Expectation Vs Reality

 

Disappointment, Frustration, Anger and all such related feelings, stem out of the same root cause. The root cause being, that many a time the reality does not match expectation or in other words the reality falls short of our expectations. Let us examine the truth of the above statement in light of a few illustrations.

 

Your child is very intelligent, but somehow he does not score good marks when it comes to his academics. Every time, you hope he would score better next time, but the marks never seem to improve. In spite of your constant advice stressing the importance of marks, you do not see any visible result. You are disappointed.

 

You start a business venture, trusting one of your good old school day friends, who you have known for years. You have been very close pals, all through your life. At some point of time during the course of business dealings, there is a misunderstanding between you and your friend.  He behaves very differently. You are shocked. His careless behavior leads you to a big financial loss. You feel cheated. You feel betrayed. You experience disappointment.

 

One of your newly appointed managers is able to show tremendous improvement in your sales volume. Your business starts to boom. You feel like a lucky star and start building so much faith on him, that you delegate most of your work to him and move into your comfort zone. All of a sudden, he hands over a resignation letter, because he is got a better package somewhere in a foreign country. You feel helpless. You sense a fear of your business future. You never thought, he would quit all of a sudden. You are disappointed.

 

Does any of this, sound similar to your experience? Well many of us would have had some unpleasant experience of this sort.

 

The expectation was we wanted our child to score good marks, our friend to be trustworthy, our staffs to be faithful, but in reality things did not happen the way we wanted it to happen. Repeated disappointments leads to frustration and this frustration leads to anger. Is it not? At the end of the day, we are either angry with others or angry with ourselves.

 

All external anger, when given a deep reflection will boil down to internal anger. We will realize that it was our mistake to trust someone or expect someone to behave in a way that according to our perception is right. But they were their own selves and as always they will have their own side of the story for the purpose of justification.

 

The truth is, it is difficult for anyone to match our expectations. Expectations often lead to disappointment at work place, at family and amidst friends.  We expect our close friend to remember our birthday, but he may not call up. We expect our staff to be self motivated, but very often find ourselves pushing them to do the work. We expect our home to be always clean and tidy, but our kids throw up their things, all over the place. As an end result we end up with so many day to day disappointments, that life gets really frustrating at times.

 

I am not advocating that we should not have trust, faith or expectations on anyone. But what we need to look at is the limitations of the people, from who we expect and manage our expectations accordingly. Your trust in people should be based on the tried and tested method. We need to assess their ability, their interest and their integrity before we could set our expectations on them.

 

Expectations are like a seed planted on soil. Before we plant the seed we should know whether that particular soil has the potential for the seed to grow into a tree. Once we are convinced and sow the seed of expectation, we need to water it with words of motivation and appreciation, and provide the sunlight of affirmation and confidence. Eventually, we will realize that more and more of our expectations start to turn into reality.

 

In short, people management is nothing but expectation management.

 D. Senthil Kannan,

Managing Trustee, PALMS, Tuticorin.

Author of "Transformational Thoughts" - A Journey of learning 

Email: senthilkannand@gmail.com