How to deal with unexpected outcomes
Over the last 5 months, people have been asking me how it feels at the end of a big ambition: publishing a book. Does it mean “check, done” and I’ve moved on, or does the ambition morph into something else? Does achieving an ambition feel like “now what?” or does it make me think, “I want to do that again.” What does the accomplishment mean to me?
And even though I briefly write about this stage in Chapter 5 of the book (“Navigate the Ups and Downs of Ambition”), I’m still processing and gaining new insights through my author experience.
I’m doing a podcast series called Ambition In-Between to unpack what I’ve been learning, and this month I’m releasing the first episode, “How to Deal With Unexpected Outcomes.” You can listen to the episode here.
What I’ve learned is that when we pursue ambitions, there are times when we don’t quite end up where we intended. And that’s not because we failed to execute the plan. It’s because the outcome became misaligned with what we actually want, something we discover along the way.
So despite needing a vision to get started, as we move toward that desired outcome, we learn more about who we are and what we value—and that learning changes things. The learning process shifts our target, making the original no longer fit.
This shift isn’t poor forecasting or planning. It’s evidence of our learning.
So instead of thinking “What did I do wrong?” we can ask “What did I learn?” and “Where do I go from here?”
Pursuing our ambitions is ultimately a process of learning more about who we are and what we want. And even when things don’t turn out as we thought they would, we and our stories still move forward.
Now, there are two sides to understanding and processing this experience of not ending up where we intended. 1) the intellectual abstraction of the experience, essentially the rationale as to why this happens; and 2) the real felt sense of the experience, the uncomfortable feelings that come with the unexpected.
I explain the intellectual and emotional sides in more detail in the episode, but I’ll share a high-level of what I mean here:
Intellectual:
We are a part of complex, adaptive systems, and as such, solutions emerge through doing, not crystallize before we start.
Agnes Callard, the philosopher and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, makes this argument in her book, “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming,”—that we build our aspirations through our doing.
The work by Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson around “affective forecasting” shows that we humans are bad at predicting our own emotional responses and what will actually satisfy us, unable to foresee how we’ll feel at the end of a goal.
Emotional:
Our disappointment with unintended outcomes is the gap between expectation and discovery, the incongruity between the person you thought you’d become and the person you actually became.
While this may be true, it’s helpful to allow ourselves to accept the disappointment before working to reframe it and move toward integration.
Once we experience the feeling, we can integrate the new information about ourselves.
And then I share how we can integrate the learning and move forward:
Connect to your personal motivators to find contentment and completion.
Shift from expectations to acceptance in order to come to peace.
Honor what was learned to realize you did make progress.
Explore your possible selves to see your next potential.
Find the thread that connects this ambition to past ones to tell yourself an empowering story.
So this is where I find myself: ending up not quite where I had intended or had hoped. Being able to intellectually understand why that’s the case, while also feeling the real emotions that come with that realization. And I’ve been going through my own integration process:
I’ve always connected to my motivators as my foundation and to find contentment.
I can accept what’s transpired.
I’m continuing to explore what I’ve learned and remind myself of the progress I’ve made.
And I’m in the process of exploring my possible selves and weaving the thread to write my empowering story and determine what’s next from here. I’m making progress!
My closing episodes for the year will continue the Ambition In-Between series including reflections for 2025 and the new year ahead. I hope in my sharing you, too, can find acceptance wherever you find yourself with your own ambition pursuits.
In the meantime, you might use this as inspiration to explore your own in-between at this stage in the year (or consider joining my reflection session below!):
What have I learned about myself this year?
What have I learned about what I really want and what matters to me?
What does that mean for who I might become?
What might I want to create next from here?
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Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.