How I learned to lower my expectations
At work we have a favorite saying that says: lower your expectations and you’ll be fine!
In other words, having expectations almost always results in disappointments for us. This may be the case for us at work, but I believe this idea is universally applicable, to certain extents.
So what kind of expectations am I talking about? You know, as a matter of fact, almost everyone one of us has some sort of expectations that he/she lives by. Without them, we’d be lost. Like the child expecting his mother to love him unconditionally. Is that too much to ask? I wouldn’t say so.
But it’s when we raise the bar a little more that we hit the hard ceiling of disappointment at many times. It occurs to me that lots of times we unintentionally raise our expectations for some reason. Say for example that there’s this bonus that most companies do give out at certain times in the year. After trying out several jobs at different companies which all of them do this, you come to expect that this should be the case for pretty much every company out there, right? Well who’s to say so? Unless it’s a law to do so, we can’t go on expecting every one of them to do the same. You see, in this scenario, you have just accidentally expected something from someone which you shouldn’t have in the first place. And now you got a bump in your head from hitting that ceiling.
So what I’m trying to say is:
If we wanted to live a less stressful life, we should learn to lower our expectations from other people as much as possible. Try not to expect them to do things unless they’re bound to in which case if they don’t they would go below humanly-acceptable levels.
See where I’m getting here? Whenever someone disappoints you somehow, ask yourself: Should I have expected him/her/them to do so in the first place? What if I just didn’t and the hell with them. If they do it, that’s fine. If they didn’t, da hell with them. I don’t need them.
One’s perception can predict his own disappointment. Period.
