Hi guys! Welcome to episode 254 of the wildly successful Lifestyle podcast!
Well, What did you expect?? I can hear my mom saying that to me when my friend had let me down again.
I expect people to do what they say they’re gonna do. But that isn’t always going to
happen.
How much time do we spend creating things in our head because something or someone is different then the way we thought it should be?
It could be with anything. Our day to day activities, our relationships, anything your brain expects to be a certain way, but it doesn’t go that way.
How much grief do we cause ourselves unnecessarily because something is different than what we had expected?
I was going into get my hormone pellets done, I’ve always had the same dr, dr Pearson but today when I went in there they took me a different direction in the clinic which I thought was odd and it was a different nurse that brought me back which was also odd and then she said dr chohan will be right in and left me there in the room. So I had this expectation that I was going to have my same dr I’ve seen for years and be with the same nurse but that wasn’t going that way. And so while I was waiting I had all this time to think. I started thinking this just isn’t comfortable like it used to be my friend is no longer managing it, I don’t know the nurse and now I’m seeing a new dr and what if she does things differently and I don’t like it? The office has just changed so much..I even had the thought maybe I stop doing this…I saw myself heading down a spiral of negative thoughts when I thought wait a minute. Dr chohan is dr Pearson’s daughter. They are all beautiful people. Maybe because she is a female maybe this might work in your favor because you can ask her some questions you’ve been wondering about. This could actually be a really good thing. But you see my expectations were one thing and the reality was a whole other thing. If I let my brain go, by the time the other Dr came in I would possibly have been a nervous wreck and have myself so upset that I stopped doing something that literally saved my life because my hormones were so off. so I checked myself before I wrecked myself literally.
I love that saying because I’m finding the more aware I am of my thoughts the more I realize most of the problems I have had in life, I created right out of my own head. I was about to make myself miserable in that dr office.
I wondered how many times I’ve done this before and NOT been aware of it.
The more we are able to pivot when things aren’t the way we expected, the better off we are.
My little sister was in Florida for the 4th of July and the weather was really crummy. It rained really hard a lot of the weekend. One morning it was really raining and would be Al day, so she journaled that she was on vacation with awesome friends and no matter the weather they would have a fun day, they would find things to do that didn’t involve the boat. And that’s exactly what they did, from having a dance party on the porch to playing giant jenga. It wasn’t the fun they expected but it was the fun they created.
Life is unpredictable. It’s not always going to go the way you thought it would. People are unpredictable. They aren’t always going to act the way you expect them to.
I believe having expectations are a good thing, it keeps you driven and excited. I just
think we need to manage them.
If you think about it, we manage expectations all the time. If someone’s young we expect them to know less than someone older. If someone’s driving super slow we get less irritated when we realize they are elderly.
How do we manage expectations day to day?
Buddha got it right in my opinion when he inferred us to always expect the unexpected.
Especially with Covid. Things take longer than normal. Companies are having a hard time finding good workers. Sometimes we expect good service but don’t get it, does that mean we just expect bad service? No of course not. We manage our expectations. We pivot. And if all else fails, we learn to expect the unexpected.
Getting upset never helps you or the situation. If I had of gotten upset enough to stop my hormone pellets I would have long term consequences for that which wouldn’t be good.
When you expect to simply have fun regardless then you look for where you can have fun and don’t rely on the circumstances to be just right kind of like what my sister did in Florida.
My husband is a pilot and they have a saying they teach in human factors. The definition of conflict is a difference in expectations.
In order for us to manage conflict, we have to manage our expectations and be aware of them. Maybe you show everyone driving slow the same compassion you’d show an elderly person? Why not?
If you really think about it, expectations are at the core of every upset we have. A different dr at My dr appointment, a rainy holiday when you expect sun, an argument with someone you love because they worked late again. This list goes on and on and you probably have a few of your own that come to mind.
My challenge to you today is The next time you start to get upset figure out what expectations are being met and then ask how can I pivot my thoughts to stop this negative thought spiral? The key as I always say is awareness. The more aware you are of your thoughts and your expectations, the easier your life will be.
I love you guys. I’ll talk to you in a few days.
People are not perfect, our circumstances are not guaranteed and life sometimes throws you a curveball.
We are not here to control anything anyone else does. The only thing we can control is our response to what anyone else does. When we know that life gets much much easier.
And everything is not about me. In fact nothing anyone else does is about me.
But everything I do is about me.
You may want to argue with me on that. You may say well everything I do is for my kids. No everything you do is so you feel good about what your kids are doing.
