There is a sneaky little culprit that negatively affects your life, but the good news is that you have 100% control over it. This little culprit has the potential to run or ruin your life, depending on your perspective. What is it? Unexpressed expectations.

They will silently and happily keep you miserable for the rest of your life unless you learn to recognize them, remove them, or reframe them into expectancy.

My history with expectations.

When I was a young kid, other kids picked on me often. I was picked on for my name. I was picked on because I liked art more than sports and wanted to play by myself at recess instead of basketball.

I lived expecting to be hated. This expectation turned me into an insecure, unstable person, and I carried that insecurity well into my adult years.

Eventually, I realized that my expectations of others caused my insecurities. When I began to unpack this, I realized that our expectations of other people cause so much of the negative experiences in life. Unexpressed expectations, which no one knows we have, cause so much frustration, resentment, anger, and disappointment. They are wreaking havoc on our lives.

What are unexpressed expectations?

Unexpressed expectations are when you think, want, or believe something will go the way you think, want, or believe, but you never actually communicate it. It remains an unexpressed expectation that you’re keeping to yourself.

Typically, we have expectations of ourselves, other people, or situations, which could be everything from how you expected your family vacation to go or how you expected the meeting with your boss to unfold. Often, we don’t realize that we have these expectations or that we need to pay attention to them.

I will walk you through what happens when you create an expectation that goes unexpressed.

When you create the expectation, you also, whether you know it or not, give yourself permission to feel and react negatively in the future, depending on whether or not that expectation is met. So, essentially, you’re predetermining your response.

Now, the expectation is calling the shots in your life. You just relinquished responsibility, but that also means that you’ve relinquished your ability to manage your internal and mental well-being. Many times this is happening in the background.

There are so many side effects to having these expectations that go unexpressed.

One of the biggest ones is that these expectations create victims. When an expectation goes unmet, you become the victim in your story, which is twisted.

You have an expectation. You didn’t express it. Someone doesn’t meet that expectation and lets you down. Now you think you have permission to feel angry, disappointed, upset, and frustrated. You feel entitled to be the victim in this little story that you’re creating. You somehow feel like it’s okay to shift blame onto someone else.

However, when you trace your frustration back to where it started, it starts with you. You’re the one who set the expectation, and now because it wasn’t expressed and went unmet, you’re the victim. (Twisted!) But the weird thing about these expectations is that it makes you a victim, but it also makes the person you have the expectations of a victim. They’re just some helpless victim that you’re now throwing all of your negative emotions at.

Another side effect of unexpressed expectations is selfishness.

You’re determining what you want. You’re deciding how you want things to go. You’re defining the way things need to be. It is the world “according to me,” and that all comes out in the form of expectations.

All of this begs the question, “Should I have expectations?” No, but I am telling you that if you’re going to have expectations, you need to communicate them. When you share the expectations, you have to be open to receiving feedback from the person you’re putting this expectation on. They may respond and let you know it’s not something they can give you.

Doing this will require more of you. It involves a lowering of that selfishness. It requires releasing the “I’m going to be a victim if this doesn’t go the way I want” mindset.

There’s something more to consider. Instead of expectations, why don’t you live a life of expectancy?

Expectancy is when you think, want, hope, or believe that things will work out in a good way or have a pleasurable, desirable outcome. It is the antidote for unhealthy expectations because it’s choosing to see and call out the good in humanity.

It calls people to a higher level. It calls situations to a higher level. So instead of giving yourself permission for future disappointment and future victimization, you’re calling something greater out of people and situations proactively. If I knew that someone was expecting that good outcome, that would motivate me. That would inspire me. That would encourage me to meet that.

That’s why I love a life of expectancy versus expectations because expectancy brings people up. It’s a much better option.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Hmm. I think that I have a lot of expectations that I’m not communicating now. I don’t know what to do.”

You’re going to have to dig deep. You will have to fight natural tendencies to see yourself as the victim. You’re going to have to fight natural tendencies to blame. And you are going to have to call yourself to a higher level.

This situation started to happen in my own life when I realized that the expectations I had and wasn’t expressing were contributing to all kinds of anger, frustration, disappointment, and resentment. I had to check myself and realize that I was responsible for creating that expectation in the first place.

The person who didn’t meet my expectations didn’t make me feel disappointed, angry, or frustrated. In reality, I permitted myself to feel those things because they didn’t meet my expectations.

If you can learn how to manage your expectations and become a master of them, you’re going to save yourself a lot of trouble.

You have to do the work. You have to show up and look at yourself and figure out where your expectations are unexpressed, unrealistic, and unhelpful in creating the kind of life that I know you want to live.