Expectations Suck...

Have you ever noticed how assumptions and expectations suck the life out of relationships?  It doesn’t matter whether it’s at home or at work, while vacationing with family or working side by side with business colleagues, my assumptions and expectations reliably reduce heartfelt connection, and almost always lead to disappointment for everyone involved.  So why is it that we expect so much from others, and have such difficulty simply allowing people to be who they are and to make their own choices without holding them accountable for our assumptions and expectations?

What if people made a point of clearly expressing what they wanted, and then without judgment let others decide what to do?  What would that world look like?  For me, it’s almost unimaginably peaceful.

Lately, I’ve been fond of noticing my assumptions and expectations.  The problem is that I’m not always conscious about them.  I assume that people are just like me.  For example, I have a value for letting people finish their sentences, but other people sometimes don’t have that value at all.  In fact, for some people, they might interpret my behavior as disinterest.  In their “culture”, interrupting is a sign of interest.  In my “culture”, it’s a sign of disinterest if someone does interrupt me mid sentence.

What if I were to share openly my personal culture with others?  I experimented with this approach the other day at my dinner table.  I explained to my two daughters about my preference to complete my sentences without being interrupted.  We then had a conversation about our differing perspectives.  I found it interesting that, during that conversation, they both allowed me to finish my sentences.  Simply by making explicit what I prefer, they were apparently happy to comply.  It was a little thing, but also a meaningful one.  Rather than judging my daughters as rude, I simply expressed my desires and the outcome was wonderful.

We all come from different families, often hail from different lands and cultures.  This often leads to substantially different work styles, methods of communication, willingness to offer feedback, among other things.  My recent experience leads me to wonder, what if we all simply got curious about how others operate, and strived to be more transparent about our own operating principles.  How might that affect life at home, relationships at work and peace in the Middle East?  Hmmm…