Expectation or Invitation? How Your Choice Affects the Quality of Your Life

In our recent podcast on Anxiety Relapse and how to get through it Shann and I touched on the topic of expectations and how we sometimes put ourselves under duress by setting the bar too high and becoming disappointed with ourselves and others when things don't pan out how we wanted them to.

 

Here's a clip from our discussion:

Shann: I've had really high expectations of myself and the people around me for most of my life. And sometimes that doesn't serve me well. What I mean by that is that it causes me more anxiety because if you're not going to perform to the level of my expectation (and you might not even know what that is right?) Or if I'm not going to - then I'm going to be hard on myself, not gentle, I'm going to push myself further and let that inner critic take hold.

Yet, if I turn it around and think of it as an invitation and invite myself to be OK with the way things are today knowing that  tomorrow or the next day may be different I can save myself a lot of stress.

Ananga: You remind me that when I was taking my NLP training we were taught that expectations always lead to disappointment. If we expect something of somebody else, and they're not even aware of it, and then we tell them "Well now I'm disappointed in you." That's so unfair!

It's also unfair when we do it to ourselves. When we tell ourselves: I expected to be over this by now. I expected to feel better than this. It's not fair. We don't always know how we're going to feel, and we can't always control it.

 

In this podcast, Shann takes things a step further and talks about the stress freeing habit of replacing expectations with invitations.

 

- Do you have unreachable expectations of yourself?

- How high are your expectations for your loved ones and peers?

- What might happen in your life if you practice inviting rather than expecting?

 

 

Listen to the full podcast here:

image by baileyraeweaver