Managing Expectations

We talk about management in many settings. Money management, business management and time management are all very important to our day to day lives. I even stress health management on a daily basis. Management is a key to any game plan, no matter what you are trying to accomplish.

There is another form of management that I want to discuss today. That is managing expectations. The management of our expectations often gets neglected or downright abused. In my opinion, expectations are a big challenge in our lives and management is the biggest challenge of all.

When I say that managing expectations often gets neglected or abused, what I mean is that we don’t do it very well and sometimes we even set ourselves (and others) up for failure. Let’s take a look at some examples to get a better picture of this challenge.

Michael is a client that has a clear list of goals that he wants to make. He wants to quit smoking and start dealing with his stress in other ways. He has done this before, so we start by talking about his past experience. Michael was feeling good after his first week of change. He significantly cut back on smoking. The only problem is that he thought he would be able to quit completely in a week. His expectation was, start tapering down and quit altogether by the end of the first week. Well, it wasn’t that simple with the other things going on in his life. He had other tasks to focus on and when he was at work, the days got very stressful. Naturally, since this was his routine, he smoked and had trouble cutting down as much as he wanted to. The results: Michael was frustrated and started going back in the other direction because he was upset about his “failure”.

Our first conversation made it clear to Michael what the problem was last time. It was not that he couldn’t do it or that he needed something major to take place to help him. It was clear that all he needed to do was manage his expectations.

It sounds simple, but I asked Michael the question:
Would you rather try to run one mile and get two, or would rather try for two and only get one?
In his case, of course, I followed that with: would you rather quit cold turkey today, but be smoking again in a month, or would you want to still be smoking next week, but continue moving toward quitting and be smoke-free next month?

There are many philosophies and goal setting techniques that will give us different conclusions, but the point is that surpassing a goal leaves us feeling better than not reaching one.

The answer for Michael, on the second try, was simple. His expectation was that he would spend a week tapering his cigarettes down. Week two would be spent focusing on his stressors while he stuck with that same number of cigarettes as week one. Once he was clear on what was making him feel stressed and therefore wanting to smoke, he could alter his habits by being alert to those events. Before they happened, he started chewing gum. Now that he had his routine on track, he was feeling confident and ready to start moving forward. The gum helped him continue to lower is smoking each day and eventually (one a two weeks later) he was smoke-free. The best part is that he remained smoke-free since he actually changed his habits rather than just quitting temporarily.

Managing expectations is the difference between quitting because we are frustrated and continuing to move forward. Without managing expectations, not only do we not know what we are capable of, we actually lower our capacity because we defeat ourselves before we even get started. Before you set a goal, be sure that your expectation is realistic.