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Leading Well is a short, impactful podcast for executive women, and the men who support them, who want to lead with purpose and show up well in every part of their lives.
Through 10–15 minute solo episodes, leadership coach and speaker Gretchen Schott shares insights, practical tools, and personal reflections that help you navigate people problems, lead with authenticity, and grow your confidence from the inside out.
Rooted in faith and designed to inspire, each episode ends with a brief prayer—an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconnect.
If you’re ready to build trust, clarity, and connection in your work and life, Leading Well is your weekly dose of encouragement and strategy.
[00:00:00] Gretchen Schott: Most leaders I believe don't burn out from too much work. They burn out from too much unprocessed disappointment. You might be hearing this and thinking like, oh my gosh, Gretchen, this is like a bummer episode. And maybe it is a little bit, but it's also real. So what happens if you don't get over the disappointment?
[00:00:23] Gretchen Schott: You're listening to Leading Well, the podcast for executive women and the men who support them, who are ready to lead with clarity. Confidence and compassion. I'm your host, Gretchen Schott. Let's dive in.
[00:00:42] Gretchen Schott: Hey, thanks for being here today. I wanna talk about disappointment. I don't know if you're like me, but as we creep into this new year, I've had a lot of things recently. That have been really kind of frustrating and disappointed. I've been disappointed in myself and disappointed in others, and I woke up one morning.
[00:01:09] Gretchen Schott: Saturday morning last week, and mostly I woke up early because I didn't sleep very well on Friday night and without sleeping well. Then I got up earlier than I normally do when I start all my great mindfulness practices and I was just. Frustrated. I was kind of pissy and angry, and I was trying to figure out like, why am I, why do I feel so unrested?
[00:01:34] Gretchen Schott: Why do I feel so out of it? Why do I feel so scattered and unable to focus and just carrying a lot of heavy feelings? And what I recognized was that. I was feeling really disappointed. Some things have happened in some relationships that I have that was disappointing to me. Some things at work didn't work out the way that I thought they would, and so that's been really disappointing.
[00:01:59] Gretchen Schott: And so when I finally recognized that like, Hey, this is, this is what's going on, like I'm disappointed. Of course, the first thing I thought of is like, how many times have I as a mother said to my children, I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Right? But. I decided to do a little research and try and really understand what is disappointment, where does it come from, how do people deal with it?
[00:02:25] Gretchen Schott: How does that relate to a loss of trust? All of that. And so I'm gonna spend today's episode and probably on my next one actually talking about disappointment from this perspective of leadership. And today I wanna focus on how do we process it? Why do we as leaders kind of skip over it? What happens when it goes unprocessed or undealt with?
[00:02:49] Gretchen Schott: And then kind of how to move through that with integrity and hope. And then my next episode, when I talk about this, I'm gonna really focus on that idea of disappointment. Leading to a loss of trust. But today I wanna just kind of dive in and share honestly some of what I've learned about disappointment.
[00:03:06] Gretchen Schott: So I thought it was interesting to recognize that disappointment is one of the most common leadership emotions, and it's one of the least processed. So disappointment is the gap between expectation. And reality, right? It shows up when I hope for something or I trusted someone, or I believed an outcome would look a certain way.
[00:03:30] Gretchen Schott: And it didn't. And so psychologically disappointment often is a blend of sadness, meaning a loss of something that we'd hope for. Grief, something that meaningful that just didn't happen. Anger sometimes at ourselves, sometimes at others, and shame, like I should have known better, right? So all of those kinds of emotions lead to us feeling disappointment.
[00:03:56] Gretchen Schott: But unlike fear and anger, disappointment, at least for me, is quieter. It's heavier. And so when I really thought about that, I tried to think about so, right? Why is it so hard to get over, right? Like, why is it so hard to get over being disappointed with someone? How do I get over being disappointed with myself?
[00:04:16] Gretchen Schott: Right? And I think that disappointment sticks because it attacks meaning. Over our mood. I might talk about disappointment as like it's a mood. I'm like, I'm feeling disappointed like it's a mood, but really at the heart of disappointment, why I'm disappointed. 'cause it's attacking meaning as to what I hope for what I expected the outcome.
[00:04:39] Gretchen Schott: And there's some research around emotional psychology that shows that disappointment lingers longer than frustration. It's harder to name, and it often goes unprocessed because people minimize it. I do this too. It's fine. I'm okay. I minimize my disappointment, thinking as a good leader, I just kind of need to get over it quicker.
