What Successful Leaders Do Differently After Disappointment

Disappointment is a part of being a professional, especially for leaders urgently acting for success.

It’s easy to feel confident when everything is going well. You have a bounce in your step, a smile on your face, and a positive attitude that lasts for days. But the best way to decipher a person’s character isn’t when things are going well; it’s when things are going poorly.? Make no mistake, it’s essential to handle success well. However, you learn more about people about the way they handle disappointment, not success.?

You learn more about people about the way they handle disappointment, not success.?

Here is the problem, many people have been robbed of navigating failure.? Whether it be from the helicopter parent generation or the micromanager led teams, too often, someone else has parachuted into a tough situation to remove the struggle or save the situation. While it’s helpful to have leaders in your life who care about you, this type of leadership doesn’t set up future success.??

What is Disappointment??

Disappointment is the emotional response that follows the failure of expectations or hopes. It often leads to feelings of sadness, frustration, or dissatisfaction. I summarize it in the Accelerate Leadership Program as the gap between our expectations and reality.?

Disappointment is a natural and universal human experience, and it’s intricately tied to expectations.? In coaching conversations, leaders say, “I don’t have any expectations, so I don’t get disappointed.”? While that’s certainly one way to live, it’s the opposite of how most high performers think.?When you set goals, you invest emotionally in those possibilities, and it makes you feel alive.??

Here is the reality: disappointment is part of life unless you have depressingly low standards. The best teams and leaders don’t set low standards, they raise the standard. While no one says you have to like disappointment, take solace in knowing that disappointment requires desire.?

Disappointment requires desire.?

Having aspirations to achieve things isn’t a negative, it’s a positive.? In fact, the greatest companies in the world were built on the backbone of ambition.? Don’t run from your desire, run towards it.?

How Cognitive Reframing Helps Reframe Adversity

Failure and disappointment are a part of life.? Did you know that 70% of people experience significant setbacks in their careers at least once, and employees who learn from setbacks are 50% more likely to achieve their goals?

So it’s not if, it’s when you are going to be disappointed.?Ultimately, how you respond to disappointment is what matters.?Because the best leaders understand that failure is not final, failure is feedback.?

Failure is not final, failure is feedback

This is easy to write but hard to live out.?Researchers would say this is precisely when cognitive reframing is essential.? If you aren’t familiar with the term, Cognitive reframing involves changing how you think about a situation to view it more positively or constructively.

Having a shift from a victim mindset to a growth mindset is difficult to?work and grueling mental work, which is why most people don’t do it.?

Key Steps to Overcome Disappointment and Build Resilience

If you are currently experiencing disappointment or want to use disappointment to fuel future success, here are some things to remember:

1. Avoid the Bad Advice

Disappointment is filled with complicated emotions like fear and anger that even the best leaders struggle with at the moment. The challenge is not acting on those short-term emotions because, as Coach Matt Mochary said, “fear and anger give bad advice.”

Fear and anger give bad advice

Have the wisdom to avoid the short-term bad advice by leveraging patience. Give yourself time to be thoughtful and level-headed before making any permanent decision.

2. Identify Opportunities in Adversity

Disappointment helps you better understand what is important to you as long as you examine the gap and identify the growth opportunities in the adversity. If you create the space, it can be a wakeup call that improvement is necessary.

Disappointment is the wakeup call that improvement is necessary.?

When you take this kind of approach, things that initially look like a burden are a blessing.?

The only thing worse than experiencing disappointment once is experiencing disappointment again for the same reason. Take the airline industry as an example. There are two black boxes on every airplane, and if an accident happens, the boxes are opened to learn precisely what went wrong. Every pilot in the world has free access to the data.? This is not just to scratch the curiosity itch but to learn from mistakes so they don’t happen again.??

For you or your team to progress from disappointment, use an open learning loop, much like the airline industry. Open a journal and write down things you experienced or want to learn. Have what we call “disappointment debriefs.” These are meeting spaces to answer the following questions honestly and without judgment:?

• What did I/we underestimate?
• Where did I/we make mistakes?
• How will I/we do it differently next time?
• Do I/we truly care about this enough to proceed again?

Perhaps you had a not-so-recent experience. You can still go back and have a disappointment debrief.?

3. Master the Art of?Moving On

Once you have a disappointment debrief, it’s time to move on.? Use the disappointment as fuel to get back to work. Think of a famous high achiever, and their story is filled with mastering the art of moving on.? Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Elon Musk experienced significant failures and massive disappointments, but they didn’t stay down; they got up.?

Confucius said, “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall."? Henry Ford backed him up when he said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”?

The best athletes in the world have short memories, and so must you and your team.? Now is not the time to feel sorry for yourself or believe in self-doubt.? It’s time to choose courage, get back up, and do better next time.??

Closing

Handling disappointment is a critical skill for leaders aiming to achieve long-term success. Whether through cognitive reframing or practical “disappointment debriefs,” turning adversity into an opportunity for growth separates average leaders from great ones.

By following these strategies, you’ll not only overcome setbacks but use them as fuel to propel you and your team toward greater heights.

Leadership Growth Plan: Do you suffer from low employee engagement and retention?? Do you feel overwhelmed as a manager trying to develop your people? Check out the new Leadership Growth Plan Tool. Sign Up to to be the first to test it out.

Leadership Communication Cadence Template: Are you responsible for having consistence cadence with a team.? You can download the Communication Cadence Tool Here.

Accelerate Leadership System Looking to turn your managers into highly effective leaders? Instead of having high expectations, now is the time to also provide a high level of support. Leverage the Accelerate Leadership System for managers in your organization. Learn more here.

About the Author: John Eades is the CEO of LearnLoft and the creator of the Accelerate Leadership System . He was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. John is also the author of Building the Best: 8 Proven Leadership Principles to Elevate Others to Success . You can follow him on Instagram @johngeades .