Great Expectations

“All suffering comes from expectation.”  

— Buddhist Proverb

This is not a blog post about being positive. Nor is it about how negative thinking is ruining your life. It’s actually about nothing and its benefits. Confused yet?

When There’s Missing Information

Humans generally do not like walking into the unknown or uncertainty, so in regards to the future, we are constantly filling in information where it is lacking.

We run through different scenarios of potential outcomes, or expectations.

Positive vs. Negative Expectations

Let’s start with the positive. If someone always has positive expectations, there’s a good chance that many outcomes will fall short. The distance between a positive expectation and a real outcome is disappointment.

So if your fantasies about other people are still alive or if you are a perfectionist, chances are you are disappointed a lot. Staying positive becomes effort, a huge burden you drag forward through an unfriendly world.

An alternative to this is having negative expectations in which you are always ready for the worst case scenario. If you are always waiting for the worst to happen, from time to time, you will be right. You’ll also have evidence to prove it.

People with negative expectations love to be right—you can hear them repeat “I knew it” over and over again, even when something unexpected happens like losing their cell phone.

People who always have negative expectations choose to be victims of a harsh universe, and are always waiting for the other shoe to drop when something good happens.

There are plenty of toxic people in the world with this perspective.

Okay, so positive expectations disappoint me, and negative expectations will turn me into Scrooge, so what should I try to do to live a happier life?

The Third Way: Let Go of Expectations

What if you had no expectations? What if however things turned out would be okay? What if you knew you could handle the full range of possibilities between the best and worst case scenarios?

You can. How do I know? Because you already did. Bad things have happened to you and you survived. You fixed it. You dealt with it. Good things happened, too. Lots of them, if you think hard enough (I challenge you to make a list!).

Letting go of expectations is not an easy thing to do. It doesn’t mean you are not making an effort toward a positive outcome, it just means you can let go of those things you have no control over.

The voice in your head will have less to say, and that makes everything a little more peaceful.

p.s. – Do you want to learn how to let go of expectations? Book a free trial session and we’ll see if we’re a fit for working together.