Richard Bandler, the co-creator of Neuro Linguistic Programming, often says in his trainings - "disappointment requires planning".
What does this mean for common people who are not trained in the field of NLP?
As a Trainer of NLP based in Pune, I spent some time in discussing this with a few friends. What follows is a summary extracted from those discussions.
Most people consider disappointment as an emotional state.
The NLP model suggests that you treat it as a process. And hence disappointment (like any other process) has a start, has a sequence and ends in what is finally labelled by people as disappointment.
1. Disappointment starts with a person focusing intensely on something she or he desires.
And this focus is so strong that the person excludes them self from the possibility of any alternative that could be equally fulfilling of the purpose .
2. They then hold a belief that based on their actions, they deserve what they desire.
Believing this, requires them to ignore other relevant but contrary examples from their memory. This is usually an unconscious process of thought, and yet it is still a process your mind goes through actively.
3. They must believe that they will most certainly achieve their well-deserved goal with no exceptions possible.
This again requires an active process within the mind to ignore external factors that result from actions of other people & environmental circumstances. They might even strongly consider these to be irrelevant and of no impact and hence no consequence.
4. They hold an expectation in their minds about the time frame when they will achieve their result.
People sometimes hold on to the time frame in which they expect to achieve their result. They hold on this so strongly that they totally ignore the possibility of getting it at any other point in time - later as well as sooner.
Some people might even sabotage themselves from achieving their result sooner. Or they might not find it fulfilling if they achieved their goal sooner than their expectations.
Dissecting the experience of disappointment using a process model rather than treating it as an emotional state (which is existential), it allows NLP practitioners and other behaviorists with a series of possibilities to deal with and alter the quality of your life experiences.