Expectations
How often do your expectations go unfulfilled? Are you finding relationships unrewarding? Your career lacking a little something? Are you finding yourself increasingly frustrated by the behaviour of others? Or maybe you’re not feeling good enough in yourself? What expectations do others have of you?
Where expectation lives there’s a danger of disappointment. Disappointment in the people around us, in our relationships, our endeavours, and in ourselves.
It is important to set out expectations if we are to have them realised. We need to look at what we are asking of ourselves and others and whether our ideals meet other people’s views. Where these don’t match up, our expectations are unlikely to be met, yet this can often be simply due to a lack of communication.
Communication is vital if we are hoping to have others meet our expectations and if we are unwilling to deviate or be flexible in what we are hoping to gain. A basic example of this is a recent personal experience involving my birthday and my son’s seeming lack of interest. I left the house before he woke and he had left for work when I returned home. He didn’t return home until after midnight when I was in bed, upset that he had not wished me a happy birthday. For me this was a basic expectation, that my son would want to wish me a happy birthday, for him, after a discussion the following day, he had wanted to see me personally with my gift and had felt I would understand that, as we hadn’t seen each other, he hadn’t been able to do this. When I expressed that I would have expected, at the very least, a text message wishing me a happy birthday, he responded that he hadn’t known he had to. He was unaware of my expectation and his expectation was that I would be happy to see him a day late with my present due to our clash of schedules. I was upset and disappointed because my unvoiced expectations of him weren’t met. It left him feeling guilty but resentful that I hadn’t seemed grateful for his gift as his expectation of my appreciation had also fallen short.
I needed to remind myself that what is important to me isn’t necessarily the same as what is important to others. I needed to also acknowledge that his absence had triggered a deeper need in me deriving from my childhood that he couldn’t possibly have anticipated, but that’s for another blog!
This said, I felt my expectation was realistic and, now knowing the importance of this to me, my son is unlikely to fail to meet this expectation in future. He is clear about what is expected of him and it is a simple enough request that doesn’t challenge his own views too deeply. He can work with it. But if he doesn’t, then I’ll remind myself that he does care and my time for birthday wishes will come. I can work with that.
We do however need to recognise when our expectations become unrealistic, when we expect our employees to work to perfection, when we expect our family and friends to be at our disposal when we need them, when we expect our children to sit quietly in the doctor’s waiting room and so on. We are relying on others to behave in a way that we would like them to behave in order to meet our values and beliefs and expectations. Is this fair? We are all individuals with our own ideas of right and wrong and good enough. Who gives us the right to be upset with another person’s actions simply because they don’t fit our view of what should be? And additionally, what makes us so hard on ourselves when our own behaviours don’t meet our standards? How absurd does this sound? Yet we do it. I’ve met many a client that continue to beat themselves up over past behaviours that don’t meet current expectations of self. They feel they deserve to be unhappy, and to be punished, simply because they’ve behaved out of character at some point in their lives when of course their character has likely changed over the years and no longer fits with the younger version of themselves. The inability to separate the two opposing characters creates a great deal of internal conflict. We can expect very high standards from ourselves that sometimes don’t serve us well and don’t always make sense.
We do spend a great deal of time putting expectations in place, at home, in the workplace, in our relationships, and some of these will be implicit messages that are just learned, never needing to be spoken. We have social expectations that we pick up as we develop into adulthood that just become the norm and we usually live by them without question. But where expectations are not met, how good are we at communicating our standards, our boundaries, our desires, and our beliefs? Sometimes we need to make them more explicit.
I see this sometimes in the people around me, friends, colleagues, clients, and strangers on social media who are in need of support yet aren’t clear about what support they require. I came across a comment on social media that said “there’s no point asking for help, people will tell you they are there for you but they aren’t” and someone had responded by saying “always here if you need anything” which is a lovely gesture but was actually just reinforcing this person’s belief. What was lacking here was clarity. If this person had offered an indication of what help she specifically needed, the responder could potentially have directly offered this, going some way to meeting the expectations of that person in need. In the same way, had the responder asked what it was this person needed, they would have been invited into a much deeper conversation and again they potentially would have been able to offer a higher level of support that felt more tangible to the person in need. A distinct lack of communication both ways and an absence of understanding of the expectations involved led to a surface level, brief, meaningless transfer of words.
We quite often assume that people should just understand what our needs are, and this is because they feel right to us so we expect that everyone else would feel the same in our position. Our expectations however derive from our own experiences and upbringing, our ethical stance and our political views, our moral compass and our perspectives and a mountain of other variables that all come together to make a very unique you. Nobody else’s life will have panned out in the exact same way as yours and so we have to assume that most people feel differently about most things. We should never assume people understand us. We are unlikely to truly understand ourselves! Do you always know what your own expectations are? Do you know what expectations are put on you by the people around you or have you made an assumption based on your own beliefs? How often have you said things like “I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this” or “well what did you expect, I’m not a mind reader!” Have you truly considered what your varying expectations are of others and yourself? Could you put these into words? If so, do.
It’s extremely beneficial to consider your expectations of yourself, lots of people put lots of pressure on themselves to reach a certain standard, in their actions, in their emotions, in their relationships, in their jobs. Are you expecting too much from yourself? The risk here is that you will also expect high standards from others that aren’t that willing. You may need to make peace with that. They are your personal expectations and you can’t expect others to live by the same standards simply because it feels right to you. Even if your expectations aren’t that high, other people may not feel they want to help you achieve them if they have their own views on what should or should not be expected of them. Would you be happy living your life to others’ expectations? People do try, and they fail miserably.
It takes a great deal of patience to compare expectations and find a compromise that suits us and those we interact with, particularly if those around us have very fixed expectations that don’t fit for us. When colleagues, bosses, partners, parents, friends, children, customers etc have high expectations that we don’t feel we can fulfil, it can lead to much conflict between us and them and can also lead to us feeling we aren’t good enough. This has the potential to cause a great deal of resentment and generate anger, both outwardly and inwardly.
Consider the last time you felt angry. Which of your expectations weren’t being met? Were they realistic? Were you expecting too much? Were you angry at yourself or someone else? This is a great place to start considering your expectations as we tend to focus more on our negative emotions, but you could also ask yourself when you were last happy with an outcome – which expectation became reality? Did you provide this for yourself or did someone else meet your needs?
The next time you feel frustrated, disappointed, resentful, or angry, ask yourself these questions and see what comes up. Never assume that people know what you want, what you need, or what you expect from them, even if it seems glaringly obvious to you. They aren’t you.
If this article has resonated with you, you may also be interested in this previous blog “Why Aren’t I Good Enough?”
