Expectations vs. Needs
Thoughts from a magical evening at the Inspiration Club.
On April 13th, at the gathering of the Inspiration Club Budapest, we chose “expectations, needs and desires” as the topic of the day.
We founded the Club two years ago, with the purpose of creating opportunities for people to talk openly about topics that normally wouldn’t fit into the ordinary, practical and/or superficial day-to-day interactions.
We wanted the group to be inspiring, authentic, deep, constructive and open to everyone. We wanted it to be based on storytelling.
April 13th was exactly THAT.
Although most people were new to the Club, the event felt magical to many of us. People (who, for the most part, didn’t know each other) engaged in an inspiring 2-hour discussion, sharing experiences and thoughts with empathy, respect, tolerance and desire to learn. You could breathe the air of deep human connections, in the House Bar.
Halfway through the event, we converged to the idea that needs are very basic requirements for someone’s well-being. In a nutshell, Maslow’s model says it all in this field.
However, we also concurred that often we seem to perceive as “needs” a number of other conditions which, at a deeper look, do not appear to be critical to survival and perhaps not even conducive to a thriving and fulfilling existence.
As we started to question what our true needs are, we awakened to the fact that some of those “perceived needs” are just expectations that we manufactured by ourselves, based on our education, personal goals and desires, or even by success-indicators that society has imposed on us as requirements to be acknowledged as “normal” or “successful”.
Indeed, understanding our expectations and cracking them down can become an unfolding ride of self-discovery. If we are able to dig deeper, we’ll find that they are somehow connected to one of the needs identifies by Maslow, particularly to the 3 layers in the middle (safety, social and esteem needs). It’s precisely in that subtle link that we can find opportunities for self-improvement and growth. Here are some more insights.
Deconstructing expectations
You really want your promotion. You worked hard for it, you deserve it. Don’t you?
You have been training for this competition for long. It is your chance to show who you are. You must win it.
These are very simple scenarios that we’ve all faced at least once in our life. We have high expectations on the outcomes. Here comes the problem: the result does not entirely depend on us. We were a great candidate for the job, but there was another folk with a bit more experience or more developed skills. We played a great game, but someone else pulled an amazing performance and won the competition.
Our degree of disappointment is proportional to the value we’re giving to the outcome. Sometimes we identify so much with it that we feel the loss as if the ground was falling beneath our feet. These are expectations.
But what are we really saying to ourselves when we cultivate this attachment to outcomes? We’re telling ourselves a story that goes like this: if you don’t win or don’t achieve your target, you’re nothing. You’re a loser.
One can go ahead an entire life “trying harder”. Or giving up and feeling miserable. None of these two conditions, however, solves the real issue. Because the problem is in the perception that we need to achieve something to feel we’re valuable and worthy of appreciation and love.
Only when we recognize that our nature of human beings participating to the experience of “Life” in this world makes us inherently valuable and worthy of love, we can let go of attachment to outcomes.
For most of us, getting there is a long and winding journey.
Powerful questions
Analyzing our expectations with an open mind can help us bring to surface underlying beliefs or mental patters that we were not fully aware of or never questioned.
For example, let’s say you are expecting someone in your family to tell you where (s)he is and when (s)he plans to get back home during a night out with friends (for simplicity I’ll use “partner” from now on, but it can easily be your son/daughter, a sibling, flatmate… you name it). For most people, it may sound like a fair expectation. But not for everyone. In both cases, however, you can transform this situation into an opportunity to develop as individual and strengthen your connections. You can ask yourself questions as follows:
With yourself:
What’s behind my expectation? Am I afraid that something happens to my beloved and I want to make sure I can help, in case? Or do I feel insecure because perhaps I don’t fully trust him/her? Am I trying to exercise some sort of control on him/her? If so, what’s the fear or concern that lies underneath?
About and with the other person:
What practical solution can I propose for this issue? Is my partner ok with that? How does (s)he perceive this request? Will this potentially change in the future? Is it possibly going to get looser or stricter? Based on what? How can we address this jointly in a way that we’re both comfortable with?
Similar constructs can be used for all sorts of issues. Write down your thoughts, as you critically analyze your expectations through powerful questions. Then do the same with the person or the group of people at the other end of the expectation thread.
The answers will help you understand yourself better and get others to empathize with you once you can articulate your concerns, even if they may not like what they hear.
Clarify Expectations
Going a bit deeper on the topic of strengthening connection: here you have an opportunity to establish constructive boundaries and agreements with your family members, friends, partners, coworkers. How? As Stephen Covey suggests in “The Speed of Trust”, you can simply “Clarify your expectations”
Clarify Expectations is based on the principles of clarity, responsibility, and accountability.
The opposite of this behavior is to leave expectations undefined — to assume they’re already known or to fail to disclose them so there is no shared vision of the desired outcomes. When results are delivered but not valued, everyone is disappointed and trust declines.
The counterfeit behavior is to pretend to be clarifying expectations, but not doing enough to pin down the specifics that facilitate meaningful accountability. Or it’s going with situational expectations that shift based on people’s memories or interpretations, or what is convenient at the time.
In every interaction there are expectations. And the degree to which these expectations are met or violated, affects trust. In fact, unclarified expectations are often the cause of broken trust.
A very interesting exercise is to observe ourselves when we get disappointed by someone we are close to, love or simply admire. The whole structure of our thinking process suggests that another human being has done something that affects our opinion of him/her. We feel confused because now we do not know anymore how to deal with that person. We ponder whether we should retain our trust, change our behavior, sometimes even exclude that person from our life. What we don’t realize in these cases is that what has really happened is this:
We manufactured a fictional version of a human being in our mind. Not just that: we have burdened this character with a number of judgments and expectations. Now we figured that the fictional character in our mind and the real person are not the same. Or not anymore.
But wait for the funniest part: we end up believing the other person is responsible for the mismatch between our perceived “reality” and what we had in mind. Cool, huh?
I once wrote:
“Freedom is to release the world from the burden of meeting your expectations”
Indeed. Our perception of unhappiness or lack of fulfillment in life lies in the gap between our basic needs and our expectations. The bigger that is, the more likely we are to get disappointed, frustrated, disillusioned.
Lowering our expectations does NOT entail not having goals or dreams.
We still have them, but the purpose that lies underneath is way more important. And certainly, less outcome-dependent.
Are we willing to dismantle the castle of expectations to uncover the treasure of purpose?
Vale
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