Well what did you expect?

Actually, I should shut up about it, because by the time you’re reading this on Sunday morning, in the UK at least, the temperature will have dropped considerably. I’m expecting it though, so I’m prepared.

Ha – that was actually a fairly desperate attempt at a smooth segue into what I’m gonna be talking about today. Expectation.

A recent connection, and soon to be good friend - I feel it - (@sarietaylorcoaching), posted a very short post on Instagram about expectation the other day, and it reminded me of some work I did around this some time ago that I’d forgotten all about.

Expectation is a whole ‘thing’ – it’s actually a full-blown nervous system pattern (as you’ll hear more about in a mo).

Have you ever done any of these things?

You’ve been out for the day, and maybe left your partner at home, or even you’ve been away for a few days and when you’ve got home, there’s a full basket of washing (that you’d left empty), or there’s no milk in the fridge, no fresh bread, or a room hasn’t been tidied since you’d been gone?

Maybe you've been off work for a few days, and you get back to a list of tasks your team is quite capable of completing, yet nobody has touched them?

Something like that anyway.

These are very tangible examples of everyday living and working with other people.

What I’m trying to get at here is that we quite often have an expectation of what somebody ‘should’ do, how they ‘should’ behave, how they ‘should’ react, what they ‘should’ prioritise, what they ‘should’ notice without us having to say it, how emotionally available they ‘should’ be, how they ‘should’ support us (especially when we’re going through something big), etc etc. And these things are almost a standard marker in our mind (usually based on what we would do) that allows us to be open for disappointment when that expectation isn’t met.

Before I carry on, I want you to recognise this…

When that expectation isn’t met, it’s not just disappointing… it physically does something in the body. That deep-seated frustrated, angry or upset feeling it brings about in your body, is not you being dramatic – it’s your nervous system feeling a rupture.

The sensations created in the body when your expectation is not met, are received by the body in the same way as an unmet ‘need’ – it reads it as a loss of safety – so your system reacts the only way it knows how: with protection; frustration, shutdown, overthinking… Why? Because as always, it’s trying to keep you safe – in this instance – from the sting of disappointment or feeling like you don’t matter.

But of course, an expectation is just a story your mind has created about what you want to happen – and quite often the other party has no idea about this expectation. And sometimes, there isn’t even another party involved. It might be something you were expecting to happen after say a medical treatment, or how you thought something would go – like the weather on your holiday, or how you'd feel after making a big decision, reaching a goal, or losing that weight you thought would change your life.

And actually, it’s expectation that can leave us wide open to not only disappointment, but frustration, anger, and a real feeling of being letdown and unrest.

To your nervous system, the unmet expectation feels like something unsafe just happened – even if the other person had no clue. And when no one else is involved, your system still registers it as a rupture – because it’s not really about ‘who’ didn’t meet the expectation, it’s the gap between what you imagined and what actually happened. That’s why your response can feel (and be) way bigger than the situation itself.

If we had to put this in a business perspective, how about when we launch something and we expect a certain amount of people to sign up for it, or we expect a certain outcome, and that expectation sets the bar for what we see as a success or a failure.

Again – it’s not real. It’s a story we wrote in our own heads.

When that ‘expectation’ is not met, it creates the narrative for the outcome being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and whichever one it is, creates sensations in our body, which trigger the nervous system into the state it believes will keep us safe, based on the messages it receives from those sensations.

Expectation creates pressure – and your nervous system feels that pressure as threat. So even something like fewer people signing up than you’d hoped for can feel like danger to your body – because it doesn’t match the outcome your system had already prepared for.

Most recently I’ve been forced to really go into some deep personal inquiry about this expectation thing.

As I allude to, albeit rather cryptically at this stage, I have some big stuff going on in life at the moment and some people’s reactions have not been as I would have imagined – okay, ‘expected’. For some weeks, this had led me to experiencing feelings of hurt and anger – I realised I was working hard to ‘make’ them come round to my way of thinking.

I expected an outcome and when I didn’t get it, it made me feel unsafe in my nervous system. Actually, when I’ve stepped back – as I have thankfully over the years learned to do (and done a sh*t tonne of nervous system regulation work to allow my brain to come back on board and think clearly and rationally!) - and reflected on what’s actually going on for me – I recognised that all it was, was that my ‘expectation’ was creating the problem — it wasn’t really the fact that people didn’t agree with me at all. It was the weight of the expectation.

So I’ll leave you with this to have a think about and start work on too, as it’s really rather helpful!

Let’s start by increasing our awareness (self-awareness is always the first step in any process of change – and also the first step in my Shift Life Design System™). Become aware of your expectations in real time. Start to see if you can see them for what they really are. Observe them as though you are looking in from the outside – what do you notice?

From this point, it becomes easier to work towards a place where we are able to drop the expectation and just experience what really happened – whatever it was - whatever it is.

And while we are at it, let’s really work towards l earning to drop the word ‘should’. It’s this little blighter that sets that expectation bar and creates the unnecessary suffering – without it we’ll be in a whole lot more present place.

Lovely.

Let’s all create a week that feels as good as we can - no expectations!