The Cost of Not Letting Yourself Get "Too Excited"

TL;DR: Dampening your excitement to protect yourself from disappointment feels smart and almost every culture has a proverb for it. But research shows it doesn't actually reduce the pain if things go wrong. It just reduces your presence, your performance, and your joy along the way.

What works instead: let yourself fully want it, name what could go wrong, and make a plan for if it does. Hope isn't the risk. Hoping without a plan is.

There’s a quiet habit many of us have developed,  so quiet we barely notice it. The moment something we want shows signs of progress, we proactively step on imaginary brakes of our excitement and pull back. We tell ourselves: don’t get too excited before we know it is done. 

In many cultures there are proverbs confirming that this is the smart way to behave and doing the opposite is a sign of naivety.

 It feels like wisdom

🇬🇧 English: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch 

🇮🇹 Italian: Non dire gatto se non ce l’hai nel sacco — don’t say “cat” until you have it in the bag

🇵🇱 Nie mów hop, zanim nie przeskoczysz — don’t say “hop” before you’ve made the jump

🇩🇪 Man soll den Bären nicht verkaufen, bevor man ihn hat — don’t sell the bear before you have it 

Almost every culture encoded the suppression of excitement and anticipation as wisdom. From a young age we were taught that and never come to question that. We dont get excited and feel as if we are  protecting ourselves before life gets the chance to hurt us.

The research actually shows it doesn’t work the way we think it does.

Brené Brown, whose research on vulnerability and shame has reached millions, has a name for this pattern: foreboding joy. It’s the moment we feel something good such as excitement, hope, possibility and immediately brace for the loss of it. Her qualitative research shows that people actively suppress positive emotions before an outcome is known, believing this will soften the blow if things go wrong. But Brown’s findings suggest the opposite:numbing joy doesn’t protect us from pain. It just disconnects us from the very experiences that make the effort feel worthwhile.

When psychologists study how people predict their own emotional reactions, a field called affective forecasting, developed by Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert at Harvard,  they consistently find that we overestimate how long and how hard disappointment will hit us. 

The pain of not getting the job, the rejection, the missed opportunity tends to hurt a similar amount regardless of how much hope we allowed ourselves beforehand. And it passes faster than we expect. What we are left with, if we played it safe, is not less pain. It’s less of everything.

We are paying the price in the present

What we’re actually doing when we dampen our excitement isn’t protecting ourselves from future pain. We’re paying a price in the present trading real, available joy for an illusion of control that doesn’t quite deliver.

And there’s another cost, a more practical one. When you don’t let yourself fully want something, you don’t fully show up for it. The preparation gets a little thinner. The interview feels a little more detached. The energy the other person in the room would have felt it’s just not quite there. Low expectations reduce motivation.

There is also evidence on the other side. Albert Bandura’s studies on self-efficacy (belief that we are capable of performing a specific action or achieving a specific outcome.)  show that believing your effort matters is one of the strongest predictors of actual performance.  Excitement, when it’s connected to action, is not naivety - it’s fuel. 

Let yourself fully want the outcome, while also thinking clearly about what could go wrong and what you’d do if it did.

Equip hope with a plan. 

Not armour. Not distance. A plan.

The strategy of not letting yourself get too excited was probably learned as we were kids, maybe we were told enthusiasm makes you naive. But you’re not in that moment anymore. 

The job search, wanting to build your career differently or whatever you’re in the middle of deserves your full presence. Celebrate the small wins: a conversation that sounded promising, invitation to be part of the project or an early interview that went well. Simply allow yourself to be in the moment of joy and presence of hope of things going the right direction regardless of the outcome. 

And when the  fear shows up, name it specifically and plan the remediation. 

The Stoics called it the dichotomy of control. Knowing what is yours to act on, and what isn’t. The outcome of the decision is not yours. Everything that leads up to it and comes after is yours to create.

What if I don’t get that promotion? 

I can have an honest conversation with my manager, not to argue the decision, but to understand it. What would it take? What does the path actually look like from here?

I can ask for specific, measurable criteria so that next time there is no ambiguity about what “ready” looks like.

I can look at what skill might still be missing  and be honest with myself about whether it’s a capability gap or a visibility gap. Sometimes the work is there. It just hasn’t been seen.

I can invest in that visibility deliberately  through the projects I raise my hand for, the rooms I enter, the way I talk about my own work.

I can seek a mentor or sponsor inside the organisation, someone who already has influence in the rooms where these decisions are made.

I can map what I’ve built here and look for a new job not out of bitterness, but out of curiosity. Knowing your external value can change how you show up internally.

I can use the time between now and the next decision cycle intentionally, becoming so woven into the team’s success that my contribution becomes impossible to overlook.

I can redefine what winning looks like in this chapter, maybe the promotion was a milestone, not the destination?

The Stoics called it the dichotomy of control. Knowing what is yours to act on, and what isn’t. The outcome of the decision is not yours. Everything that leads up to it and comes after is yours to create. 

Lets put it to the test!

Think about a thing that is important for you and you’re hoping for.

Now ask yourself: if this doesn’t work out, how much will it hurt — on a scale of 0 to 10?

Hold that number.

Now imagine that you had been fully present throughout the entire process. Fully excited. Giving it everything. And it still didn’t work out. How much would that hurt now?

For most people, the number barely moves. The difference is smaller than expected or stays the same. What changes is not the pain at the end it’s the quality of the experience along the way.

Now ask yourself one more question: What if this does work out — what have you already lost by spending the whole time with one foot out the door?

The price of emotional self-protection isn’t cashed out at the end, when things go wrong. It’s paid every single day of the process, in aliveness, in presence, in the version of yourself that shows up or doesn’t.

Whatever you’re in the middle of right now, the process isn’t over. You can decide today to show up differently. Not with blind optimism but with the decision to be fully present for something that matters to you.

The outcome is not yours to control. Everything you bring to it is.

👋 I’m Alicja, a career coach based in Berlin. I spent fifteen years making hiring decisions inside German and European tech companies._I now work with international professionals who are good at what they do but have learned somewhere along the way to play it safe with their own ambition. My job is to help them unlearn that.

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