Smart Single Parents Speak #1: Lower your Expectations

Last month I asked for your collective wisdom and you did not disappoint. Click here for a list of everything you said.

This month we are going to give each of these great pieces of advice some attention. These are not presented in any order.

#1: Lower your Expectations

There is a difference between being optimistic and having unattainable expectations. Generally speaking, optimism is a good thing and predicts good results. However, having impossibly high expectations predicts just the opposite.

When a person expects something that is very hard to be very easy, disappointment or feelings of failure are not far behind. Ths disappointment or feelings of failure almost always leads to misplaced blame. Blame is placed on the difficulty of the situation or the inability of the person. The real culprit here is niether. The villian is expectation that does not match the situation.

Expectations are subjective and really amount to a sort of fortune telling on the part of the expector. There is often a whole lot less information or evidence supporting the expectation than is believed or that most people would admit.

The biggest problems occur when people base their expectation on their wishes or absolute best case scenario. The higher the requirement for an expectation to be satisfied the higher the chance of dissatisfaction or disillusionment.

The converse is also a problem. Expectations that are too low might all a person to be satisfied with much less than was possible.

What yo might want to try is taking stock of your expectations and ask yourself if they are likely to result. If they are, then go for them. However, if you find that they are based on your best wished scenario, then you'd better ratchet is down a coupld notches.