5 Benefits to Ditching your Expectations
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
The above quote was one of the first principles that I learned while going through coaching school. Truthfully,I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept. Up until that point, I believed that pain and suffering were interchangeable. Once I learned to separate the two, I realized that suffering was a function of my mind (and therefore something I CREATED), my whole life started to feel expansive. I began to feel more open, more free. I began to live with conviction. Of myself and my beliefs, rather than looking for outside approval. I was slowly able to break free from the hustle and proving that felt so familiar to me and the expectations that I allowed others to put on me and that I placed on myself.
If you think about it, we place a lot of expectations not only on ourselves, but others. And when we are full of expectations, we are equally full of control. And when we live life trying to control, we are no longer available to live in the present-we are either trying to make something happen in the future or wrapped up in trying to change something from the past-which of course, simply isn’t possible.
Pain is inevitable can we agree? Pain is part of the human experience. It allows you to know that you are human and that you are experiencing life. Life happens and we don’t experience joy, bliss and excitement every single day. The problem however, is that many of us are so fixated on thinking that we actually shouldn’t have any problems. That life should just be marvelously glorious and go our way 100% of the time.
As we know, that just isn’t how life rolls and so we wind up creating a lot of our own suffering. Everything is a choice. Arguing with reality and choosing to suffer is a choice. Suffering stems from a single source, comparing our reality to our ideals. When reality matches our wants and desires, all is well. We experience happiness, satisfaction and joy. But when reality doesn’t match our wants and desires, we suffer.
From the time I was young, I always dreamt of having a little girl. Clearly as a mother of 3 boys, that didn’t happen. When I would take my boys out in public as a new young mom, people would constantly remind me that my life just wasn’t quite where it needed to be-”when are you going to have that girl?” “Don’t you want a girl?” “Are you going to keep trying until you get that girl?”
Imagine if I would have clung to that idea. Everyday I would be extending an invitation to sadness and disappointment at what I thought life ‘should’ have handed me. Focusing on the fact, the reality that I did not have girls would have caused me to be ungrateful for what I did have which was 3 amazing boys. It would have caused me to miss so many moments because my mind would have been focused on what I didn’t have.
Traffic is a classic example. I remember being caught in an awful traffic jam late one night in Orlando when we were on our way home from a theme park. Now I have to confess, this situation WAS entirely stressful and annoying. I didn’t want to be sitting on 1-4 any more than anyone else in the car. However, there MAY have been some people in the car that were resistant to the fact (the reality) that we were actually caught in traffic. Getting angry and screaming things such as -”This should not be happening, why are we stuck here” only made the situation feel worse. There was anger, agitation and upset that just wasn’t necessary. We suffer when we desire for things to be other than they are.
You don’t have to suffer either because suffering is a function of the mind. Suffering is a function of having expectations. So when you learn to ditch expectations, you also ditch your suffering, control and disappointment because you open yourself up to flow and possibility. Your expectations are impacting your happiness, your soul and your relationships because they are impacting your energy, how you feel, how you think and how you show up in the world.