Living with Great Expectations
Living with Great Expectations
If you were to live out your parents, grandparents or families expectations of you, and your life where would you be right now and what would you be doing?
What were the expectations you had of yourself when you were younger? Did you expect you would become a doctor, lawyer, banker, sports star, actor?
Did you expect you would be married or divorced, with children or without, wealthy or struggling financially? What picture did you hold in your mind for yourself and what picture do you hold now?
What are expectations and how do they affect our lives? Even though my parents may have had their expectations for me, I definitely had expectations for those people in my life and of myself. And as life happened to me, those expectations kept morphing into what was reality.
Living with great expectations, especially of others can create disappointment when things don’t come together as we expected they would. We can spend years of our lives living with our expectation of others, never seeing that it’s our expectation, not theirs.
If we expect someone to behave in a certain way, and they don’t we can find ourselves disappointed. You might also find yourself stuck in an expectation as well.
If you’ve ever said the words, I’m just waiting for them to grow up, or I know if this happens then they will love me, etc.
This is all about expectations, your expectations. The other person might not realize that you have some expectations as to how things are going to go. If you can associate with the word limbo, this is a place you can find yourself if you are still hanging on to the expectations of others. Limbo is not a fun place to be. Limbo is putting yourself on hold and waiting for someone to catch up with you.
You can also find yourself trapped in limbo, where you have let go of moving forward on your own as you are waiting for someone to catch up with you, knowing if you move forward that the situation would be over.
You can essentially put yourself on hold, because of your expectations. And when you are willing to sacrifice yourself and your valuable time, is it really worth it?
If you expected everything to be perfect and it wasn’t, would you be disappointed or would you be flexible with it not being perfect?
When things don’t go your way or how you saw them, are you frustrated or disappointed? Are you judging the person, the situation or yourself? Who are you making wrong?
There are a lot of people in situations, waiting for something to happen. Some might be waiting for a ring to appear, or an engagement, a commitment or waiting for their partner to change their mind and want to have children...there are a million different scenarios about having expectations of a situation and it’s usually a one side expectation.
If you were to live without expectation or anticipation of events, you might find yourself a lot happier. If my family wanted me to be something that I wasn’t and was never going to be, and whenever I saw them they talked about their disappointment in my life choice, not choosing what they wanted for me, that would be very difficult to deal with, on both fronts.
Depending on where I was at in my life, I might carry the guilt of feeling I was never good enough for my family or a huge disappoint to them. Or I might see their reaction to my life choices, and understand those are their expectations, and even though they are stuck on this story, that it’s about them and not me. And with this style of thinking, I am not taking on their stuff.
It’s a lot easier to go through life without having expectations, because there is no disappointment unless you have an expectation of a situation.