#3 - expectation

Perhaps one of the most profound lessons that came to me this last year was a lesson on expectation.

Someone brilliant articulated to me that "expectation is a non-verbal agreement we bestow upon another without their knowledge and then later make them pay for when they don't fulfill the expectation we non-verbally placed on them in the first place."

It's a handful to swallow I know, so let me explain.

Have you ever expected that someone do something for you, only to have them show up and either not do it, or do the complete opposite of what you had expected?  What ensues is a rageful exchange of harsh words where you persecute them for not being the person you thought they were..... or worse off, you hide your anger towards them, only to have them ask you repeatedly "what's wrong with you, you seem off tonight, is everything okay?" as you shove the anger further down and put on a smile to cover up your resentment at them not doing "what you thought they should have done in the first place."

Have I lost anyone on this?  Let me give an example: You got out on an amazing date with the most profoundly articulate and exciting man you have met in ages, you think "this is it, we've hit it off, this is the one for me."  The night is sealed off perfectly and you say to yourself as you fall asleep, "I'll definitely be hearing from him tomorrow."

The next day its 11:30am and you think, "no big deal, its still early, maybe he had something important to do."

At 1:30pm your feeling anxious and trying to distract yourself from checking your phone for the 100th time while doing anything you can to stop wondering how you could have been so wrong about this guy in the first place.

It's 5pm and you are raging! This guy is clearly a jerk and has no respect or appreciation for you and how amazing you are, so screw him.

By 8:30pm you've already signed this one off and have made up your mind that even if he does call tomorrow or send an apologetic text, you won't respond so you can teach him a lesson........

Let's take a step back here, because I've been there, and boy did the wisdom of expectation bestowed upon me ever shift this one magnanomously for me.

In the first place, you placed an expectation on him that you should hear from him the next day, without him knowing this was your expectation.  And then you made him pay for the expectation by writing him off as not being worthy of you and not being the person you thought he was.  Can I pause here and gently say that there would be a lot less upset and struggle in the world if we actually said or asked for what we wanted instead of expecting that people should just know what we need? 

My point in all of this is, its useful to step back and see where we have expected things from the people in our life, without ever actually articulating it with words.  And when they didn't do the thing we expected, we made them pay for it in some way or another and often over and over again.  Essentially we withheld from them, we didn't pick up our phone the next time they called, we stopped treating them the way we had always treated them, we were mad and we took it out on them.

And for those whose inner voice shouts "well I wouldn't do it that way" or "I wouldn't treat someone else like that so why is it okay that they treat me that way" stay with me for just a sec because self-righteousness and justification used to be my MO.  I practically had a degree in it till about December 2012.  The point is not "do unto others as they do unto you." We are not all the same, we don't do things the same way, there are 1 billion plus different ways to do things and if we are going to discard people in our life because they don't "do things the way we would" then aren't we just as judgemental and demeaning?  If we actually A, give the person the space to explain why they made a particular decision, we might learn something about them we hadn't previously known and B - we may see that they didn't actually do or not do what they did to hurt us, like we thought.

So what did I do with this lesson on expectation?  Well its an evolving art, but I notice.  I notice when I am feeling that inner rage because I didn't get something I wanted from someone and then I pause. Often the "Oh wow, I expected they'd fulfill something without actually saying it to them and now I'm really pissed at them that they didn't do it" follows and I realize that I was spiralling into a rage of anger at them when they really had no chance in the first place because I never articulated my expectation to them with words.

And you know what the most amazing thing is? People actually start showing up. Like really showing up for you and you notice all of the profound things they do do instead of that one thing that you thought they should of done.  You are able and willing to receive the gifts they bring to your life because your not so caught up in making them wrong for the things they didn't do....