[00:05:01] Gretchen Schott: But disappointment isn't always easy to get over quickly. And, uh, Brene Brown, who I absolutely love, she talks about unacknowledged emotions don't disappear. They go underground. They show up as cynicism, disengagement, emotional distancing. And she says things like, we say that we're over it, but we're not actually over it.
[00:05:21] Gretchen Schott: What we're doing, instead of we're putting up armor, right. We're ready to deflect. And I know for me personally, that I have. Absolutely done that. When I have been disappointed in others, I've very often diminished my own feelings of frustration and hurt and sadness and sorrow around that, and just said things like, it's okay and put armor around just to kinda like move forward, like get through it, which isn't healthy and, and doesn't help me to be my best self.
[00:05:46] Gretchen Schott: The way that this shows up in leadership is lower energy, right? Subtle disengagement over-functioning. Or under communicating. So working so hard to get the task in a, in a sense, I know I do this, I distract myself, right? So rather than actually dealing with the emotion and dealing with the fact that I'm disappointed in dealing with the fact that I'm hurt and I'm angry, I just kick into over-engineering things and distracting myself with a bunch of tasks and getting things done on my list.
[00:06:16] Gretchen Schott: And doing that too much then can also lead to the other way. Of under communicating because I'm just in my own head and it, it's gotta be me and I've gotta be the one to get it done. And it's just easier if I do it and stop communicating well with others. And then this leads to a loss of joy and sometimes a loss of competence in what we do.
[00:06:40] Gretchen Schott: Most leaders, I believe, don't burn out from too much work. They burn out from too much unprocessed disappointment. So you might be hearing this and thinking like, oh my gosh, Gretchen, this is like a bummer episode. And maybe it is a little bit, but it's also real. So what happens if you don't get over the disappointment?
[00:07:04] Gretchen Schott: Right? And so in my Saturday morning when I was processing and researching and writing and journaling and then going back and reading things, and what I kind of came to was that unresolved disappointment. Often for me and perhaps for you, turns into resentment, bitterness, numbness, and a loss of hope.
[00:07:28] Gretchen Schott: Leaders, and myself included, perhaps stop advocating. Having been on teams where I worked and didn't check my level of disappointment or didn't actually deal with my level of disappointment, I quietly disengaged. Right. As an employee, quietly stepping away, and if this is an issue on an entire team where you have a, a number of people that are disappointed and they're not talking about it, or maybe they're grumbling about it, but you're not actually doing anything to move through it, well, the teams end up complying, but they're not fully committed.
[00:08:09] Gretchen Schott: Right. And when we, what we know. About teams and, and individuals is compliance is not satisfaction. Compliance is not necessarily engagement. Engagement comes when we are both loyal and satisfied through personal growth. That's how we know that we're fully engaged, and if we are unsatisfied and we're feeling unloyal and we're just sitting in this sea of disappointment.
[00:08:38] Gretchen Schott: Our high performers will emotionally check out some of the stuff I read. Adam Grant has some really great work on this, and he says that disappointment is one of the fastest paths to discretionary effort loss, meaning people still show up, but they stop caring deeply. And so unprocessed disappointment doesn't disappear.
[00:09:00] Gretchen Schott: It essentially hardens. So having shared all that, being the educator, leader, teacher that I love to be and how do I become better as a result of now knowing all of this, I kind of came up with a, a framework around this, where I'm calling it, you name it, you grieve it, you reframe it, and you release it.
[00:09:24] Gretchen Schott: All right, so how do I get over disappointment? The first thing is naming it. What is that unmet expectation? So recognize the story that you're telling yourself around this disappointment. Be aware of what are the facts and what's the story. And so an example might be a fact, and a situation might be that the people that you're working with didn't follow through the story.
[00:09:49] Gretchen Schott: You might be telling yourself is, I can't trust anyone to get this done. So really, really being clear on what are the facts and what's the story you're telling yourself and asking some questions of yourself, like, what did I hope would happen? Right. Being really honest, like what did I hope would happen?
[00:10:05] Gretchen Schott: I hope that they would recognize my great accomplishments. I hoped that we would win that deal. I hope that the team would finally get it right, whatever. Whatever that hope might be. And then what expectation wasn't met, right? I didn't close the deal. The team didn't get better, my boss didn't recognize it, whatever.
[00:10:24] Gretchen Schott: Whatever that might be. And so what feels lost in that disappointment needs language. Before it can begin to loosen and be processed. Right. So getting really clear on naming, what was that unmet expectation, that unmet hope. And then once we name it, then we can grieve it. And I know like grief is one of those things.
