The Strong Within Affirmation Podcast
Education:Self-Improvement
386 I Expect Great Things | January 2018 Sunday Week 4_
Smiling Sundays - #386 January 21st The Strong Within Daily Affirmation Podcast
I Expect Great Things
“A desert is a place without expectation.”
~Nadine Gordimer
There’s the famous piece of advice that says if you don’t expect anything, you’ll never get disappointed. And while that’s great advice, it’s dime store advice because I don’t know ANYONE on this earth who didn’t ever expect anything.
I get what they’re saying when they say it, but it’s plain wrong when people offer it up as advice as if they live it. When we tell people to have no expectations, we are then essentially saying we have no expectations. This advice that we give away so freely conveys to others that we’ve mastered it ourselves, which is a lie because as I said before there’s no one on this earth that doesn’t have some form of expectation. It’s like the practice of Zen, when they tell you to have no wants, but not having any wants is still the form of a want.
Now I know it may seem like I’m being anal or that I’m splitting hairs here, but sometimes the advice we give to others that sounds nice really…harms them and it harms us. Because what we’re doing is telling people to do something impossible.
I get what the advice is trying to say, to not be upset or be disappointed if you don’t get what you want…but I believe when we use words and ideas incorrectly we cause more harm than good. What I’ve come to find that’s better than having NO expectations, is to be open to all possibilities. It’s the idea that there’s great merit in finding the good in whatever happens. Because in most of our focus upon what we expected, or wanted to have happen, was a limited range of the amazing things that could happen.
My expectations only saw a small fraction of a picture, yet there was something so much better by being open to all possibilities…not just what I thought would make me happy. It opened my eyes to the whole picture. It opened my eyes to ALL the pictures that could be.
Let demonstrate what I mean. A friend had posted something on social media that said. “note to self, never expect anything from anyone.” And this is where people started commenting things like “zero expectations=zero disappointments, or never expect never disappointed.”
But I took another road, and here’s what I posted:
“I hope you expect great things from yourself. I'm sorry you're going thru this... but never expecting is unrealistic. I expect to see good in whatever I look at, I expect to find an answer if I just keep looking long and hard enough, and I expect to find good people on this Earth. I've met you... and you're one of them. And I expect to die someday but enjoy life while I'm here living. It's not that you can't expect anything from anyone... I think it's about finding the ones great enough to be around even when they do let us down... because someone will always let us down. I let myself down all the time by being too hard on myself or giving up on myself too early. Everyone's dealing with their own demons and it doesn't make it right or better when people let us down... it just helps us to get rid of unrealistic expectations--that everyone will be there for us when we need them. I'm sending great love, energy, and the reminder that you are your best advocate for saving yourself. 😀🙌💪 I believe in you.”
What I said in this post all boils down to one thing…having unrealistic expectations. That everyone will be there for us when we need them. And I’m not going to talk about her issue as I don’t know what she was referencing specifically, so I’ll talk about my issues. So grab a chair since we’ll be here for a couple years talking about my issues…just teasing.
When I’d say things like “you can’t trust anyone, everyone will let you down, no one is ever there for me when I need them…” what that did was create a world of disappointment for me. And maybe you’ve heard me saying this before as I like this quote… “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” What I was doing when I spoke this way, was first feeling sorry for myself, telling myself how no one is there for me, and then I actually began creating this reality.
Being a helper, or someone who makes their living in trying to inspire and motivate others to think differently…sometimes I don’t share my pains with people. And so, the story I’ve told myself is that I’m there for everyone else, but no one’s there for me when I need them. And the reason people aren’t there for me is, first of all, I don’t tell people when I need help as sometimes I would think my issues weren’t that big of a deal and I didn’t want to bother anyone with my minor problems, but the other reason is I didn’t have the right support group around me.
I work to help people who have problems, and so I attract those type of people in my life, and there’s nothing wrong with those people…it’s just that they aren’t the right support I need…when I do need help. I needed to create the right support group of mentors and friends who can give me what I need. And being a coach, I know that I need to invest in coaches who help me to think differently when I myself get stuck. The problem I had was in believing in an idea that everyone can be there for me exactly how I needed them to be…which is an unrealistic expectation.
So sure, I partially agree—don’t have expectations. But let’s be more accurate about this, let’s not have unrealistic expectations. And if we were to take the example I used above, then let’s work to surround ourselves with people who can be there for us when we need them…but let’s understand that NO ONE will be the exact answer for us when we need them to be… the only one that can do that is ourselves…and God.
Today’s Personal Commitment:
Take a piece of paper out and write down the answers to this question, “what unrealistic expectations have I been living my life off of that’s causing me pain?”
Maybe that’s a tough question to answer at the moment. So start looking at issues that you’ve had recently about being disappointed. Ask yourself why you were disappointed, and how you could look at it better next time? Ask yourself, “what would being open to all possibilities look like? How different would your life be, and what would it take to be able to begin living your life this way?”
Expectations aren’t a bad thing, unrealistic expectations are. I do think we need to reach further than we think we can in life, and to push our expectations. But what I’m really talking about, is ridding expectations that harm us rather than push us to see more in ourselves and in life. The reason I said the quote above “A desert is a place without expectation.” Is because when we have no expectations, like a desert, there’s nothing there for us…it’s a life that’s empty and barren. There’s nothing to look forward to. So let us expect good things, but be open to all possibilities. Because even in my worst situations, they brought me to something even better than I could have imagined.
I Expect Great Things
Thanks for listening. I'm sending great energy your way as we become Strong Within together,
Personal Development Life Coach-
Chris O'Hearn
Contact info- email: chris@strongwithin.com phone:865-219-3247
Music by:
- Zest by basematic (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
- I Have Often Told You Stories (guitar instrumental) by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
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