Expectation Management: How Being Realistic Helps Us Not Be Disappointed
Expectations can play tricks on us. Let’s imagine the following situation. When we meet someone with whom the hours fly by, with whom we can enjoy and laugh out loud but also have deep conversations, we usually say that “we are getting hooked.” At that moment, it is common for a lot of scenes of moments that we could potentially share with the other person to come to mind, mostly pleasant and pleasant experiences.
But as soon as we realize how well everything could turn out, a hurricane of questions invades us; and in his eyes, the following unknown: what if such optimism inevitably leads us to great disappointment? In this article we invite you to reflect on the importance of managing expectations in the face of the opportunities that are unfolding in our lives all the time
Expectations are those thoughts, sometimes accompanied by vivid images, that we develop based on the tentative outcome of a future situation. We usually do not know the ending that many of the important events in our lives will have, so our expectations play an anticipatory role and represent what we expect to happen as a result of such situations.
People tend to categorize our expectations as “high” or “low” based on how pleasant we think a certain circumstance could end up being. We also provide specific mental content to our expectations. What do we mean by this? Well, we could return to the situation of meeting someone with the aim of clarifying this idea. When we like a person on a first date, not only do we tend to develop “high” expectations for the future, but what we expect from the partner, the other person or the situation in general is something very specific that could be shared with the rest of the people in our society.
For example, it is common to have the expectation that the other person will send us a text message at the end of our meeting, that we will go to the movies together and, if we let ourselves be carried away by the free flow of expectations, we could even imagine a very distant future. with that person. Let’s see below why it is useful for us to take this into consideration.
At this point the first potential problem of expectations emerges. Many times, the contents of our expectations—whether getting a good grade on an exam or getting the job opportunity of a lifetime—are not determined by our authentic desires, but are loaded with the implicit values and desires of our environment. People are not always aware of the expectations we place on an event or person, so we could lose sight of the north, that is, the question: is this expectation mine? Perhaps the expectation that this new job It will be what I need to be successfuloriginates not so much in intrinsic motivation, but in the expectations that a caregiver placed on one in the past
Another possibility is that our expectations are a product of the sociocultural world in which we have grown up. Since we are little, we internalize the ways in which the members of our family are linked to each other in a sustained way over time. Actions in society are always directed towards another and what is expected of them. From early childhood we observe how adults constantly use expectations to obtain a response from others, and we are also exposed to receiving them from them. Also in this period we receive expectations according to the collectives or social groups to which we belong – for example, the expectation of what it means to be of a certain nationality, age group or gender -, in more or less explicit ways, depending on the case.
In relation to this, a very interesting investigation carried out by Galloway and collaborators, from the University of Nevada, found that young people who tend to consume films of the comedy and drama genres tend to present common expectations in relation to romantic love, based ideas like “love can do anything” or “intimacy will always be satisfactory.” For this reason, the fact that our expectations tend to deal with the same topics, to contain the same content, makes perfect sense, since they are a product of the cultural environment in which we are immersed. However, we must learn to question our expectations since the idealization of situations that are yet to occur and whose outcome is uncertain could lead us to color them with what we expect from them, to not be present when they finally occur and, consequently, to not enjoy what a situation has to offer us as it is.
Is it a good idea to “have no expectations”?
Given what we’ve seen so far, it’s tempting to believe that the ideal would be to have no expectations at all and simply let things happen on their own accord. This is very widespread advice today, although it is not recent: the English poet Alexander Pope already advanced it in the 18th century when he noted: “Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he will never be disappointed.” The problem with these messages is that, despite having good intentions, they end up ignoring the fact that completely stripping our minds of expectations would be a huge problem.
In some contexts, expectations could be very useful since, ultimately, They are thoughts that help us anticipate a future situation High expectations could denote that this novel event that is presented to us—a job change, for example—is valuable to us, so it is common for us to feel excited, motivated, and serve to guide our future actions in pursuit of achieve a specific objective. For their part, low expectations usually have the objective of minimizing the possibility of disappointment. There is nothing wrong or strange about this. No one likes to experience pain or get hurt just for the sake of it. In fact, in some circumstances it can be useful to maintain low expectations to avoid situations from which we will not obtain any benefit.
The key lies in managing expectations
However, trying to shield yourself behind maintaining low expectations so as not to suffer is not ideal either. Pain in human life is inevitable, and something we tend to ignore is the fact that behind some circumstances that produce unpleasant emotions and thoughts in us could lie something extremely valuable and significant for our lives. For example, having low expectations and adopting pessimistic attitudes could reduce our possibility of exposing ourselves to uncomfortable situations such as going on a date, under the argument of “I don’t think I’m going to like it” or “I don’t want to be disappointed later.” The problem with this attitude is that it ignores the fact that, Despite being a situation from which we could be hurt, it could also bring us extremely rewarding experiences for us in the long term
Ultimately, we could argue that a key to building a meaningful life is learning to manage our expectations. This does not mean that we have to force ourselves to think in a certain way for the future, since part of the nature of our mind is to generate expectations about everything, all the time, often beyond our control. It is evolutionarily designed for that. On the other hand, managing expectations involves learning to evaluate when it is convenient to meet a particular expectation and decide to act based on it and when, on the contrary, it is not.
On the other hand, managing our expectations means learning to distance ourselves from them, knowing that on many occasions they can be useful but that they are just that, expectations, and not reality. Therefore, it is about adopting a realistic attitude, since managing expectations involves seeing that something exists beyond what we think. And, as if that were not enough, it is essential to take care of our interpersonal ties, since it prevents our vision from being clouded by what we expect from other people; gives us enough clarity to know that our expectations are, in the end, only ourand that the other does not have to share them nor is he responsible for it.
