Expecting the unexpected

Grab a cup of your favorite drink and concentrate for 8 min with me, you are about to explore a hidden layer of unwanted thoughts — that might wreak havoc on your life — and how to conquer them.

When we take on a life-changing project, we prepare for it from what we know. That includes items from our own experience, what we’ve read, heard and imagined. We start to picture it in our minds. We research, we ask others for their opinions and consume reams of information. We begin to assemble an idea of what this will look like and how we’re going to get there. That image in our heads becomes the template from which we work and plan.

What we don’t see is that we’re also setting up a world of hidden expectations — the cracks and crevices hidden in the foundation of our best-laid plans that can kill off a potential idea before it gets going.

You may be asking yourself, how would I know if I have hidden expectations in my life?

Simply, if you have places in your life where you experience disappointment, resentment, regret, suppression, anger, lethargy, essentially anywhere you are deflated or have some loss of your chutzpah or any other suppressive emotion, you have these expectations. Any place where you’re just not yourself, if you look at these places long enough, you’ll see the reality of that area of your life is some way short of the scenario you had anticipated in your mind’s eye.

For instance, if you have upset in your marriage, you’ll see a gap between your expectation between how it was “supposed” to be and how it is.

I read somewhere that the root cause of upset in marriage is an unmet expectation. I think it goes out further, much further. I say the problem is expectation itself. I contend that the upsets strewn throughout your entire life are a product of thousands of unspoken or unrecognized expectations that cast a giant shadow across your life experience; causing great stress when you’re trying to make life fit with your expectations and great disappointment when life doesn’t match up to them.

Here’s what else they do, they get in the way of our real lives, our real issues, and items that require attention. They are like a mirage that diverts us from our genuine power and clouds our ability to take pronounced, decisive action. In short, you might end up working on your expectations and having life line up with them rather than taking the actions that would positively impact your situation. This “sidetracking” draws all of your power away from what’s going to improve your life or accomplish your goal, down a pathway of no power, no results and wasted time.

Now that we’ve busted our problems with expectations wide open, you’ll start to realize something. And that’s what many of the difficulties and complications in your life are the direct result of expectations that you have or have had. In your own life, your failed relationships, dissatisfaction with work, and abandoned diets can be traced right back to expectation. How many times have you said to yourself, “This isn’t how I thought it would be”?

What about the last time you were angry with someone? Can you remember it? Take a moment to examine that situation, and you’ll soon realize that your anger was a product of expectations. The gap between how it is and how it should have been. You harbor an unspoken expectation that people in your life will be agreeable, you expect them to tell the truth, and follow through on any agreements you have with them. Expect, expect, expect. And when they don’t match those expectations?

How in the hell do I uncover my hidden expectations?

The whole point here is to realize your hidden expectations and practice what I call “deliberate rational analysis”.

Pausing and reflecting gives you the needed time to access your thoughts library and allows your brain to make connections between a particular problem and understand your inner motives and gain the bigger picture of what you are doing or about to do.

Apply reflecting and rational analysis:

Pick an area of your life in which things aren’t going as well as you’d like them to, maybe even somewhere in your life that sucks right now. Take a pen and piece of paper and write out how that area was “supposed” to turn out. How had you planned it? How should have this gone? You might have to use your imagination and sense of wonder to get in touch with how the future looked from back there. Get in touch with that area and where it was supposed to head. Describe it in as much detail as you can recall.

Next, on a separate piece of paper, write down how this area looks “ access reality”. Again, make this an exhaustive description not just “it sucks”. Get into detail about why it is the way it is and what you now have to deal with. How do you feel now that this part of your life did not meet your expectations?

Now, look at both pieces of paper side by side. Your pain, anguish, disappointment (or whatever your thing is), is greater in the areas where the gap is widest between what you expected and what you have. In there, your hidden expectations are sitting. Do the work here until you fully uncover the expectations you had inadvertently set yourself up for.

Good, now look again. In what way does how you feel about this make a difference to your reality? Does it make it any better? Does it solve your issue? Hell no, it makes no positive difference! It even makes it WORSE!

The point here is that the “expectation” of how life should be doesn’t do you any good. You’re more winded by the whack your expectations took than the situation itself and that’s the deal with expectations, they blow things out of proportion and dilute your power to deal with issues effectively and powerfully.

The notion of “letting go” of expectations has been around for thousands of years although it used widely in our culture, but, it’s the practice of letting go and focusing on the reality very few engage in.

Simply put, the Roman philosopher said that the reality is not fu*king matching our expectations but in our imagination everything is possible, so stop suffering from your daydreams and put in front of your eyes the reality.

Here’s the coaching — CUT IT OUT! Let go of those expectations NOW! It’s much more powerful to come to terms with life’s unpredictability and to engage with your circumstances for what they are than getting bogged down by your refusal to let go of unnecessary or unproductive expectations. The world revolves around change. Birth and death, growth and destruction, rise and fall, summer and winter. It’s never the same from one day to another no matter how much it might seem that it is.

Our minds would love to predict and plan for everything that’s going to happen. But it’s simply not possible. And these expectations not only hurt our emotional state, but they also leave us less powerful than we really could be.

It’s so much more effective to simply take things as they present themselves, to live in the moment (like there’s another moment you could live in), and solve issues and items as they arise than to constantly expect.

It’s not that I’m anti-planning, (I most certainly am not), but the stone-cold attachment to the plan, (and all the expectation therein), is a little like falling out of a row-boat and continuing to grow even though you have no oars and no boat under you anymore. Your plan (and image) of how this should have gone is no longer relevant but yet you still struggle to reconcile the space between your expectations and reality.

Life can be like that at times. On some occasions, you have to realize that the game has changed (sometimes dramatically so) and you need to pivot. Deal with your reality.

Wake up, you’re in the water. Stop waving your arms about and paddle to shore dammit!

Our mind has all kinds of automatic thought processes that we don’t even know are going on. Expectations are just one of them, albeit an important one.

Here’s the harsh truth about how our brain works.

We all like to believe in something called “free will”. It’s one of those concepts that speak to who we are as human beings. I mean, let’s be honest, if we don’t have free will, what in the hell do we have?

We value the notion that we freely choose what we do, and when to do it. We want to feel that we control our fate and shape our destiny.

But when our minds are ruled by these automatic thought processes, do we have free will? Many would argue that we don’t. Listen, here’s how much free will you have — stop doing all that shit you know you shouldn’t be doing and start doing all the shit you know you should be doing. All of it. This free will stuff isn’t so easy now, is it!?

Even when you feel yourself making a conscious decision, there are a series of unconscious thought processes that are driving that choice. Things you don’t even see or acknowledge. People are much more irrational and illogical than we realize.

In many cases, our subconscious is the puppet master that truly pulls the strings. Fortunately, you can take back your freedom to choose. And that’s by understanding how your mind works, seeing what it’s doing as it does it, and being able to use that information to cognitively choose something else. To make conscious that which is currently unconscious. Expectations are just one of these things.

Thank you for reading.

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