Expectations can color someone's entire experience of a situation. For example, there's a stop light near my house that Gracie fondly calls "The Silly Stoplight" (this is a misnomer, but the name Jon and I have given the stoplight is much less family-friendly). Anyway, I can expect that when I drive to the nearest major intersection to my house, I will have to wait at The Silly Stoplight for approximately two minutes and fifteen seconds. I have had a lifetime of visits to Grandma's house, sitting at The Stoplight just before getting there, to know that it's a reasonable expectation that The Silly Stoplight will halt my forward motion when I get close to it. It's Silly. While annoyed by The Silly Stoplight, my family and I also regard it like a Crazy Aunt Cathy--that's just how she is, so let it go. That's our family's Stoplight Standard.
However, despite the long-standing expectation that The Silly Stoplight will keep us waiting virtually every time, there have been some times that the Stoplight Cosmos has decided to randomly bend the laws of Stoplight Psychosis and cause The Silly Stoplight to remain green when I approach it. It's never predictable. Those days are like winning the lottery. Really, there is not much exaggeration surrounding the joy I feel when I'm not stuck at that....Silly...Stoplight. Then, my day is much more beautiful-seeming. Cartoon birds follow me to work. Then, on the way back home on those days when my stoplight expectations have been surpassed, inevitably The Silly Stoplight proves that our original Stoplight Standard was accurate; I get stuck at the light, and I fume. I spit and sputter because dang it! it rose above my expectations only nine and a half hours ago! I'm even madder than I would have been had I been stopped for the compulsory minutes in the morning as I had expected.
What I've found out, though, is that after sailing through the light in the morning, I have already re-evaluated my expectations and set a new expectation for my return trip from work. My new expectation is that The Stoplight is not such a douche bag after all. The Stoplight wants to let me through, in fact! That's a much more pleasant expectation anyway! Yes, my brain wants to believe that it is now true that The Stoplight will have mercy on me. I'd rather believe that! Alas, after days of cartoon birds and spitting and sputtering, I have learned over time that my expectation that I'll always make it through that light is unrealistic. It doesn't stop me from hoping for it, though.
I'm noticing lots of areas in my day, in fact, that setting expectations incorrectly can lead to quite the celebrations and quite the turmoil. I caught a student purposely violating our school's dress code by rolling her shorts such that they looked like junderwear (okay, if jean-type leggings are "jeggings", then...you get it now). I asked her to unroll her shorts as she passed by, and she unrolled with great care as she continued to walk away, glancing back at me very (not) innocently. My expectation in the situation was that she was probably going to roll them back up later and get away with her cheekiness because she wasn't going to see me again in all likelihood that day. In fact, I'm guessing that was her expectation, as well, because she had a look of horror and devastation on her face when she walked past me later and I sent her to the office. Her simple expectation, and the situation that violated it, really caused some turmoil! On the other hand, the violation of my expectation caused me to celebrate a victory over all middle school defiance and awkward sexiness attempts! Our expectations were inaccurate, and it turned out to be very bad, and very good (respectively).
Toddlers are great living examples of setting unrealistic expectations and seeing the consequences of this almost immediately. Zeke, for example, tends to expect that using his new-found vocabulary means that his parents will obey him. Immediately. He says "I walkkkk," his feet should touch the floor within ten seconds. He says "Pees," we should hand him candy. He says "Dabadi," we should [whatever the heck that means at the time]. He's learning steadily, and not without tears and screeching might I add, that his expectations aren't always reasonable. Sometimes they are, such as when he wants to "walkkkk" in the back yard, or when he's asking for more milk at dinner, or just about any time he makes a request and the timing and circumstances are right. The hard part about his expectations, and his process of discovering how to set them and reset them, is that for most things in life, expectations can't be fixed. They are fluid, depending on the state of the world, or the state of the people involved, or even the state of the stoplight. It takes a fine-tuned brain to be able to evaluate the practicality of an expectation and a fine-tuned heart to figure out what to do when an expectation isn't as practical as once thought. It's hard! It causes crying and screeching.
So here I am, currently evaluating my expectations. I'm fairly stubborn by nature, so, as illustrated with the stoplight example from earlier, once I have had success, that bar of performance tends to be my new expectation for myself.
It gets worse.
When someone else reaches success, I reset my expectations for myself to meet their level of performance.
It gets worse.
When someone tells me they think I can do something, or when I start fancying a new idea or problem to solve, I reset my expectations for myself to meet that only-speculated-about (and not yet real) level of performance. Case in point, I currently have set the following expectations of myself:
- I will take a group of high schoolers to camp to participate in a camp counselor leadership program that I'll be leading (and change their lives forever)
- I will take a group of eighth graders to camp to participate in a counselor-in-training leadership program that I'll be leading (and change their lives forever)
- I will take a group of seventh graders into my classroom, teach them a curriculum that is foreign to me with perfection (and change their lives forever)
- I will be part of a committee that will build a peaceful community of staff and students (and change their lives forever)
- I will be part of a committee that will be scholarly in our study of our content area, be revolutionary in its work for the district, and be impressive to the Board of Education (and change their lives forever)
- I will be a good teacher, teammate, colleague, friend, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, mother, wife, Catholic, and general citizen of our country and possibly global community (and change all of those people's lives forever, too).
When I don't meet my own expectations, I freak out.
Hmm. That makes me one Silly Someone who will never, ever meet all of the expectations I place on myself (and consequently will spend my life, or until I reset my expectations, freaking out). But resetting expectations is a painful process for me. Since my expectations are insanely high, resetting my expectations means lowering the bar, and then what? Achieve less? Appear weak? Watch opportunities fly by while the world forgets you were once there? I'd like to blame society or politics or something for this deep-seated feeling of insecurity, and I'm sure some Freudian investigation into my childhood might produce some answers, but there's not much point in dwelling on why my expectations aren't reasonable. It's probably better to spend time thinking about what realistic is for me, and using that support system that's come out of the woodwork in the last week to know that it's safe to reset.
I can't promise that the resetting that's about to happen won't produce cartoon birds on some days and fuming on others. Some days when I'm particularly in danger of not meeting my own expectations, my claws will be so deeply gouged into the stratospheric bar I've set that I'll be panicky if you suggest I let go. However, I'm thinking I'll finally get some rest when I've deemed it's reasonable to do so.
Right now, rest is looking pretty good.
