Expectations have an enormous impact on your behavior. Expectations are one of the ways in which your brain organizes and makes sense of contemplation of the future. Your thoughts, the little dialogue which continually operates within your “self”, essentially focus on either the past, the present, the future, or some combination of these three.
Expectations generally deal with thoughts of the future. An expectation may help you set goals and lead you on a path to take action to meet those goals. An expectation can help you as an athlete excel. An expectation can assist you in healing, as in a belief of the power of medication to cure disease or reduce pain, even in cases where the medication is a placebo. Expectations motivate you to achieve results and meet goals.
Expectations can have a dark side as well. While you are likely familiar with the placebo effect, do you know about the nocebo effect? You can focus too much on a negative future possibility, which may in fact lead to a more statistically significant occurrence of things you perceive as bad.
And, people who are too highly motivated — hyper motivated — have been shown to have a smaller chance of obtaining success with the matter to which the motivation is applied. Moreover, if you live only in the future you run the risk of missing the present moment, spending your time in a daydream.
Expectations need also be balanced with wisdom gained from the past. As the old saying relates, if you don’t learn from your past, you will repeat the same mistakes. Further, there is nothing wrong with reminiscing about fun times in high school, or cool things you did as a kid, or how much fun you had last night. When reminiscence becomes rumination, however, living in the past can become pathologic.
Excessive focus on the past or the future also leaves you unappreciative of the present. How often have you sat drinking your breakfast coffee, ruminating about a conversation with a significant other, friend or business associate that you had yesterday that went poorly, all the while missing the warm, rich taste of your coffee, and the appreciation of how the rising sun plays off the dew on the grass and the mist slowly dissipates in the chilly morning air?
Sometimes, you may excessively live in the past because of trauma. Childhood abuse, workplace bullying, posttraumatic stress from service in the military, can all create a difficult environment for you to focus more appropriately on the present and future. For those situations, therapy might be the answer.
If however, your goal lies in achieving the optimum balance between mindfully appreciating the present, and appropriately managing expectations of the future, the tools that are available to you range from meditation classes to self-help books to coaching. It is the rich life where you can mindfully appreciate each moment of each day, in a respectful and grateful way, while still using your abilities to plan, to set goals, and to motivate yourself towards achieving those successes for which you have – you guessed it – set certain expectations.