Expectations

Expect the unexpected.

That is one of the most important sayings that gets taken for granted.

We're told that we shouldn't expect anything from anyone or anything but if you don't expect anything then you will not be given what you want.

When you start a new job you are given the information and resources needed to fulfil your role and execute your tasks. You expect to be given these tools because if you weren't given anything to complete your duties you would fail. There is an expectation with everything that you get into. You expect the streets to be clean and the roads to be pothole-free and signs and the necessary equipment to be available because you pay road tax. You expect your car to be protected if you get into a car accident as you pay car insurance.

If someone ever tells you not to expect anything from anyone that's a lie because you're still expecting nothing. 

It's in our nature to expect things. Expectations are like cause and effect.
They're like a chain reaction. When one thing happens you assume it will lead to other things. We set expectations in our lives. These expectations can be personalized per each individual. What may be okay for me may not necessarily be okay for you.
For example, You enter a restaurant the waiter greets you and tells you that there is a 10-minute wait for the next table. While some people are okay with this, there is a small number of people who will be frustrated and decide to leave instead of wait. This is due to them having a clear mission of going to this restaurant to eat and nothing else. They are not thinking about any circumstances just what they want to achieve without any compromise. Once we get to personalized expectations that's when we begin to define ourselves as individuals.

What do we wanna achieve?

What do we wanna accomplish?

What do we want from our lives?

Ask yourself this, are you doing what you dream about doing?
Are you doing what you imagined yourself doing in your 20s?
Are you where you thought you would be at this time in your life?
Some of you may say yes and that's good. That you've fulfilled the expectation that you set for yourself.
But what if you haven't. What if the expectation set wasn't met or hasn't been achieved yet?
What does that mean?
Have you failed?

No.

You've just altered your expectation which means you have an alternative reality that you are happy to live with and that's not a bad thing. We don't all achieve the things we set out to achieve because we grow and our mentality changes and our goals change but what doesn't change is what we get back from what we put in. You may have wanted to be a scientist but you ended up as a pharmacist because what you put in only got you that far. As I said before expectations are like cause and effect you get out what you put in so you can't expect much if you don't put in much. You hear people talking all the time of what they could have or should have been. You ask them what did they do to try and achieve those goals and the answer they give you doesn't sound like they did much but they still expected to achieve the same outcome.
You can't expect much if you don't do much. Big Companies do forecasts because they have a target of what they want to achieve for the financial year. When they do this they can plan what steps they need to take to achieve that goal. If we applied forecasts to ourselves then we would have a clearer and realistic idea of how we can achieve the things we want and have a clear path of what direction to go in. This would increase the chances of what we want to achieve for ourselves drastically.

The same thing applies to relationships of all kinds. friendships, Parents, spouses. We all expect certain roles from these groups. The main thing we want from our families is unconditional support even through our failures. From our friends we want genuine bonds through social activities allowing us to feel part of a tribe by our own free will. Then there are relationships which once again are very personalized as you could have ideas that may require someone for a short period or the person you are with not living up to the standards you have set for yourself but ultimately what we want from relationships is that emotion that allows us to be selfless enough to love another person not related to us through our own decision.

This is just an introduction to what I will touch on next.
Expectations in relationships.
we have to understand that there are things that we want to have and those things set the standard for what type of lifestyle we want to live.