All About Expectations

Topics: Health & lifestyle, Relationships, Tips & Tools, Useful Tools

Today I am featuring a “guest post” from Michael Neill’s GeniusCatalyst website. He has the best take on EXPECTATIONS of anybody I have ever read. I couldn’t have said it better!

“Encourage miracles by being open to the seemingly impossible.” – Barry Neil Kaufman

A friend of mine once told me the story of the first night he kissed his future wife. Having known her for years and loved her from afar, he confessed his true feelings for her. She asked him if he wanted to sleep with her and he said “To be honest with you, if it’s just sex, we may as well not bother because there’s no way the reality is going to live up to seventeen years of my fantasies!”

The key to understanding expectations is this:

Expectations exceeded bring good feelings;
Expectations unrealized bring bad feelings;
Expectations met bring nothing but more expectation

So how do we manage our expectations of life and of other people in a way that allows us to think creatively about the future without setting ourselves up for future disappointment?

There are three distinctions that I have found extremely useful in answering this question for myself:

Expectations vs. Standards

When I first talk with people about lowering their expectations, they often get a bit upset with me. “You want me to expect less from my employees? I can barely make this company work as it is!”

But once I clarify the distinction between an expectation and a standard, they usually relax into the possibilities this shift allows them to make. For example, I have a standard that says I will always either be on time for a meeting or let people know if I’m going to be late. Recently, I completely missed a coaching session with one of my clients.

If “showing up on time” was an expectation I had of myself, I would have responded to that situation with either a lot of guilt and shame over having missed the appointment or blame and fault finding with the people and circumstances that led to my missing it. But because “showing up on time” is for me a standard – something that I want to create as “standard operating procedure” in my life – I responded by changing the appointment scheduling system in my office to make this kind of thing unlikely to happen again in the future.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t apologize to my client – it just means I didn’t exhaust myself with self-flagellation or damage my relationship with my employees by taking out my frustration on them. And when you raise your standards while lowering your expectations, you open up the possibility to create something really beautiful in your life.

Expectations vs. Agreements

One of the most useful distinctions I use around expectations came from my friend and mentor, Steve Chandler. Instead of having high expectations of people (or indeed any expectations at all), he recommends the use of clear agreements.

Here’s how he wrote about it recently in his wonderful blog:

Expectations are stories we believe about how others should behave. The more expectations I have the more I set myself up for disappointment in life.

But with no expectations, there can be no disappointment, only loving life as it is.

“I expect you to clean your room!”

Imagine yourself hearing those words. A knot forms in your stomach. Your throat tightens a little. Your chest feels like someone is pushing on it. You begin to explore the consequences of rebellion. Because people rebel against expectation.

That’s why creating agreements is so much more effective. No expectations, just agreements. Two people co-author the agreement in the same way that John Lennon and Paul McCartney would co-author a song.

Parents live in a constant state of anger and anxiety when they expect so much from their children. I know a woman I will call Courtney who walks around all day riddled with expectations for her children. She has even more expectations for her husband. So she is miserable. And if she died tomorrow her tombstone would say, “DISAPPOINTED.” Because that would sum up her life.

Take, though, the example of a different wife and mother I know named Alexandra. Alex has no expectations. All human behavior is an amusing surprise to her. And her son’s room is clean. How is that possible? Because she has an agreement with her son about the room. She and her son respect each other. They also like keeping their word with each other. It’s easier to live with confidence and happiness that way.

Her son’s favorite action heroes keep their word, too. It’s a matter of honor and grace.

As Steve so beautifully illustrates, when we base our relationships on mutual respect and clear agreements (as opposed to expectations and emotional blackmail), we create a greater ease and “workability” in every area of our life.

Expectations vs. Hope

I was teaching a seminar several years back when a woman stood up, dripping with disgust, and pointed an accusatory finger at me. “The problem with you”, she said, “is that you give people hope”. She was right, of course,though in my defense it had never occurred to me that this might be perceived as a bad thing.

Where did hope get such a bad name? Criticism of both religion and new age thinking is filled with accusations of giving people “false hope”. But what makes hope false?

The Oxford English dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen” and as “grounds for believing that something good may happen”. False hope, then, is not to do with my feeling of expectation and desire for my relationships to be successful, my business to make money, and my body to be healthy, but with my grounds for believing that these things are possible.

If I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because I have “secret” knowledge of the future which reveals that as long as you do x, y, and z, you will ultimately succeed, that is unfortunately false grounds for hope – I have no such knowledge. However, if I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because there are hundreds if not thousands of stories of people who have succeeded in spite of the evidence, that is indeed grounds for legitimate hope, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.

(A quick word on “evidence”. In days gone by, the evidence has clearly “proven” that the sun revolves around the earth, which is in fact flat, that bumblebees cannot fly, and that humankind will not only never reach the moon but cannot run a mile in less than four minutes or find true and lasting happiness in a world filled with suffering….oh, wait, is that one still a fact?

I gave this definition of hope in a tip a few weeks back:

Hope is not a promise that something you want will happen – it is an invitation to enjoy the possibility of what you want while you and life negotiate the eventual outcome.
And since hope costs you nothing and in fact increases the level of energy you have to move forward towards a goal, there is never a reason not to hope. In fact, there is every likelihood that hope itself makes achieving your goal far more likely.

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT

1. Think of an impending event that is important to you. It could be a meeting, a phone call, an announcement, a trip, anything that you know is coming up in the next few days.

Imagine the worst – the nightmare scenario. Not only do you fail, but you fail publicly, embarassingly, and on an unprecedented scale!

Now, imagine the best – the Disney movie scenario. Not only do you succeed, but you save a diabetic child from down a mine shaft along the way!

Next, imagine the likeliest – what do you think is a more likely outcome than either the nightmare or the “disney dream”?

As you go through this, notice how your feelings change without anything having changed in the world around you.

2. Identify an area in your life in which you would like to improve the quality of the result you are producing.

What expectations do you have for yourself and/or others in this area?

How might they be getting in the way of creating the results you desire?

What is the standard you would like to establish for how you behave in this area?

What structures, systems, habits or reminders will assist you in creating that standard?

3. Choose a relationship to explore where you are currently experiencing conflict.

What are the unmet expectations behind this conflict?

What are some agreements you could put in place that would make the expectations irrelevant?
4. Find an area of your life in which you have given up hope of ever making a useful difference. Notice what happens to your energy when you give yourself hope that it could actually change. Remember, you’re not setting yourself up here – no promises or resolutions required. Just hang out for awhile in the energy of possibility and see what happens!

What are you grateful for today? Please share! If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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