Expectation

I get home from pickleball and have four minutes to get to my zoom-based writers’ group, an hour to which I look forward every week. I am surprised when I arrive to find my three dogs still in the kitchen. I expected my husband would have picked them up and taken them to our daycare for romping and running in our large snow-covered yard.

I am immediately irritated. Instantaneously the stories began: Why is his time more important than mine? Why can’t he ever be on time? Why is what’s important to me not important to him? And so on.

I expected to have this hour free from barking and critters being on the wrong side of the door. I expected time to be able to focus before other constraints of the day came to the foreground. I get the dogs in the back yard. I stomp to move my car off the icy driveway to the neighbor’s so as to make room for the impending arrival of the roofer.

By the time I did that and retrieve the dogs to come back into the house, and get settled for writers’ group, 15 minutes of my allotted 30-minute writing time has passed. My level of irritation already has escalated to well past the boiling point. I text him angrily and with a high level of snark that was easy to access.

He arrived shortly thereafter, thinking he was fixing the problem, which only served to irritate me more, and I exploded with the volume of a screaming tea kettle. He was taken aback and surprised, which turned up the volume on my screeching and the dial on my frustration.

HOW COULD HE NOT KNOW that I was hoping for a dog-free morning? Didn’t we talk about this? I was certain I had asked for this and hurt that he didn’t grant my request.

Built into this narrative that I very quickly constructed in my head was all of the evidence pointing to the fact that he doesn’t value me or my pursuits. So I laid that all out, which only devolved a discussion into an outright fight.

And then I paused, recognizing a brief but salvaging short-circuit in my brain: What if?

What if I hadn’t made myself clear earlier in the morning? How much evidence do I have really that he doesn’t value me? Crap. Also, oops.

After a pause for my revved up nervous system to return to a low softer hum, it became clear that, while my expectation was crystal clear in my head, my husband had not understood what I was asking for. This all sent me into an immediate tailspin around a false narrative and that rapidly escalated into a fight of my own manufacturing that was based on a false premise. Hashtag, expectations.

How could this all have unfolded differently? There are many answers to this query, but let me offer one framework that has benefited me many times.

Think about Expectations as having four requirements: they must be communicated, agreed upon, conscious, and realistic. Let’s go back and look at my scenario and notice where I may have missed the mark on meeting these four effective criteria.

Had I communicated my expectations clearly to my husband? I thought so, but he didn’t register that the timing aspect with respect to him picking up the dogs was important to me. So, no. I did not communicate clearly.

Were these expectations agreed upon? Again, no, because I wasn’t clear in my communication to him.

Were these expectations conscious? I thought they were, but in fact, because I had not communicated clearly and concretely to him, I only knew what I knew inside my own head.

Were these expectations realistic? I presented him with a timeframe that was very tight for his obligations, with almost no wiggle room. Then, of course, he experienced a problem at his end, inside of that tight time frame, that delayed him. So, no. These were not at all realistic expectations that I put forth.

Revisiting this scenario with these criteria in mind, I instantly could see how the entire interaction, and the subsequent two hours during which I struggled to get over myself, could have played out very differently had I been aware and mindful of these four criteria for expectations.

I don’t always succeed in following this structure, but when I do, I tend to have much more success, ease, and peace. Try this out in your own life, and let me know how it goes.

If you want more help in navigating expectations, hit me up below and I will respond directly.