Expectation Misery

Today I’m talking about a common thing that all of us do where we have expectations of people, sometimes called “a manual”. We want them to think, feel, and act a certain way.

The problem- people aren’t very good at being who we think they should be. Holding onto our “manuals”, expecting our kids and others to be who we want them to be, just causes us a lot of unnecessary misery.

Believing someone should be different than they are, feels like love. It feels like we’re just trying to be a good mom (wife, daughter, friend, etc.)  by looking out for them, but what we aren’t seeing is the misery we’re inflicting on ourselves in the process of trying to control and change them.

Join me on the podcast this week as I highlight how we hold onto our joy-sucking manuals, and why letting them go is the key to becoming A Joyful You – happier, healthier, confident, as well as improving all the relationships in your life. 

Don’t forget to grab your Drop It Like It’s Hot Weight Loss Strategy Blueprint if you haven’t already! It will show you why what you’re currently doing to lose weight isn’t working and a personal strategy for what will.

What You’ll Learn on this Episode:

• Why having expectations for others might be making you miserable
• What having a “manual” for someone means.
• How we punish ourselves with our manuals.
• Why you need to drop expectations of other people and who you think they should be.
• The lie we tell ourselves around our expectations of other people.

Mentioned on the Show:

• When you’re ready to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10X level, then come check out 1:1 coaching with me.
• Let’s be Instagram friends

TRANSCRIPT:

This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 93, Expectation Misery.

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.

On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.

I’m your host, Rachael Collins.

As an eating psychology practitioner, a certified life coach, and a weight loss expert, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.

Let’s do this.

Hello, friend.

Welcome to another podcast episode.

This morning, I had the best time writing up and sending out this week’s Drop It Like It’s Hot Weight Loss Strategy Blueprints.

If you are struggling to lose weight, even though you are doing all the things, and you would like me to help you figure out what’s really going on, sign up for a Weight Loss Strategy Blueprint.

As a special thank you for being here, I am offering these for free for the month of July.

I have three available for next week.

If you want one, just send me an email, rachel, r-a-c-h-a-e-l, at ajoyfulyou.com, or you can DM me on Instagram or on Facebook.

I will get your messages there too.

All right, today I want to talk about relationships.

One of the pillars of a joyful you is social health.

Our relationships with others really do impact our overall state of well-being, our health, our weight, our energy, our flow, our moods.

If your relationships are happy and healthy, we typically have a happy and healthy life.

So, here’s where I want to begin.

I want you to think about all of the people you are in a relationship with.

And there’s a lot.

And then I want you to think about the experiences and think about the expectations you have of these people.

Or another way of saying that is to think about all the ideas that you have about how they should be, what they should do, how they should act, how they should dress, etc., etc., etc.

You get the idea.

Now, if you are like most humans, you’re going to have a lot of stories and a lot of opinions about how the people that you interact with in your life should be.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a mom, and I had a picture in my mind of what it was going to be like to be married and then to be a mom and how my husband and my kids would be.

I have old journal entries probably from the fourth grade up, just painting this picture, painting a picture of how I was going to feel.

And I wrote about the routines that we were going to have and the rules that we were going to have and the holidays we were going to celebrate and how the house was going to be decorated, the experiences that we would have as a family and that my kids would have and that my husband and I would have, and just the relationships that we would have amongst us.

Now, some of these things happened, but many of them did not.

Some of how things turned out have been harder than I ever imagined, but some of them have been more magical than I ever thought possible.

Now, when it comes to these expectations, these pictures in our mind of how things should be, we don’t just do this with our kids and with our spouse.

We do this with our parents, with our in-law relationships, even the relationships that we have with our siblings.

We have a picture in our mind of how it should be, how these people should be, and not just how they’re supposed to be now, but how they should have been in the past.

We have tons of opinions about how they should have done this differently, or how they raised this wrong, or how they’re not showing up in the right way now.

And this isn’t just family either.

We do this with almost everyone in our life.

Bosses, friends, neighbors, people at church, even people we don’t know that we pass by in the store or on the freeway.

We think we know the way that they should do something.

We think we know how they should be.

The reason that we want them to be any different than they are is so that we can feel better.

Let me repeat that.

The only reason we want them to be different than who they are is so that we can feel better.

We think if everyone would just do what I say, they would be happy, and if they were happy, I’d be happy.

Come on, people.

It’s not that hard.

Give it the program.

Brooke Cascio, who trained me to be a life coach, she calls this way of thinking having a manual.

My husband recently just won a new drone, and it came with a manual that explains how it’s supposed to operate.

