Are you where you want to be in life today? Does your bar for success and happiness continue to rise just a bit further out of reach with each passing year? We all love to ‘should on ourselves’. We all wrestle with expectations; whether it’s in comparison with distant daydreams, current projects, or the digital masterpiece of other people’s lives as presented on social media. There are cultural expectations like marital status and raising a family. There are economic ones like the magnetic pull to earn more money or to own a home. Even when we earn a decent living, we want more. Happiness is perhaps the most elusive of pursuits that falls into our scope of expectation. So how do we manage expectations about life? Everything is relative, but if you don’t know where you’ve placed your bar, you don’t know how high you need to jump.
We’ll explore ideas like the notion that happiness is a lousy thing to chase. We’ll examine the effect that social media is having on our sense of self-worth. If you’re like me, you have dozens of little ‘shoulds’ running around your head all the time. Don’t worry; we’ll examine that, too. Believing you can improve your position is a good thing. We just need to learn how to harness the guiding potential of those shoulds. This is something I will attempt to lay out clearly in the form of a practical exercise. Through all of this, we’ll embed everything about how to manage expectations about life in the bedrock of the present moment. Being here, now, mindfully is the most potent way to quell not only comparative anxiety but also to get to where you want to go more effectively.
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Manage expectations specifically
Imagine if your boss came to you and asked you about your future salary expectations and you gave the following one-dimensional answer: ‘more’. It’s not very specific, to say the least, and it would likely result in a short and unproductive conversation. In this context, we see that being unspecific about important things is ridiculous. Yet we do this constantly with the notion of happiness. We know we want it, but we can rarely define it in concrete terms. The best way to get a grasp on what happiness means to you is to work it out on paper. Take your time, adjust it as you evolve as a person, but most importantly, break the concept of happiness down into specific and measurable elements.
Try this brainstorming exercise to help you define happiness more specifically. Grab a pen and paper and do a flowing brain dump of the things that make you feel happy. Here’s what that looked like for me: family, freedom, the right amount of challenge, adventure, cats, friendship, good food.
A practical exercise to help manage expectations
Now that you have a list of broad elements, elaborate on each one with simple “When I can…” statements. These statements should describe the condition upon which you enable the associated feeling of happiness. For example, “when I can fly to see my family three times a year, I feel happy”. Similarly, “when I have enough money to pay for new education to secure a career change, I feel a sense of freedom”. The critical part of this elaboration exercise is that it takes an abstract concept like freedom and specifies it into something measurable. I can measure how much money it costs and how much vacation time I need to visit my family three times a year. I can measure how much it will cost to attend a certain educational program and how much savings I would need to sustain myself during the program.
If you’ve not already paused to try this simple exercise on paper, I encourage you to do it now. If you have, you may be thinking ‘this is overwhelming because I’m so far off from some of my ‘when I can conditions’. I hear you. I’m far from achieving some of my own happiness conditions as well. However, the empowering feature of this exercise is not to realize that we’ve made it and the work is done. The purpose of the exercise is to have a more specific answer than ‘more’ when it comes to managing expectations. There’s nothing worse than chasing an undefined ‘more’. When we sit down and calculate what we need in order to align our current reality with our expectations, we can work towards them more effectively. If we can measure it, we can solve it.
Gratitude and awareness of the present moment are the bedrock
We’ve established that working toward something specific is better than entering the rat race blindfolded. But this still doesn’t solve the sense of relative inferiority or failure, because striving implies that we are not there yet. The means of relaxing this tension between where you are now and where you want to be is by grounding yourself in the present moment and constantly taking stock of everything in your life that inspires gratitude. A major theme of The Mindful Stoic blog is that striving and contentment can coexist. Admittedly, there is an inherent tension between wanting more and being more, but I believe it can be a healthy one.
Planning is such a crucial element when it comes to striking this balance between expectation and reality.
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu
Once you’ve established the measurable elements that enable conditions for happiness, the next step is to draft plans that will help you get there. If you are not making enough money, you may need an intelligent and realistic plan for a career change or a side hustle. If you need companionship, you need a plan to expose yourself to more valuable social situations, such as special interest clubs or sports.
Plans change
There are two critical aspects to consider when drafting plans. First, they must be in written format and they must contain time-bound actions. Include in your plans realistic and achievable actions that are likely to move you closer to your goals and set dates by which you must complete them. Secondly, plans change. Set reminders in your calendar, perhaps twice a year, to revisit your plans. You evolve and grow as a person. Your expectations and goals may change depending on life circumstances. Abandoning a plan or goal because it is no longer relevant is much more productive than sticking to it for discipline’s sake. The idea here, again, is to bring structure to how you manage expectations about life.
The final point I would like to make about how to manage expectations more effectively is to stop comparing yourself to others. We see more communication (recently with documentary films such as The Social Dilemma) on the fact that social media has amplified comparative anxiety. There is the organic factor embedded in the fact that we all tend to present only the best versions of ourselves on social media. We only post pictures and stories about our exotic vacations, our expensive nights out, or our disciplined workout routines. We know people do this, yet it has the effect when scrolling through our feeds that leads to the subconscious conclusion that everyone else is amazing all the time.
Then, there is the artificial intelligence factor, which we don’t fully understand. Social media companies invest billions of dollars and use intimate information about us to feed algorithms designed to keep us scrolling.
Be specific in your comparisons
The Stoics and many Eastern philosophers prescribed that we should not compare ourselves to others but that we compare ourselves to ourselves.
“The only one you should compare yourself to is you. Your mission is to become better today than you were yesterday.” – John C. Maxwell
This is more than a simple epithet. When you break it down and think about it, the only logical reference point for improvement is your past performance. If I am training for a marathon, I cannot fixate on the previous times of other competitors in my area. Perhaps they are much taller than I am, have been doing it for much longer, or perhaps even had been taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Moreover, I have no insight into their training regimen and therefore no actual data on the process by which they transformed themselves from a non-marathon runner into a marathon runner. Conversely, I do have all the data on my own progress. I can measure how far I ran yesterday or last week. Again, the idea here is to be specific and measurable. The only way you can assess your performance with the highest quality of data is if that data comes from your life.
Learning how to manage expectations for yourself is a win-win situation. We know that living far below your ideals causes psychological distress. It is equally true that having undefined or needlessly increasing expectations traps us on a hamster wheel. It is therefore well worth our time to sit down and figure out exactly what we need to feel fulfilled. Even if we fall short in this pursuit, we will be better off than if we had not attempted.
Embrace the tension
Try the above-mentioned exercise to break down and analyze the conditions that will promote what you define as happiness. Make sure that these conditions are measurable and then draft a plan to guide you. Stay away from social media or at least be honest with yourself that it can lead to inevitable and unhealthy comparisons to others.
The preeminent point I will make to conclude this post is that you need to enjoy the process. Mindfulness is the most effective way of working toward a future condition while enjoying the present moment. Coupled with a lighthearted enjoyment of the process, we should take stock of everything for which we are grateful at least once a day. Manifesting gratitude is the best way to realize how far we’ve come. If we always have our heads buried in the sand working towards ‘more’, we fail to realize our past and current success. This is crucial because not only do you gain a great sense of contentment and satisfaction from the current state of our lives, but also you receive important feedback to let you know if you’re on the right path.