these career steps are proof positive of their capacity to make a way for themselves in the world.

Making partner is one expression of personal agency. But even in the field of law, it’s far from the only one.

Disappointment is a normal emotional response to an unmet expectation. It’s important to take time to grieve the dream that was. At the same time, even severe and unwanted vocational changes do not need to mean the end of everything. The you who needs to make your way in the world is still in there, and still has opportunities to thrive.

Re-evaluating Expectations

We often move from our valid needs to particular expectations without even realizing it. Someone might work toward becoming a partner for years because they are, even subconsciously, convinced that that is where true well-being will be found for them.

But when you take a step back, the idea that making partner is the only way to be well as a human or even as a lawyer is rather implausible. Sometimes the desire for a position of such prestige amounts to little more than the need to win—a “need” which always dehumanizes us and causes us to hold other human beings in contempt.

There are other motivations that might draw someone to the practice of law: A desire to serve people, to apply their intellectual abilities to the full, and even (one might hope) a longing for justice to be realized, albeit imperfectly, in our social systems. A partner position is not a prerequisite for any of these things.

There is opportunity, in the face of disappointment, to consider whether we did in fact move too directly from a need to a specific expectation. We can re-evaluate the expectations that got us to where we are now. Perhaps we would have done well to adjust some of them even if they hadn’t gone unmet.

Disappointment and Forgiveness

On the other hand, sometimes disappointed expectations have more to do with others being unjust or incompetent than with us being unreasonable. Suppose you were denied a partner position because you were betrayed and slandered by an ambitious colleague? Or, returning to our earlier examples:

What if the carpenter suffered the career-ending injury because of someone else’s negligence?

What if the engineer keeps getting shunted from role to role because of her sexist senior managers?

What if the PhD is denied tenure-track positions because of administrators’ systematic over-reliance on adjuncts?

In these cases, the wound of disappointment is a wound inflicted by someone else. Given the implicit social contract of trust in our professional setting, our own abilities, and our work ethic, our expectation of a specific vocational path was reasonable. But someone else has stepped in and pushed us out.

It’s not caving in to an “external locus of control” to name genuine harms committed by someone else. At the same time, how we respond to those harms determines whether we cede our locus of control to the offender or not. Namely, do we seethe in anger and resentment? Do we suppress our dreams and numb our disappointment? Or do we choose the difficult, but healing, path of forgiveness?

When you choose to forgive someone else for how they have wronged you, you assert one of the most powerful forms of human agency possible. Someone who has done wrong by you cannot take away your choice to do right by them.

Jesus is leading us into one of the deepest human freedoms when he says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44 ESV).

Dashed Dreams or Confused Callings

When we deal with disappointment, we may need to re-evaluate the expectations that led to our disappointment. We may need to forgive someone who hurt us. We may need to do both.

As disciples of Jesus, we also need to consider something else: How do my vocational expectations relate to the calls of God on my life?

A vocational disappointment takes the shape of a dashed dream. There was something you imagined, something you held dear, that now will not come into being, at least not in the way you first expected. But what if you thought your dream was also a calling from God?

Here, too, we need discernment. Some Christians are convinced that every single turn in our career must amount to a call of God. In a previous series, I argued that we don’t need to consider every job a calling. At the same time, sometimes God does give specific calls—religious and secular—to his people.

So if you understood a specific dream to be a calling, it’s worth considering the possibility that you were wrong.

Think back to when the dream took shape. Did the Lord speak to you, confirming his guidance through Scripture and community?

In the book of Acts, we find the apostles and elders at Jerusalem writing a letter in which they say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us . . .” (15:28 NIV). When we take up our callings, we may not always have a community around us to say with such confidence, “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us that this work should be done.” But we can still invite others into the process of listening for God’s voice with us.

When you first took steps toward your dream, did you take time for such corporate discernment? Or, did you rush ahead of your own accord, following the dictates of individualism and self-determination?

More than One Calling Over Time

I don’t mean to be harsh; I only raise the question because it’s all too easy to tack on spiritual language to our own desires without doing the work that genuine discernment requires. I also don’t mean to suggest that if a certain kind of work has come to an unexpected end, you must have wrongly discerned its place in your life in the first place. Timothy Keller helpfully writes:

In a world where people have on average three to four different careers in their work lives, it is perfectly natural that changing careers may be necessary to maximize fruitfulness. God can—and often does—change what he calls us to do.

My friend Jessie says she’s felt more than one calling over time in just this way:

We even think about Jesus as a carpenter and then as a rabbi. I know that as a teacher and then as a nurse I have felt a calling and a passion and a Lord-led spiritual direction in my work. And while an unnatural ending (getting fired/laid off/transferred) might not feel like the hand of the Lord, he will continue to lead us gently to good things that we can do in his name.

The key to discernment is not the measurable success of our efforts at a given moment, but rather the word of God in our lives over time. Even in moments of apparent defeat, it’s possible that the dream was indeed a call from the Lord.

It may be that it was a call intended only for a period of time. For Nehemiah, rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem was “what . . . God had put in [his] heart to do”—and that project was finished in only “fifty-two days” (Nehemiah 1:12, 6:15 NIV). It may be time to move on to something new.

But it’s also possible even in the disappointment that God is not yet done with this dream. In which case, fortitude, faith, and a watchful eye will serve us best. “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29 ESV). We worship a resurrection God. Jesus may tell us that our dream “is not dead but asleep” (Mark 5:39 NIV).

In other words, we may need to let go of a dream, or we may need to hold onto it. Regardless, we can hold our expectations loosely and our Lord tightly, continuing to ask him what he has given us to pursue.

A Way Forward

We find healing from vocational disappointment in many steps. Even if the expectations that drove our disappointment were unreasonable, we’ll still need time to grieve. We need space to name how we feel in the midst of the unwanted change.

We also need to take time to re-evaluate our expectations. If they were unreasonable, or an unhealthy expression of a valid need, we can begin to trace a new path. The need still counts. But just because this path ended in a blind alley doesn’t mean there isn’t another way to realize that more basic human necessity. Get clear on what your needs really are, and you’ll see the steps you can begin to take to meet them.

Whether or not our expectations were reasonable, we may also need to forgive someone for how they hurt us. We strengthen our own agency when we obey Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies.

We need to take stock of how the callings of God have been communicated to us. Something that we thought was a call might not have been, or might have been intended for only a season. But a dream that looks dead may still yet come to life.

Our specific way forward will depend on the nature of our needs, our expectations, and our callings. There’s no one-size-fits-all panacea for vocational disappointment. But for all of us, there’s a way forward in the Lord.

Reflect and Practice

Take a moment to consider your own heart. Ask Jesus, “Is my dream dead or only asleep?”

• What are the biggest disappointments of my career so far? What were the expectations that led to those disappointments?
• What things did I have control over in my vocational failure, and what was beyond my control?
• Who do I need to forgive at this point in my journey?
• What has God called me to do with my life, and how did I discern that?
• What is my way forward today?

Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash.

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