How THIS one thing can be Hurting your Results

Expectations…

We all have expectations. That feeling of anticipation that something -good or bad- is going to happen. Expectations are a prospect of a future benefit or, for those more pessimistic, a future damage.

Expecting for something good to happen is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually help us prepare and do the work to meet those great expectations we’ve set out for ourselves. In this sense, expectations can play in our favor and make us take action with the hope that we’ll achieve our goal.

However, for a lot of us it’s often easy to fall into the trap of setting expectations that are so high that they become unreal, and getting so attached to them that when we don’t meet them, we get frustrated and hurt.

The act of expecting is, by definition, strictly related to a future that hasn’t happened yet. So, instead of being present in the moment and enjoying the journey as it unfolds, we tend to be mentally in a near future that hasn’t come and that we can’t control 100%.

While it is natural to anticipate the outcomes of something that is important to us, we shouldn’t let this anticipation become the only possible scenario, for this will prevent us from flowing and letting life surprise us.

Often when we expect a negative outcome from a situation, later when we actually live it it’s almost never as bad as we expected, and more often, is much better than we thought it would be.

So if we can learn to let go of expectations, we are less likely to put ourselves under too much pressure to make things ‘perfect’. We are much likely to just focus on doing the job the best way we can.

So, why live in an uncertain future when we can fully enjoy our present? Which actually is, like the word suggests, a gift.