How To Get Control Over Your Expectations?

Hello my fellow readers! I am super excited and feeling quite thoughtful while penning this relevant article. In most of my articles, I have mentioned more often about controlling and reducing your over expectations from others as well as your life because expectations when fail to achieve its goal, it leads to disappointment and depression. Well, expectation is something that cannot be completely eliminated from one’s life as well as one’s inherent characteristics because at every phase of our life and at almost all situations everyone expect something from either themselves, or from others or the things or work they execute, which justifies that our lives are quite dependant on our respective expectations. However, we can control or reduce our expectations in some possible way.

Expectations from others might be distressing but expectations from yourself is kind of a motivational thing but not always.  For example you expect your spouse to understand and read your mind and your thoughts but it’s not possible for everyone to understand their significant other’s thoughts and needs that easily, whereas, expecting a new improved personality in yourself after incorporating lots of efforts in enhancing yourself for being a better person is a noble thing. Hence, expectations can be awful only under few circumstances. One has to keep the consequences, the necessity, the justification and the authenticity of expectations in mind before heading blindly and aimlessly towards it. The things that are most important to control expectations are the reasons for controlling i.e. ‘why’ and the right time of controlling i.e. ‘when’.

Comparison leads to expectations

When we compare ourselves and our lives with others we get expectations. For example, you got to know your boss has got a new ‘Audi’ car and has shifted to the most lavish flat, instantly your mind starts the process of comparison that you have a mediocre car with a normal 2BHK house with a boring lifestyle. Here starts the chain of expectations that includes more money, a great job, increment in the salary, a new car, a new flat and the list goes on. Now the question arises here is how to control this comparison process to avoid over expectations? Have you ever thought why we people always compare ourselves with others who are financially and socially more successful than us? That’s because we are not content with what we have. You can easily control your expectations and become super happy with your life once you compare yourself with people living in slums, with severe financial issues, who are physically challenged, who have no smartphones not even electricity. Now you must be feeling blessed and lucky to have at least a job with 12 Lacs of annual income and that mediocre car and house. Isn’t it?

Re-evaluate your expectations

Controlling your expectations completely is near to impossible task for normal human beings, however saints and yogis can do this by controlling their five senses (indriyas). For people like us evaluation of expectations can be enough to reduce expectations and anticipations. Think and analyze if your expectations have any useful outcome or is it really that important for you to invest your resources on it? It becomes very essential to make clear that fine line difference between reality and expectation as some expectations are almost same as dreams with no convenient outcomes.

Are you deserved to meet your expectations?

People blindly run behind their meaningless needs that are actually their expectations they try to achieve every day. If someone expects to become the CEO of some company and dreams of big luxurious car and lavish flats then he must be well deserved to achieve that expectation and self realization is very important. Unless one realizes his own capabilities and deserving qualities one cannot achieve his dreams and expectations. And if someone is not deserving and less capable then such big expectations are simply fictional.

Check your resources

So you’re anticipating to become a successful entrepreneur establishing a large scale sprawling business abroad then you must check your resources such as money, time, manpower, connections, location and many more. You cannot simply dream of bigger things without any resources and efforts to invest on your dream project. If one has no financial support, ample experience, knowledge and awareness, right talent and skills, he must control his expectations to become the CEO of an organisation because without such necessary resources and requirements one cannot achieve the goal of expectations.

Recommended: How to Overcome the Feeling of Hopelessness?

Scrutinize your capabilities to put efforts to achieve expectations

Scrutinizing and scanning your capabilities plays a very crucial role in controlling hopes and expectancy. You must be capable of putting efforts to achieve that goal. You must be ready to go beyond your capabilities to meet your expectations. If you find yourself less capable and prepared and unavailable for putting enough efforts in the process of attaining your goal, you must pull yourself back to control and reduce your over expectations from yourself and your life.

Patience directly proportional to expectations

When you create a chain of several expectations and work accordingly to it for achieving them one by one you must not lose your patience. For example, you are a diehard fan of Ferrari car and want to be the owner of it someday and you’re working hard to be successful enough to own that car you must work on your patience because over expectations sometimes lead us to wrong directions compelling us to do something unfair, illegal and inapt thing having tremendously negative consequences. Hence holding patience is the most important factor in controlling expectations.

Go beyond your distractions

People usually fall for external beliefs such as one wants to become skinnier because being skinnier makes them look attractive, one wants to be successful because being successful brings fame and prosperity. Each expectation is associated with external distraction hence going beyond your distractions can help you to control your expectations to some extent. For example, you think you need to be in a relationship as all your friends have their boyfriends and girlfriends to spend quality time. But if you’re not in a relationship you are saving your resources time, money and energy. You don’t have to spend your money for your beau’s shopping list, rather you can have something more useful things that you have been planning from a long time back. You can invest your time in travelling, culturing your creativity, learning new skills, languages or you can simply explore the world with that time, money and energy.

Getting a good control over your list of expectations might not be that easy but it’s not impossible. Changing your perception a little can help you significantly in reducing your expectancy. You just need to analyze things in a different way and find a different look out for every expectation that you get.