And if something isn’t working the way the manual says, it’s broken, and you need to take it back or send it into the company to get it fixed.

We have manuals for people.

Usually these manuals are not written out in a book form.

They’re usually in our mind.

But these manuals explain how other people are supposed to operate.

They’re supposed to behave in this way.

They’re supposed to talk to me in this way.

They’re supposed to show up like this.

They’re supposed to dress like this.

And when the people in our life don’t meet our expectations or don’t follow our manuals, we feel angry and resentful and frustrated and disappointed and hurt and fearful sometimes.

We are like, didn’t you read on page 17 of my manual that you are supposed to keep your dogs quiet?

They’re not supposed to be in the backyard by themselves, just barking and barking and barking.

You’re supposed to keep them inside.

That is a manual.

We think if everyone would just follow our manual and be more like us, then we would all be happy.

The problem is most of the people in our lives don’t cooperate.

They aren’t good at being who we want them to be.

They’re not good at being us.

They’re only good at being them.

They have their own ideas of how they want to do life, and them not meeting our expectations leaves us feeling a lot of misery.

I watched a man getting coached who was unhappy that his wife wasn’t following the manual that he had for her.

He just knew that if his wife would eat healthier, stop drinking soda, eat more vegetables, never eat candy, exercise daily, and be more like him, she would feel so much better and she’d be so much more happier.

The problem?

His wife didn’t want to do these things.

His wife didn’t want to be like him.

You know what she wanted?

She wanted to be like herself, which looked like eating chips and candy and drinking soda every day and laying around scrolling on her phone instead of going to the gym.

Again, I recently heard a woman getting coached about the manual that she had for her in-laws not wanting to come and visit them very often to see their grandkids.

The client was like, if I had grandkids, I would be there all the time because I would want to be a part of their life.

And the coach said, you know who your in-laws aren’t good at?

They’re not good at being you.

They’re only good at being them.

I could 100% relate to these two examples.

Now, although I don’t have the same manuals as they do, I still know how miserable and disappointing it feels.

I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t want to think, act, and see the world like I do.

I mean, come on guys, look how awesome I am.

And sometimes from this place, I go into victim mode.

Woe is me.

I know what’s best, and no one will listen to me.

And I just know that if they would listen to me, I could make everything perfect for them.

We take it personally and make them choosing to be them mean something about us that it doesn’t.

And then from this victim place, we turn into the villain.

We get mean and sneaky and critical and really judgy.

We try to control and control and control.

We scold.

We give the silent treatment.

We criticize.

We’re passive aggressive.

We try to manipulate.

And while it might seem like we’re doing a good job of hiding this, other people can feel our energy.

They know what we’re doing.

They know that when we offer unsolicited advice, or we’re sending an article, or we’re forwarding an email that we think will get them to follow our manual, it’s not coming from a place of love.

They know that it’s coming from a place of scarcity, a place that’s saying, I don’t trust you.

I don’t like you how you are.

I think you’re wrong.

I think you’re broken.

And if you would just do what I say and be who I think you should be, then I’ll be happy.

Never mind what you want or what you think will make you happy.

The truth is we really don’t know what will make them happy.

We think we do based off of what makes us happy, but others aren’t us.

And they don’t want to be us.

They want to be them.

When we want them to be us, we are actually punishing ourselves with our expectations of how we think they should be.

All that criticizing and wallowing and huffing and puffing and offering unsolicited advice is just making us miserable.

We are the ones suffering, not them.

We all came to earth with agency.

I believe it was actually something that we fought for in our pre-earth life.

Satan had a manual.

He wanted to force everyone to follow his manual so that we could all make it back to God.

Everyone would be who he said they would be.

They would all be like him.

No one would get a say.

No one would have a choice or agency.

Satan had a manual.

God had a plan, a plan of happiness, and agency is a part of his plan.

Everyone on earth has the ability to choose for themselves.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I like being able to choose for myself, and I like being able to make my own decisions.

I would hate it if someone was telling me what to wear, or how to manage my money, or what to eat, what to say, who to be, how to show up.

So why is this so hard for me to think this about others?

I think I know how other people should dress, and how they should manage their money, and how they should eat, and how they should be.

But I’m pretty sure I don’t.

But do you know who does?

They do!

They know who they want to be.

They know how they want to dress.

They know how they want to manage their money.

They know how they want to eat.

They get to choose, just like I get to choose.

And it’s through our choices that we learn and grow and become.

That is why it’s part of the plan.

One season in my life, when I was really struggling with a manual I had for one of my children, I was really wishing God would have reserved the gift of agency until age 26, when my kid’s prefrontal lobe was fully developed.

And I was miserable.

