Freedom from expectations

Do they work for or against us? What’s the right way to bring out the best in you?

We would expect filmmakers to be big risk-takers, but Hollywood director James Cameron perhaps pushes more boundaries than most, on camera and beyond. In a recent radio interview, Cameron talked about how important it is to allow oneself to take risks without the fear of failure. “Failure must always be an option,” he said, “But fear is not.”

Our willingness or reluctance to take risks often stems from the framework built by expectations — our own and others’. Cameron says that we should not be limited by our expectations of ourselves — and, perhaps, more importantly, we should not be limited (or defined) by other people’s expectations of us. But there’s another viewpoint as well. Behavioural research also suggests that high expectations can actually make people perform better while low expectations can limit their performance. So, in this view, it’s not expectations per se that is the problem; it is the content and level of those expectations that are important. We know this from experience as well. We respond well to encouragement and positive reinforcement and stumble when we expect criticism or negative feedback. Of course there are those who believe in reverse psychology and suggest that criticism can motivate those who enjoy challenges.

How do you begin?

So, what are we to do with expectations? It may be near impossible to do away with them all together, and, surely, we have limited control over how other people, even our parents, construct their expectations of us. But it may be useful to think a little about how we react to expectations — real and imagined — and whether they do indeed work for or against us.

A good place to start may be our own attitudes to what we do and how we do it. Do you begin with a sense of “can do” or do you start off thinking “I’m never going to get this done”? Do you generally expect to succeed or to fail? Do you have an imaginary bar that you set for yourself and anything short of it just will not do? Or do you set it so low that success comes easily, and with it, possibly, complacence? How do our expectations of outcomes influence our behaviour? For instance, when we are convinced we are going to be late to a show, do we automatically slow down (or stop rushing), believing that it is a foregone conclusion? When we think a particular subject is going to be too hard for us, do we stop trying to understand it?

Many of our expectations have become so ingrained that we do not even realise that they are driving our actions. In my own classes, I have seen some really good students end up performing poorly because they have been used to getting good grades with very little work, and they continue to operate at that level of performance. In this case, their expectation that minimal effort will deliver results has structured their (suboptimal) performance. There is also another side. Some students perform poorly because they have never expected anything more of themselves, or, perhaps (unfortunately) they have been conditioned by other people’s expectations that they cannot do any better.

Balancing act

Very high expectations can also be a tremendous burden. Some of us, in wanting to meet those expectations, feel a lot of pressure and could even buckle under it, ending up achieving less because we are focusing more on what we think people want from us, rather than just on doing the task as well as we can.

Clearly, it’s a complex balancing act. Should we pay attention to high expectations and try to meet them, despite the pressure we may feel? Should we ignore low expectations and refuse to judge ourselves by those poor standards? High expectations could also be seen as belief in our ability, and they could give us a sense of confidence. They could energise us as long as we do not turn them into a source of pressure. But is it possible to respond selectively to other people’s expectations in this manner? And what do we say (or think) when someone tells us that we have “exceeded expectations?” Doesn’t that mean that they had set an imaginary boundary for our achievement that we have somehow crossed? In this case, do we feel happy for our achievement or unhappy that people had lower expectations of us?

Maybe the trick lies in freeing ourselves from expectations of all kinds — our own and others’— and just focusing on what needs to be done and do it as well as we can. That is what James Cameron did when he decided to undertake the Deep Sea Challenge and dive, alone, to the deepest part of the world’s oceans — the Mariana Trench. No expectations, no boundaries. Benchmarks are useful to measure ourselves against after a task has been done, or to set a goal so that we can go in the direction we want. They cannot become bars that hold us back or sticks to prod us forward.

Bench-

marks cannot become bars that hold us back or sticks to prod us forward.

Source | The Hindu | 13 July 2015