The Unexpected Magic Of Low Expectations
I have always had high expectations for myself. That was something I never expected to change. I have always been planning my high achievement, whether that was ordering university prospectuses when I was 14 or setting a goal to make £100k in 2020. High expectation has been the red thread throughout my work from school to now – expecting myself to get A’s and A*’s, expecting to myself to get a first in my degree, expecting myself to get a prestigious job, expecting myself to win awards, expecting myself to get promotions, expecting myself to create an impressive self-employed bio.
When I began reading more into manifestation over the last eight months or so, I started to realise that I’d really been doing all the components of manifestation all my life, just in the form of expectation. My over-active insular brain naturally goes to work, imagining the realised expectation, so I have always been visualising the things I want. In many ways, I would live as if the thing I wanted was already happening because my high expectations made me assume I’d do it, so I would keep particular dates free or plan my life so that I would be able to do that thing. And, I’d work towards it. I wasn’t putting anything out into the universe. My high expectations were all on me shouldering the responsibility to work hard towards that thing. And a lot of the time, I made it happen.
This isn’t supposed to be a humblebrag, but a setting of the scene. Throughout my life, having high expectations of myself has served me well. It has motivated my work and helped me to prioritise, which is why I’ve consistently earned higher than my previous salary in this business, and turned over enough money in the last three years of self-employment to buy my dream house. High expectations served me well, on the material plane. But what about happiness?
The thing with chasing after your expectations is that you’re never done. There is never a moment in which you can enjoy what you’ve worked for because there’s a new goal post, a new expectation. It was early in 2019 that I realised that chasing after these physical measures of success wasn’t making me happy, but I didn’t know how to change it. When I was very young, my parents told me that if I worked hard, I could do anything I wanted, but at some point that metastasized into a belief that I was only worthy if I was working hard and achieving. I didn’t know how to exist out of the expectation loop. I didn’t know how to translate expectations about achievement into expectations about happiness; I didn’t know how to be happy without achievement. I spent most of last year working on it.
Even this year, I realised that expectations die hard. We had moved into our own house, which in terms of my expectations, I thought represented the completion of level 100. There was surely nothing more I could expect myself to achieve. And yet, there I was in January, setting a goal to make £100k. Completing level 100 simply unlocked 100,000 more levels to work through.
And then, enter stage left, coronavirus.
Overnight there became no place for my high expectations. £100k suddenly looked incredibly unlikely, and incredibly unnecessary. For the first time in my life, my high expectations ceased to serve me, both in terms of them now being more or less impossible and just feeling gratuitous in the face of tragedy. Now, the expectations formed a part of the crisis I felt about my business. As I spoke about on this podcast about re-setting goals, it was the high expectations and the goals they’d previously set that made me feel like my business couldn’t survive. As soon as I said “ok, the old goals are gone, no more striving for growth or maximum profits, I just want to make £1000 a month to survive” – everything went quiet. Like plunging underwater where all you can hear is your heartbeat and undefinable low frequencies. There was stillness.
This was the first time I had ever given myself low expectations. And it was the first time I ever felt peaceful towards my work, towards my life. Over the following weeks, my working life changed. Rather than constantly striving for more, I became able and content with doing enough. I, mostly, stopped feeling guilty for doing anything that didn’t work. I only did the work that filled me up and made me feel good. I aimed not for achievement but for happiness, and I hit it.
This period has shown me that my high expectations, my idolising of achievement, has not been serving me at all. It was a trap, all along. My high expectations kept me dissatisfied, so that I would continue to work and consume and actively look for ways to fill the void; I’d get high on productivity and then be constantly chasing the same buzz. I thought that my high expectations would get me where I wanted to be, when really I was already there.
The whole reason I wanted to make £100k was because that was the arbitrary figure I’d decided meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about money. At that figure, I’d be able to outsource much of the work I didn’t enjoy, and be able to spend less time working and more time in my garden. But I have the garden, right there. The only thing stopping me from enjoying it was my belief that I had to achieve some more to be able to.
When I lowered my financial expectations, I worried far less about money – because it feels much more do-able to make £1000 a month than £10,000. And because I wasn’t trying to reach that bigger figure, I didn’t need to half the work I’d believed I did. I realised that if I actually just don’t do the stuff I don’t like doing, I won’t have to make the money necessary to hire someone to do it instead. My goal was going to take me on a circuitous painful journey right back to where I currently was. Instead, I could just close the laptop and sit in the sun.
I should say, it is only with the perspective of the last month that I can identify much of what I’ve written about here. Up until the beginning of March, I was psyched about my £100k goal, it felt like a great challenge, the next step. But I don’t think it was a step that I chose. I think it was one that expectation had seen as the next logical one, the way in which I could continue pushing the narrative of success so that in decades to come, there would be a nice, satisfying arc to my career success.
But life isn’t supposed to be a career arc. It’s supposed to be lived. I’m not saying that I am now 100% free of all expectations, it’s not as binary as that. I still feel the push of striving inside me, wanting me to go work towards something when I’m trying to be still and read. I still have days where I think “can I really let that £100k dream go” – but of course, it’s not about the £100k. It’s about the person who set the £100k goal, it’s about being ready to let her go. And there will be wobbles on the way to that. But, ultimately, I have spent 29 years believing that achievement and holding high expectations is the route to get you to fulfilment. I am now learning that, just maybe, it is low expectations that help you to live.