[00:10:43] Gretchen Schott: People are like, oh my gosh, that sounds so soft. And grieving the loss of an unmet expectation. Yes, we need to allow ourselves to grieve. We have to be open. To recognizing sorrow and suffering, how that feels physically, how it feels mentally, how it feels emotionally. Because if we can't get in touch with the grief, then we can't ever get to the hope.
[00:11:07] Gretchen Schott: We can't get to the other side. We just stay armored up. We stay in this protection mode. We stay in a place of always feeling fearful and always needing to be on guard and always needing to protect ourselves, and not every situation is requiring of that. And so disappointment, I think is a small grief.
[00:11:23] Gretchen Schott: It's almost always a small grief. You don't need drama, but you do need to be honest about how you're feeling and suppressing your grief doesn't make you strong processing. It does. So we've named it, we grieved it. Now we wanna reframe it. And so disappointment doesn't mean you were foolish to hope, but it does mean you were brave enough to care.
[00:11:48] Gretchen Schott: All right. And hope isn't the problem. Unprocessed disappointment is the problem. And so ask yourself, what values do I refuse to abandon with this? What kind of person do I still wanna be, even though I'm disappointed? And even though now I recognize I was angry with myself, or I recognize I was angry with them, I recognize these.
[00:12:13] Gretchen Schott: Facts. And I recognize this is a story that I'm telling myself. So what kind of person do I still wanna be going forward? And what will I release now as a result of that? What will I shed? What will I allow myself to hold onto to continue to make me stronger? But what isn't serving me? What stories am I telling myself that no longer serve me?
[00:12:37] Gretchen Schott: And I can just let those go? And so in the reframe, we move towards then. Yeah, releasing, and if we can reframe, this is kind of where disappointment can turn into wisdom for us. When we release, you decide what you're gonna carry forward. Where am I still guarding my expectations and, and asking yourself, like, guarding my expectations.
[00:13:00] Gretchen Schott: Is this a smart and wise decision to protect myself because this person or this situation has continued to show me like this is something where I need to protect myself. Or am I choosing to protect myself because that feels like the right thing to do, so that I don't have to deal with the fact that this is making me uncomfortable?
[00:13:19] Gretchen Schott: Who or what disappointed me more than I admitted originally? So to release it, like recognizing how this really was surprising to me, how this took me off guard. This took me off balance more than I care to admit. And then finally, how will I show up? Is my best self going forward? Because it's not wrong to feel disappointment, but living a life where you are constantly disappointed is not you being your best self.
[00:13:51] Gretchen Schott: Your best self is you living and acting in love, loving towards yourself, and loving towards others, leading yourself so that you can lead others. So as I shared, I had this like deep reflection on disappointment and how I was feeling disappointed. And then I thought about hope, which is my word for this year.
[00:14:14] Gretchen Schott: And so I tied this back to that idea for myself. And maybe this will be meaningful for you too. And what I kind of recognize is that hope isn't pretending I wasn't disappointed. Hope is believing that disappointment doesn't get to have the final word. And so with that, I wanna leave you with better words than mine.
[00:14:33] Gretchen Schott: Which are his words. And so the verse I wanna leave you with today and invite you to pray on and consider and reflect on is from Romans 8 28. And in that verse, he says, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. So if you're feeling.
[00:15:02] Gretchen Schott: Disappointed, fearful, frustrated, sad, resentful, angry, any of those feelings. I invite you to think about what is your purpose? What makes you uniquely you, and how can you acknowledge this disappointment and these negative feelings and move towards something that allows you to lead well, that allows you to hope?
[00:15:30] Gretchen Schott: That's my deep dive on understanding disappointment. There's a lot to unpack with this. I find it fascinating. So I'm gonna talk about it again, um, in my next episode, but more specifically, which I didn't even get into here, was about how disappointment and trust relate and how that looks, how that shows up at work.
[00:15:46] Gretchen Schott: But if you are hearing this and you're kind of feeling some nudge to maybe go a little deeper and explore some of this, I'd love to talk with you if you have some thoughts. On how disappointment shows up for you, things that I've maybe shared that maybe triggered some ideas for you. I'd love for you to pass that on and share that with me too.
[00:16:07] Gretchen Schott: But in the meantime, I hope that you will continue to choose to lead well. Ready to lead well, or need some coaching and encouragement? Sign up for my newsletter or reach out for a personal consultation. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe and leave a review.