Good & Healthy Relationship Advice & Tips

The consequences of missed opportunities are not easy to handle. Some people easily deal with their disappointments while others carry them for long periods or even for life. Many people struggle to recover when they fail to seize their defining moments. They often find it very difficult to bounce back and move on with their lives. Psalm 137:1 summarises three of the most common things people do when faced with disappointments and frustrations arising from missed opportunities. It reads, “By the rivers of Babylon, There we sat down, Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.”

One of the first things disappointed people do is to sit down. That refers to stagnation or remaining at the same place. Instead of standing up and moving on, people rather choose to focus on what they have lost. The second thing people do is weep; this refers to the regret, pain and sense of loss that people tend to nurse for long periods as they muse over their missed opportunities. The third thing people do is remember; that refers to the posture of folding their arms and reminiscing on what could have been and whose fault it was. All three actions focus on the past and easily serve as a barrier to progress.

Steps to restoration

In these circumstances, people tend to lose hope to an extent where they start thinking that there is nothing left in their lives and the situation would remain forever. Depending on the circumstances, bouncing back from missed opportunities can pose a huge challenge in itself and one needs to have the right attitude and the right mindset in order to prevent the potential damage and instead of a grave, convert it into a turning point and a new phase of opportunities. 

The key to restoration is to change your focus from yesterday’s failings and pain to the promise of tomorrow. The following steps could help you to pick up the pieces and to systematically and constructively propel your life in a positive and meaningful direction.

Break things down

Picking up the pieces becomes really difficult when one is engulfed in a whole gamut of angles to the same issue. When you look at what you missed, questions about “why, what, whom, where, how and when” all come flying at you concurrently. This makes restoration very difficult. The mess you are in was not created in a day and will definitely not be resolved in a day. Take time to break things down before you take them on. It makes things look far less overwhelming. Breaking complicated situations down is very important for resolving them. In chemistry, decomposition or breaking-down reactions occur when one substance breaks up into a number of smaller ones and that hastens the chemical process.

A man who loses his job because he messed up a high-profile assignment would typically be haunted by so many things. Whenever he thinks of bouncing back, he would at the same time be grappling with a myriad of issues including how to defend himself in the court of public opinion, how to deal with the damage to his reputation, how to communicate with organisations that may have heard about his situation, how to regain the confidence of industry players, how to rewrite his CV and even the right answer to give if the issue comes up in an interview. The more he thinks about all these issues at once, the more overwhelmed he is likely to feel and that is when he could “sit down, weep and remember.”

When dealing with errors or past failures, there are two areas you have to break down in order to set the restoration process in motion. You first have to deal with what happened and then move on to the way forward. Instead of grappling with the entire range of issues, clearly categorise them in order to hasten the solution process. For example, in breaking down what happened, your focus could be on segmenting the issues into omissions, commissions, technical failures, human errors, structural deficiencies, planning issues, system failures and the various stakeholder reactions.

Going forward, the systematic process could involve defining your purpose, setting goals and making plans for their accomplishment. The goals you set for your restoration could also be broken down to increase the chance of their achievement. Big things don’t get done at once. Even the pyramids and great cathedrals that took years to build, were accomplished one block, one step, one stone cut, at a time. There was an overall plan or blueprint as to how it would all come together and how it would look. There was also a strategy that dictated how to accomplish the plan. However, the work was broken down and accomplished as a series of small tasks that they kept working on one after another for years and decades.

Impatience is one of the predominant virtues of this generation. It often manifests itself in a desire for instant results. We want what we want and we want it right now! This may be an offshoot of the number of instant solutions we live with today: instant food, instant pictures, instant photos, high-speed internet-based technology and even instant relationships, also known as blind dating. Our failure to focus on process and systematic execution is probably another reason why so many plans and resolutions fail. We don’t break them down into simple, small steps and we fail to get the instant results we desire.

The key objective of the man who lost his job may be to regain employment and rise to the top once again. Looking at the big overall goal can be quite overwhelming. However, by breaking his goals down into small steps and learning to take a longer view of the process, it would be much less stressful to start and work it through. Things take the time they are going to take and accepting that gives you peace of mind.

Accept & learn from your own mistakes

One of the most important foundations for recovery or restoration is the acceptance of our own failings and mistakes. Dispassionately breaking things down will help you see where you are clearly at fault and begin the repair process from there. The penchant for blaming others, explaining things away or giving excuses can deprive us of useful learning platforms that could help us avoid the same mistakes in future.

Many of us find solace in the false assumption that others are entirely responsible for the predicaments we find ourselves in. It makes us feel better because we are often unable to deal with what we did or failed to do. When you fail to examine your actions and accept your faults, you deny yourself the chance to quickly bounce back and move forward.