The Expectations Paradox: Danger Ahead

From the minute I woke up, at the age of 16, and took control of my life, I had a good understanding of the power of expectations. At least this is what I thought for a long time. I thought that I switched from having low expectation to high expectations and believed that high expectations were the key to success in life.

I still think so, although I believe that it is important to distinguish between expectations from ourselves and expectations from others. Even more important is what we do when our expectations are not fulfilled.

Expectations can be a blessing or a curse and we can always determine what they were after the event. Subconsciously, when we succeed, we tend to consider our expectations as blessings, as a ladder that led us to victory. When we fail, we consider them false, frustrating and painful. In victories, we reward ourselves for having “motivating expectations”. In failures, we blame circumstances and/or people, and sometimes, we blame ourselves.

Expectations are a double-edged sword if we do not define them properly.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series The Expectations Paradox

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My Personal Spring Cleaning of the Mind

My life changed when I was a teenager. I was in the middle of 10th Grade when the school counselor gave me a letter telling me that since I had too many failures in my report card, I would not be able to stay for 11th Grade.

There was nothing special about it. I counted the days to the end of the year, so I would not have to go to school anymore. I hated school with every cell of my body. I was looking forward to the end of it.

The change happened when there was a contradiction between what I wanted and how it felt. You see, I wanted to leave school at the end of 10th Grade anyway, but it just did not feel right.

This inner conflict was a very big quantum moment in my life. It made me wonder, “How was it possible to get what you want and still be unhappy about it?” It is a big question. Have you ever asked yourself this? I suggest you do!

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The Devastating Relationship between Expectations and Conflicts

Couple under signs in opposite directions saying "I am right" and "Me too"

Conflicts determine the quality of every relationship. Even the most loving couples, friends or family members face conflict in their life. It is because we are different people, with different life experiences, tendencies, desires, fears, challenges and upbringing.

Every moment in time, whether we have judged it as a negative, positive or neutral, has molded us into the people we are today. We can define ourselves as the accumulation of all those split-second moments of experience and how they have affected us.

It is important to remember that even twins, having the same genetic code, do not have the same path in life, because each of them was in a different place in their mother’s womb, was born at a different time, has a different name and reacts differently to the same experiences. As hard as it may be to accept, the chances that two people will go through the same experience and come out of it the same way is zero.

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Emotional Freedom: Let Go and Be FREE!

Barbed fence with plant growing outside it

I do not know about you, but once, whenever I thought about freedom, I thought of a prison. I imagined someone trapped in a closed place against his will. It was always a physical place, with bars and darkness, and just thinking of it upset me.

When I started studying how the brain works, my perception changed. I learned that there is another prison – a very secure place that is the hardest to escape. Most of us live in the prison of our own mind, in which we are limited by our way of thinking.

I remember the time that I experienced the loss of my child. I could feel how quickly I was building my own prison and how each thought was adding one more bar and one more lock around me. The hardest realization was that only I could set myself free.

No one in their normal mind wants to be trapped inside their mind. Yet, in some way or another, we all are. This is because we are not in our normal mind. Yes, me too. Do not take this too hard, but Buddhists think we are all delusional, trapped in the prison of our own ego.

Think about it: imprisonment is the absence of freedom. We only desire freedom when we feel that we do not have it. If you feel free, why would you search for freedom? This comparison between what we have and what we lack, followed by the bad feeling we have about it, is a prison in itself.

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How to Release Negative Emotions: 10 Constructive and Healthy Ways

Sad mask with bad feeling words and happy mask with good feeling words

Most people think that emotions are not controlled. They come and go from somewhere in the brain or the body, and we have no control over them. In my coaching, I come across this misconception with every new client. Usually, they are not happy about something in their life and they come to me because they do not think they can change it on their own.

In general, emotions are not a problem. If they are happy emotions and if we feel good about them, we do not want to change them. But if they are painful and make us uncomfortable, then we want them out of our system and fast – and usually for the right reason. Feelings manifest into our physical world. If you think of emotions as vibrations, then we feel their vibration in our body as a physical reaction.

When I was young, my younger sister and I were fans of Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life.

We borrowed it from the local library and she bought it for me as a birthday gift. In the book, Louise Hay describes the connection between body and mind and explains how every thought, feeling, idea and action has a physical manifestation.

