Lower Your Expectations If You Want To Be Happy?

I saw my optometrist on Tuesday, and she said the blurriness was due to this retinal mountain of vitreous fluid that’s tractioning up. Until that’s fixed, my vision will continue to be blurry.

That’s the scan of my retina. That twin peaked blob I’m calling Mt. Retina. 

Great Expectations

This was sad news, but at least I can stop being so damn anxious now. 

All this agita, anxiety, and sadness I’ve been feeling were caused by my own misguided optimism that my vision would be crystal clear within a week of the surgery.

But now that I know I still have to scale Mt. Retina, I am giving myself a longer timeline to heal, which is taking so much pressure off.

The anxiety just whooshed out of my body as soon as I revised my thinking and resigned myself to blurriness for a while. Not forever, but for a while longer.

I felt worlds better once I understood that my eye wasn’t going to be effed up forever, but only until this retinal problem could be fixed.

So much relief.

Whew.

Now, I’m on the hunt for other areas in my life where I might be able free myself of unrealistic expectations—of places, people, situations, and obligations I am holding to impossible standards that would be better served if I just let them go.

 What if I could fall in love with people, places, and situations just as they are? No expectations?

And if I could, is this even advisable? 

I can think of a lot of jobs where lowered expectations would make life so much easier: coaching, teaching, counseling, and managing, for starters.

Without high expectations, all the stress around performance and compliance would vanish. 

Teachers could teach what students wanted to learn without having to meet performance metrics decided by the state.

Coaches wouldn’t have to obsess over won-loss records and could work on developing the complete athlete. 

Managers would be more free to cultivate innovation and creativity if exceeding the last quarter wasn’t a priority.

Lowered expectations could be the key ingredient for sustaining peaceful and easy relationships.

No demands, or just minimal ones between partners, would keep friction and fights to a minimum. 

But what if you want high performance in all those domains? What if your goal is excellence?

Don’t you need to set a high benchmark, then? 

And what about, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”

~Robert Browning

Aren’t the highest performers, innovators, and creators those who set the bar impossibly high and challenge themselves to reach it?

Isn’t the definition of deliberate practice —that key to mastery— knowing how to set the bar just high enough but not so high as to be utterly discouraging? 

Isn’t lowering your expectations resigning yourself to a frictionless life of mediocrity and blandness?

I think the answer is discerning when expectations in a situation, process, or relationship are causing pain and suffering and when those expectations are fostering growth.

My expectations for how long it would take my eye to heal needed to be revised downward based on the existence of Mt. Retina.

That lowering resulted in me feeling less anxious, which fosters healing.

On the other hand, letting another person walk all over you, lie to you, or shrug off their responsibilities doesn’t improve a relationship; it kills it. 

High expectations make people better most of the time.

You just have to know when and set them accordingly.

Thanks for reading.

Let me know what you think about expectations. Have you ever lowered your expectations and found your life infinitely easier? Have you ever raised yours and experienced growth? Let me know!