More often than I would like, I get myself into situations where a positive outcome for me depends on some choice of action by someone else. We’ve all been there, sad to say: “If only you would do this<\/i>, it would be so great for me.”<\/p>\n
In an ideal world, an outcome good for me would also be good for the other person, and everybody would end up happy. Alas, we do not live in an ideal world. I cannot decide what is good for somebody else, and it’s certainly not up to me to try. So sometimes I just end up disappointed and sad.<\/p>\n
When my spidey-sense tells me I might be entering into such a situation, I often arrange a side-deal — one that is just between me and myself. If the sought-for positive outcome doesn’t pan out, I stand ready to reward myself in some other way, as a kind of “disappointment insurance”. This reward doesn’t need to be elaborate. It could as simple as treating myself to a movie, or buying myself a particular kind of fancy chocolate.<\/p>\n
When I do this, I adhere to two important principles: (1) I plan this insurance ahead of time, before I know what the outcome will be, and (2) if the positive outcome does<\/i> occur, I don’t give myself the disappointment insurance.<\/p>\n
The net effect of all of this is that I’m not as focused on whether things that depend on other people will work out. Because no matter what the outcome, I’ll get something nice out of it that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More often than I would like, I get myself into situations where a positive outcome for me depends on some choice of action by someone else. We’ve all been there, sad to say: “If only you would do this, it would be so great for me.” In an ideal world, an outcome good for me … Continue reading “Disappointment insurance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8033,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions\/8033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}