As freelancers, we are only as good as our physical and mental "fitness" allows us to be. While maintaining and learning new skills is great we also have to think about possible setbacks and how to deal with these.

In our work-lives and private lives, disappointments are inevitably gonna affect us. Feelings of anger, self-doubt, sadness, regret, hinder us from being productive and being focused on the tasks and goals we want to achieve, both, in our personal lives and out jobs. That's why we are going to talk about Disappointments today and about tactics to help us deal with them.

How Do Disappointments occur?
We want to find success and fulfill our dreams. It is just hard work, right? From our parents, in school, ... I am sure almost every one of us has been taught that hard work is going to be rewarded.  So it would be just a matter of time when we would be able to harvest the fruits of said hard work. But life does not come without its hurdles and often disappointments are inevitable.

We as business persons have to deal not just with professional disappointments but also in our private lives. This, at times, makes running a business and being a good person incredibly hard.

Disappointment comes in a wide variety. How some deals and business relationships turned out can be a huge disappointment, how we saw a person in our life who happened to turn out to be completely different.....but also, we can be disappointed about ourselves, for little mistakes we make but also for not reaching our goals, for not being where we think we are supposed to be.
Questions we ask ourselves can be:

* Why have we missed a certain opportunity?
* Why haven't we tried harder?
* Why didn't we follow through when it counted?
* Has this been all I could achieve with my efforts?

All these questions are normal. We all fail, we all make mistakes and we all experience self-doubt! We all experience disappointment with feelings of sadness, regret, and anger when our expectations in life or our jobs are not met.
From my experience, there are two main ways of dealing with disappointments.

Change
One is the obvious, Change, which is repeated all over every self-help book ever written. If you have failed, try differently, if your way of doing things does not lead to the expected results, change. If you are unhappy, do something that cheers you up. If you don't earn enough money, look for another job, other clients, rebrand, and so on. I think this approach is the easiest to explain and the easiest to suggest. I have to refer again to self-help books here as this mainly is the only tool or tactic recommended in such books because it is easy to give this advice. While dealing with disappointments itself is never easy this advice also is not applicable to every situation you might face.

So let us explore what other ways there are to dealing with disappointments when change is not an option. What if you are not in control of your reason for disappointment? What can we do to deal with these emotional reactions which keep us from fulfilling our dreams?
Acceptance
Acceptance is the other main way of dealing with disappointments. However, this needs some more clarification as to what this means is not necessarily native understanding to many of us.

When compared to the other ways of dealing with disappointments, acceptance, can easily be seen as resignation, the passive approach without taking any actions. I think there still is a big difference between resignation and acceptance!

While one means resigning ourselves to the situation without taking action to change our situation or our mental state, the other is working with life as it is. Dealing with situations we do not have an influence upon and even if we do not approve the state we find ourselv...