Managing Expectations vs Your Inner Peace

So you want inner peace? However, you are still frustrated and others seem to have a different idea.

Expectations are everywhere, whether they are of ourselves or somebody else it is not something that we can easily get rid of.

In this episode we talk about managing those expectations so they don't get out of hand and you can still have inner peace.

• Different types of expectations.
• Should we drop expectations?
• What are healthy expectations?
• Moving beyond unhealthy expectations.

Transcript

Intro: Alexander Pope, one of the greatest English poets of the 18th century said, "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.: I love that. That's one of my favorite sayings. I'm Steven Webb and this is Stillness In The Storms Podcast.

On today's show, I'm going to share how to stop expectations from ruining your inner peace. We all have these expectations of what life is going to be like, how people should show up, all these stories in our heads of all different types of how life should be. I guess that's the overarching thing of expectations. So on this podcast, we're gonna see why do expectations block your happiness? Should we drop expectations entirely? Why healthy expectations? 

So I want to go back to that first quote, 'Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed', Alexander Pope, I guess that's what it comes down to, here on the spiritual journey alone and that is don't expect anything. Should we be really not expect anything from a partner or a family member? Is it really the way the world's gonna work nowadays? Well, we'll explore about that a little later, but I want to share one other quote as well, because it goes two ways. Bruce Less says, "I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.'

I love that quote also because that does the other side of it as well. let's look at why expectations are, where do we have them in life? Well, as we're going through school and we think about careers, think about work, what we're going to do in life, we have expectations of us. Where our lives go and we have expectations of life and career. I can remember at school and whenever I bumped into any family members or people I hadn't seen for a while, it was like, "What do you want to be when you're older?"

"What are you gonna do?:"

 "How are your exams going?"

Expectations of yourself

And it was all this pressure of, I almost felt like everybody expected something of me, which, in return, made me expect something of myself. Well, if I don't fulfill these things, I'm going to be a failure. And then, of course, when everybody thinks we're going to be a failure, that's what they expect to happen, we kind of create that. Until I was 18 and I ended up breaking my neck and ended up paralyzed, I expected my life to go a certain way. And then ever since then, whenever anybody hears about me breaking my neck, when I was at that age, they tend to look at the alternative or what might have happened. It's almost like they expected a different life that would have been better or would have been like they say, "Well, you would have been really successful. You'd have had a family. You'd have been, done this, that and the other."

And I'm like, "Well, how do you know? I could have been a real bum. I could have added up in a serious car accident and a week later, not even survived the following weeks."

 The thing is, we don't know about what are the alternatives, but we have this image in our heads and the story in our heads of how things should be. I've got a daughter and for many years, I had a running narration in my head of how a daughter should be and what she should do and how she should show up and she ha