Yes, we’re busy.  Certainly we have way too much to do and not enough time to do it in.  Of course we’re under stress and pressure.  Undoubtedly we’re exhausted and overwhelmed.  And? That’s life my friend.

If we step back for a minute, don’t we like something about our work?  We surely love the money and benefits we get from it if nothing else. Perhaps we even get satisfaction or recognition from it. If not, then at least it finances the rest of our lives.

We certainly value and love our children, family and friends.  They’re annoying at times, but funny and supportive at others. We may never know what to expect, but they add something of significance to our lives and keep us from being dull.

We can even the respect how tired we are. That usually means that we are contributing something to the world and hopefully accomplishing our goals and that feels good.

Contentment not a place you get to, but a place inside you that you can step into and experience at any time. It is quiet and busy, calming and energizing all at the same time.  It may be submerged under chores and worries, busyness and chaos, but if you look deep enough it’s there – I promise. You just have to look!

“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.

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.

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!

Copyright 2001-2010 – Genius Catalyst / Michael Neill. All Rights Reserved.

For the record, my husband says I don’t have one – I think I do, it’s just hiding sometimes. I tend to be a very serious, focused person and levity does not come easily to me. My trigger is when I hear myself say, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I know this means that I am annoyed, frustrated and most likely ruminating that I didn’t get my way. It also means that whatever the cause is; it’s most likely not a big deal or my reaction would have been different – true anger or hurt feelings.

Every day so many things don’t go the way we’d like them to. We can’t control it, we can’t change it; sometimes all we can do is laugh at it. You have to have a sense of humor if you don’t want to be frustrated and angry all of the time. Very few things or situations are worth the aggravation we allow them to cause. Ask yourself, “Is this really important?” and if it’s not try to find the humor in it.

Don’t take life so seriously!