There's something uniquely painful about not getting a job you genuinely believed you were ready for. It's particularly difficult when you've been with an organization for years, you've worked hard, earned the respect of your colleagues and quietly imagined that the next opportunity might finally be yours. You go through the interview, answer the questions, perhaps even leave feeling rather pleased with yourself. Over the following days you start imagining what life might look like in the new position. You haven't been offered anything, of course, but that doesn't stop you from entertaining the possibilities. By the time somebody calls to tell you they've chosen another candidate, you've already become a little attached to a future that never actually existed. You thank them for their consideration, try to sound gracious and assure them you understand. Meanwhile, your mind has started racing through everything that might have gone wrong.
At first you're shocked, perhaps even a little embarrassed that you allowed yourself to be so confident. Then comes the anger, followed by that uncomfortable fear about what happens next. Maybe you've gone as far as you can with the company. Maybe management doesn't see the same potential in you that you see in yourself. You start replaying the interview, convincing yourself that a different answer or a more confident delivery might have changed the outcome. Eventually you begin bargaining, promising yourself you'll work harder, develop new skills or somehow prove that the decision was a mistake. There's a familiar quality to all of this. Shock, anger, denial, bargaining and acceptance are emotions we associate with grief, and while they don't necessarily arrive in that order, it's remarkable how closely professional disappointment can resemble mourning. We've lost something that mattered to us, although what we've really lost is the possibility of something we'd hoped would happen.
What I find particularly interesting is how quickly we turn that disappointment into a judgment about ourselves. We assume that because somebody else was selected, we must have fallen short. We rarely stop to consider that the successful candidate might simply have brought something to the interview that management believed was better suited to the work. Perhaps they had a particular kind of experience, a different approach to leadership or strengths that complemented the people already on the team. There could have been a dozen reasons for the decision that had very little to do with our abilities. The truth is we generally have no idea what the other candidates offered, and yet we'll spend an extraordinary amount of time punishing ourselves over the outcome. We fill the gaps in our knowledge with assumptions, most of them unkind, and then treat those assumptions as though they're facts. It's almost as if we can't accept that somebody might make a perfectly reasonable decision without that decision somehow diminishing us.
Of course, sometimes the decision isn't reasonable. Management can get things wrong, deserving employees are overlooked and organizations don't always recognize the talent they already have. But I've noticed how readily we convince ourselves that this must be what happened when we're the disappointed candidate. Suddenly the company we've enjoyed working for isn't such a wonderful place anymore. We question the judgment of people we previously respected, become suspicious of their motives and start wondering whether our future lies somewhere else. We remind ourselves of everything we've contributed, including the sacrifices nobody asked us to make but that we made anyway. Before long we're telling ourselves we're far better than the credit we're being given, and perhaps we'll show them by leaving. There's a certain satisfaction in imagining how much they'll miss us when we're gone. We might even threaten to quit, which is a rather extraordinary response when you think about it. We've just been told we can't have one job, so naturally we consider giving up the one we already have.
I don't think there's anything especially unusual about behaving this way. Disappointment has a way of making us unreasonable, particularly when it touches something as personal as our sense of accomplishment. Most of us want to believe that hard work will eventually be rewarded, and there's something comforting about imagining that career progression follows a reasonably predictable path. Work hard, do well, earn respect and the opportunities will follow. Except careers don't always unfold that way, and other people have ambitions, abilities and experiences of their own. We can do everything right and still not get the job. That's an uncomfortable reality because it reminds us how little control we sometimes have over things we've allowed to become enormously important to us. We can prepare, contribute, improve ourselves and make our ambitions known, but ultimately somebody else gets to make the decision.
And maybe that's where we should begin questioning ourselves, rather than questioning whether we were good enough. How did we come to place so much importance on something that was never entirely within our control? At what point did a job title become a measure of our value, or somebody else's opinion of our suitability become a reflection of everything we've accomplished? There's nothing wrong with ambition, and I wouldn't suggest for a moment that we should stop wanting to advance our careers. But there's a difference between caring about our work and allowing it to determine how we feel about ourselves. We've all met people who have impressive titles but seem deeply unhappy, just as we've known others who find enormous satisfaction in work that brings them very little recognition. I suspect most of us understand this perfectly well until we're the ones who have been passed over. Then, for reasons that are difficult to explain, we temporarily forget everything else that makes our lives worthwhile.
Eventually the disappointment begins to settle. You might still disagree with the decision, and perhaps you'll never really understand it, but you're no longer spending every quiet moment rehearsing arguments in your head. You go home, spend time with your family, laugh with friends and get on with the ordinary business of living. Life has an interesting way of reminding us what matters when we finally give it some attention. The people closest to us haven't suddenly changed their opinion of who we are. They haven't been sitting around wondering whether we're sufficiently qualified for the next stage of our careers. They're interested in us for reasons that have nothing to do with our professional accomplishments, and in most cases they've been remarkably patient while we've been distracted by our own disappointment. There's something quite humbling about realizing how much time we've spent worrying about the approval of people at work while taking for granted the affection of people who never needed us to prove anything in the first place.
I think that's when acceptance really begins, and it feels almost like lowering yourself into a warm bath after a particularly exhausting day. The tension gradually disappears and you're left wondering why you allowed the whole thing to cause so much suffering. You can still want the opportunity, still believe you'd have done a wonderful job and even feel a little disappointed that somebody else was chosen. None of that has to change. What changes is the importance you attach to it. You begin to recognize that your life is filled with things that deserve far more of your emotional energy than a hiring decision, and that your worth was never something management had the authority to determine.
You may eventually decide to pursue another opportunity, or perhaps you'll stay where you are and find a renewed appreciation for the work you've been doing all along. There's no particular lesson here about whether to stay or leave, and acceptance doesn't require you to abandon your ambitions. It's simply the point at which you stop allowing disappointment to make decisions about the rest of your life. You remember the people who make you laugh, who know your shortcomings, who enjoy your company and who couldn't care less whether you've been promoted. They've been there through all of it, quietly getting on with the business of loving you while you've been busy trying to convince somebody else that you're worthy of recognition.
And when you finally look up from all that disappointment, there's a wonderful comfort in realizing they've always left a place at the table for you.
