Abandoning expectations about how I’m supposed to feel

November 05, 2016 1:14 PM

Lately I’ve been learning new ways to treat myself with compassion and patience. How to meet more and more of my life experiences with kindness and understanding.

It’s been an enlightening and rewarding journey.

One practice I find to be particularly helpful is abandoning expectations about how I’m supposed to feel.

Especially when it comes to my goals and dreams. Because when I first write them down, I tend to create this fantasy in my head about how things are going to be better when they come to pass. About how I’m going to know a different kind of happiness that I’d never known before.

But it doesn’t always happen like that. Despite my waiting for that one huge life moment with fireworks and banners and trombones, most goals and dreams unfold slowly and quietly.

And we get outraged when we can’t impose our own time frame on the process.

That’s the danger of harboring expectations about how things should go. White knuckling and trying to control the outcome only leads to disappointment.

If we want to free ourselves from the clutches of unnecessary distress, we have to be compassionate and accepting of the results we get.

Krishna famously said that we have a right to our labor, but not to the fruits of our labor.

That’s the approach we have to take with our goals and dreams.

To focus on the intention of the execution, and let the rest go.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What expectations are you prepared to abandon?

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.