Expectations at fault or your actions?

3 min read

1 hour ago

Do you think that your partner is not even doing bare minimum for the relationship, or your employee is not giving the work their 100%, or your friends are just not understanding why you took a decision or are you really just expecting too much? We will try to decode this in our today’s blog.

Almost everyday I meet people and I can hear them go on an on about how someone in their life should have done that, should have understood this, should have thought about this & that, or they have started demanding too much, expecting too much, asking for a lot etc.

We can conclude this on a short message like ‘No expectations no problem’. This is mostly used in various quotes which are highlighted as something said by Buddha, Bulle-Shah, sometimes Gandhi and others. This practice is quite common on social media posts.

But I think there is more to this picture than just a one sided problem.

Expectations in general may seem like a bad word but its actually misunderstood. People realize about this when the damage has already happened.

When we hear the word ‘Mother’, didn’t we already start expecting her to be a care taker, nurturer, protector and plethora of other things. Why is that? Aren’t we expecting a lot from her?

Some might argue, it’s the definition of Mother. and not the expectations from her. Now we have come across a fine line between a definition of a relationship and its associated expectations.

This is the first step. We need to identify this line.

Definition of a relationship will tell you what a person needs to do while the Expectation of the relationship will tell you what a person chooses to do by their own accord and understanding.

Another take of this can be that definition is involuntary while expectation is voluntary.

So am i trying to say that a person can choose whatever they wish to do and the other party should live with it? Of course not!

We have now come to the second and final step.

Since we all are already aware that expectation differs from person to person, we have been given quite a common solution for this: Communication!!!

You would hear from a lot of folks around you that communication is the key to every relationship’s success, you should talk about things, if you have a problem with your sister then you should let her know how you feel using words, if you are having trouble with your manager then just raise it in a respectful manner so on and so forth.

But they all are missing a very important factor that will make communication actually work! It alone will not serve you much. It’s called Comprehension.

I’m sure we all know its meaning and the most common thing we can relate is the comprehensive passage we used to endure in our school exams.

Did you notice that we used to provide answers only according to what was clearly conveyed statement by statement and made relations/connections of those statements?

So the statements here are communication but the connections are comprehension.

If this is still unclear, I’ll give examples to demonstrate this

Let’s say your partner is not feeling well since yesterday, but you just got an opportunity to hang out with friends at a fancy place! So just by communicating that you will not be coming till late, you can’t expect anyone to understand.

If you had followed comprehension in this matter, you would reconsider your decision to not go at all or maybe come back as early as possible.

Let me give you another example. For instance, one of your employee has completed a lot of work in last few weeks and you get another task that needs to be done. You can’t just communicate to him/her that this task also requires attention! What you can do instead is add comprehension to your communication and assign one or more resource to ease the employee’s load at least for the current week.

That’s all you really got to do. In order to differentiate the expectation from definition you need to communicate with comprehension and one by one you will be able to understand every relation of yours clearly and productively.

The victim theory to complain that your opposite party has started to expect a lot is mostly not a reflection of their behavior but of yours where you may lack comprehension in your actions.