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What Others Think about You Is … None of Your Business

Man covering his face with a mask showing words like meaning, persona, memory, conditioning, etc

When I was young, if someone asked me to complete the sentence “What others think about you is …” I would have said, “the most important thing in life”. I thought that, because of how I grew up. My mom, who is over 75 years old now, still thinks that we live to impress other people and navigate our life based on what they think about us.

When I studied Education, I realized that most parents in the world teach this to their kids. At first, they say, “Whatever your parents think about you is the most important thing in life”. Later on, they say, “What your teachers think about you is also important”.

They are all very surprised when their kids become teenagers and transfer this to their peers and add, “Whatever your friends think about you is the most important thing in the world”.

It is a natural progression. If you practice worrying and navigate your life based on what others think about you, you become good at … worrying and navigating your life based on what others think about you.

Simple!

When you follow this path, you never learn who you are and how to navigate life based on what you think of yourself.

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Reasons: The Search for Cause and Effect

A row of dominos with a hand in the middle stopping them from continuing to fall

I often hear that finding the reasons for things we do is the way to have a happy life. There are many public claims that understanding why we do things cures bad decisions and is the way to contentment.

However, it is important to distinguish between the search for a reason and finding a reason. Searching for a reason is a continuous state of limbo, based on the belief there is one true reason for something. Finding a reason is just an illusion that the reason we found is the one true reason.

There is a big challenge in searching for the one reason, mainly because most of our decision making (in fact, more than 90%) is done by our subconscious mind, which means we are not aware of it. We only know of 10% of it.

Our conscious mind can process a limited number of thoughts and memories, so it is unlikely to lead us to the “right” reason, or right decision. At the same time, our subconscious mind can process millions of thoughts and memories in a split second. We can never hope to be aware of everything that goes on “down there”.

So in humans, the concept of cause and effect is not that simple. There is no single cause that will lead to the same effect.

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Children with the Kinesthetic Communication Style

Kinesthetic kids love mess. Two boys cutting out Halloween pumpkins

The idea that all kids are the same is false and brings parents and teachers into lots of trouble. Every time these kids are not “the same” as others, they think something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with them! They are just different and we should all be happy that there is not such a thing as “one size fits all”.

In my kids’ assessments, I check children’s communication styles. If I know their communication styles, I know what challenges they have and why, and I know the best ways to introduce new information to them.

During our sessions together, I pay attention to how they move. I check if they stand up while they work and if they move their legs or other body part. I notice if they are social and friendly and pay attention to how they talk about others. Moving a lot and talking about emotions, fairness, kindness and caring are typical for kinesthetic children.

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Your Child’s Subconscious Mind Has No Sense of Humor

When people ask me to summarize my studies, I say they were all about how the brain works. The first four years focused on how to use this knowledge to stimulate learning. Later on, I learned how to work with the subconscious mind to avoid misery and have more success and more happiness.

Learning about the brain is a never-ending quest. There is much research in the world about the brain and its functions in health, in success, in relationships, in learning and in everyday life. Over the years, I have tried to share my learning about the brain and its functions through this blog, especially in relation to parenting and education.

Why parenting and education? Because these two areas are very close to my heart. Since you are reading this, you probably care about them too.

Today, I would like to share some insight that is very important in parenting and in education. I want to tell you how the conscious and the subconscious minds work. Specifically, I want to tell you about how the subconscious mind deals with humor.

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Raising Children with “The Disease to Please”

Children are affected strongly by their emotional state. When I work with children, I can see their performance decrease when they are emotionally preoccupied. Some kids are affected more and others less, but all of them drop in performance when they are down.

Kinesthetic children are typically affected more, because they are very sensitive to the people around them. These are the kids who can “sense” others around them and all they want is for “everyone to be happy and nice to each other”.

Children who are highly sensitive to pressure are at risk of developing “the disease to please” – dependence on external rewards and oversensitivity to pressure. It is the perception that other people’s feelings are so important that they trump your own.

In most cases, “the disease to please” comes from fear of rejection, which most people want to avoid. Many people have this disease and they got it during their childhood. We can say that this kind of disease is contagious and we catch it from our parents…

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