I was feeling so much pain and anger and frustration because my child wasn’t being who I thought they should be.

They weren’t choosing the things that I thought that they should be choosing.

And for years, I prayed a lot for my child to change.

Why wasn’t God answering my prayers and fixing things?

One of the moments when I stopped yelling and being mad at God for a second, I could hear God whisper, I’ve got this, do you trust me?

Yes, of course, I answered.

That’s why I’m asking you to fix this.

Then trust your child.

Let your child make their own decisions.

Let your child be themselves.

Trust that they are learning all the lessons they need to be their best and create their best life.

It was really easy for me to justify my manual as love.

It felt so true that the reason I was trying to enforce my manual on my teenager was because of the love I had for them.

I wanted them to stop doing some of the things that in my mind would be so much better for them and would make their lives so much easier.

They didn’t listen to me.

So what did I do?

I pushed harder.

I tried to control more.

I’d manipulate more.

And we used to fight all the time, which was not very loving, right?

But the story in my mind was that I want this for you because I love you so much.

I don’t want you to act like this because I don’t want you to get hurt.

I don’t want you to suffer.

I was basically saying I love you, but not like this.

And then I blamed them for my misery.

I blamed them for my own unhappiness.

I want to be sure that you understand.

I’m not saying don’t dream.

I’m not saying don’t have expectations.

What I’m saying is don’t let them rule your emotional life.

If the people in your life make choices that make them unhappy, you don’t have to be unhappy too.

We can’t control them.

We can only control ourselves.

So what I’m practicing doing and what I’m offering to you is to drop your manuals.

Love other people exactly as they are.

Let them be themselves and let them choose who that is.

This is something that we have to train our brains to do, but it can be done.

When you manage your brain and instead of putting all of your energy towards trying to control others, you put it towards you and showing up as your best you.

What kind of a mom, wife, daughter, friend, employee, sister, in-law, neighbor, citizen, church member do you want to be?

Who do you want to be?

How do you want to think and feel and act?

How do you want to show up?

When you can take the focus off of everyone else and put it on you, you’ll stop noticing what others are doing and you’ll start paying attention to what you’re doing.

Do you like it or do you want to change it?

Now, this is a practice.

I have been working on this concept for years and years and years, and I still catch myself showing up with a manual.

In fact, yesterday at church, I was grumpy, critical, angry, and pompous because I had a manual for how something at church was supposed to look.

I was furious and fuming and miserable.

I even reacted in a way that I am definitely not proud of.

It wasn’t until I got home and I asked myself, What is going on?

That is when I realized it was a manual issue.

And once I realized that I was in somebody else’s business, I with my agency could choose to butt out and love them exactly how they are, exactly how they choose to do things.

And when I made this choice to butt out, the misery I was feeling went with it.

I was able to use that energy to instead decide who I wanted to be and how I wanted to show up moving forward.

When we let other people be who they want to be, we’ll have so much more joy.

If you want to step into having more joy and becoming a joyful you, let go of your manuals.

Let other people choose who they want to be, how they want to think and feel and act, and just love them exactly the way that they are.

Now, one more way we can drop our manuals is to train our brain to look for and find what’s good about others.

I used to play a game to train my brain to do this.

So for me, it’s easier to see the good in people that I’m not close to.

So what I would do is, as I was driving down the freeway, and people would pass by me, I would find one good thing to say about the driver of each car, or somebody in each car.

It looked like this.

Ooh, she is holding the steering wheel at 10 and 2.

Her hair looks awesome.

Her kids are smiling.

I bet she’s a great mom.

Most of it was made up.

But the truth is, everything is made up.

Your thoughts about the people in your life are made up too.

You can choose to think anything you want about them.

After I got really good at playing this game while driving, I started doing it at church.

I would scan through each person, thinking of one good thing to think about them.

And then, lastly, I moved on to my family members and those that were closest to me.

And it really did help teach my brain to look for the good.

Okay, a couple of things before I let you go.

If you are a parent wondering if dropping your manuals means that you should just let your kids run rampant, the answer is no.

You can definitely set standards for your kids to follow, and you can hold those standards.

There is a difference in trying to control who your kids are and setting a standard and enforcing a consequence if that standard is not upheld.

Do you see the difference?

Now, the last thing, dropping your manuals is not the same as tolerating abuse or mistreatment.

It doesn’t mean that you don’t have boundaries or you don’t walk away.

It just means you stop trying to control the people around you.

Alright, friends, that is all I wanted to share with you today.

As always, I am cheering you on.

Have a great week, and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.

If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes, and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.

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If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram, at A Joyful You, or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.

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