Monday Morning Motivation – Expectations
By: Curt Stowers
Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Expectations
As I go through each day, I jot down ideas that come to me for blogging/writing. Occasionally, the idea is NOT new, and I find that I have previously written on the topic. These times give me the opportunity to reflect on what I have learned since that time, how I have grown since then, and how my philosophy on life may have changed.
This week’s topic (expectations) is something I wrote about back in June of 2015. At that time, I posed the question:
- Are my expectations reasonable and aligned with what is most important in my life?
While I still think this is a solid question to ask, since then I have reevaluated my thought on expectations. My current thought is that, in general, we should AVOID developing expectations.
While it is absolutely necessary, in my opinion, to develop and implement plans related to the key areas of your life (faith, family, friends, fitness, and finance), anchoring on expectations in these areas can be very dangerous!
When we develop EXPECTATIONS about OUTCOMES we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. If we “shoot for the moon” and believe that “the moon” is the goal, we will likely be disappointed as we are NOT Neil Armstrong. This anchoring on outcomes is, in my opinion, an unhealthy habit.
Conversely, I believe that if we develop EXPECTATIONS about how we LIVE life we are on the right path. While we cannot control the outcome, we CAN control the process through which we experience life. This slight difference (process versus outcomes) is huge in how we perceive things in our life.
That brings us to this week’s question:
-
Are my expectations reasonable and aligned with what is most important in my life?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.
Have a great week!
Curt
About MMM: Each week I publish “Monday Morning Motivation” in the hopes that at least one person will find a bit of inspiration and that this inspiration will have a positive impact on their life. My motivation comes from experiences, reading, sermons, and discussions.
Photo credit: Conor Luddy on unsplash.com
Blog post from this past week:
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