This week I'm talking about disappointment and how raising my expectations ended my five-year affair. It's the emotion I see most often in the messages listeners send me about infidelity, the other woman experience, divorce, and relationships that fell apart. Disappointment is the gap between the expectation you had and the reality you're sitting in. Sometimes the other person didn't even know what your expectation was. Sometimes they did and chose not to meet it anyway.

I share a recent experience where someone I respected made comments to me I never saw coming. I fumbled through the moment, processed it hours later in the shower, and felt that burn in my diaphragm that tells you something is really off. The old version of me would have followed up the next day to explain why it didn't sit right. This version of me didn't. Once you know who you are and where your lines are, you don't hand someone the chance to apologize their way back in just because you reached out first.

I also get into how disappointment showed up inside my five-year affair as the other woman. I talk about the bathroom mirror moment a few months after that relationship ended, when I said out loud that I value myself. That was the self-worth shift that changed everything. My expectations started rising, and eventually they rose so high that the married man I was with couldn't meet them anymore. That's when I ended the affair. I didn't want to be the other woman anymore, and he couldn't give me anything different.

Self-worth is the foundation underneath all of this, and it's the work I now do with women one-on-one in my coaching practice. You can't move through disappointment, infidelity, or the end of any relationship until you can name what you're feeling and decide what to do with the information. You control your energy, your time, and who gets access to you. That's the whole game.

New episodes every Thursday.

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