The Art of Letting Go: Living up to Others’ Expectations

Our life works so that we are born into living up to others’ expectations. It starts with fitting into our parents’ expectations and then goes through 12-15 years of living up to our teachers’ expectations and nothing at all focuses on living up to our own expectations. In fact, as I recall from my early years, adults said to me over and over again that life was not about what I expected while they did everything in their power to make me fit their expectations.

There are several problems with living life that way and the common thing between them is that they are motivated by the fear of not matching others’ expectations.

Let go of living up to others’ expectations by speaking your mind, by listening to your gut feelings and by aligning your beliefs, values and rules to match them. Use your feelings as a guide. I am not suggesting that you live in the world on your own to minimize external influences, but whatever comes from the outside, ask yourself, “Does this match my feelings? Does this match what I believe? Does it feel right to me?”

This post is part 5 of 10 in the series The Art of Letting Go

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Make a list: Expectations

I always say life depends on what we focus on. Our expectations are a way of focusing on what we would like the future to hold for us, which means our life depends on them.

Expectations can motivate you or hurt you and only we can determine what they will do to us. Here is it how this works.

We all have expectations, because we rely on them to make life more predictable and therefore safer and less stressful. We learn from past experiences and predict how thing will turn out.

A person without expectations is like one with very short-term memory, because he or she cannot remember how things will turn out and must re-learn life’s lessons over and over again.

When I ask my daughter for her name, I expect her to tell me the name I gave her when she was born. Every day, I get up in the morning, I expect the sun to be there (sometimes it is hidden behind the clouds, but it is still there). I expect my sister to call me on my birthday and say “Happy birthday”.

This post is part 21 of 48 in the series Make a List

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Great Expectations

When I was training to be a life coach, our instructor said to us that our level of disappointment is related to the gap between two things – our expectations and the facts. Although this may sound simple in principle and you may be saying to yourself, “Well, of course”, stop and think about real-life situations where you find yourself disappointed and you will soon see the problem.

I went out to lunch with a few other future life coaches, and one of them, Sarah, told me about some challenges she was having at the time with her teens. Sarah was married for the second time and had two teens of her own and two teens who were her husband’s kids. Most people would already cringe at this stage, right?

Anyway, Sarah said that her kids were well organized, but her husband’s teen daughter was “very messy” and kept leaving her clothes on the floor, which drove Sarah bonkers. When Sarah tried to confront her stepdaughter about tidying up her room, she got the “You’re not my mother” treatment.

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