When we want things that we don’t expect to get, it makes us feel pretty bad inside and it also keeps us from having positive progress towards our goals.
What happens when we make our expectations negative? Usually it isn’t good stuff. For me it often starts a big downward spiral. But people (like me) keep doing it all the time.
I’ll never find love.
I’ll never get published.
I’ll never make a difference.
Those expectations and fears can be come prophesy because they take up so much space in your brain that you can’t break free from them to create good outcomes.
So what do you do to break free from negative expectations?
When you find that negative expectation taking hold of you, you can ask yourself, “What would I rather have happen?”
It seems like a simple step. It is. Here, let me repeat it and make it a header just to be cool.
Ask yourself, “What would I rather have happen?”
Got it?
Now you have to do that next step—you have to take the steps to make that positive result happen. You can focus completely on what might go wrong, but all that time you spend thinking about what might go wrong is time where you don’t get to think about where you can make it go right.
Yes. It’s simple.
But it’s true.
“The only place where your dream becomes impossible is in your own thinking.”
Robert Schuller
We waste a lot of time thinking and expecting only about what might go wrong, and that gives up all our manpower and energy and intellect away from dreaming and acting on the good, positive, awesome possibilities of our wants.
This example might help explain it.
I have a client that I worked with. He’s an older gentleman living in another country and getting a bit worries about his wonderful books, which he had previously self-published. He wanted me to read two of them and just tell him if they were any good. Not edit them. Not give an editorial assessment letter. And he wanted me to charge him $35 an hour to read the stories.
“It’s a great deal,” he basically said. “You love reading. You’re being paid to read.”
And I do. I do love reading. And I love stories. But what the problem was here is that he wanted me to take six hours for each book and pay me $35 an hour. There are limited hours in my day (like everyone else’s) and I tend to get paid between $75 and $100 an hour.
So I had to choose between helping this man out and taking a loss of $240 (at least). Or the loss of six hours I could spend writing my own books, painting, cleaning the house, being with my family. Because I’m not monetarily motivated, I did it. But he didn’t understand that choice.
We have to choose what to do with our time.
Do we want to spend it helping people out? Do we want to spend it thinking negative things about ourselves? Do we want to maximize it? Do we want to minimize it?
We only have so many hours in a day. We can spend that time focusing on negative expectations and our fears or we can spend it focusing on our wants and positive expectations. The choice and power is ours.
“All stress begins with a negative thought. One thought that went unchecked, and then more thoughts came and more, until stress manifested. The effect is stress, but the cause was negative thinking, and it all began with one little negative thought.
No matter what you might have manifested, you can change it ….with one small positive thought and then another.”
~ Rhonda Byrne
Changing your expectations makes your life better. There are actually studies about this. Your brain leads your way. Make it lead the way to somewhere good. Those negative expectations limit you and your future. But those positive expectations? That’s where the power is.
Your power.
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