Expectations Create Emotions

Emotions are fleeting. Every day we feel a wide range of emotions. In fact, if there is one thing we can be absolutely sure about, it is the fact that our emotions will always vary or change and are never the same. Even within the course of a particular day we feel boredom, irritation, happiness, disappointment, frustration etc. and most of the time we take different courses of action and do different things depending on the emotion we are feeling at that moment. However, this poses a problem because emotions are not completely under our control. Despite how hard we try to directly control them by suppressing them or trying to consciously change how we view or think about a particular incident or situation in the hope that this will lead to our emotions changing, we all know that this does not always work and that we never are able to control our emotional state on command. This leads to situations where you know that you have to do something or that it would be extremely beneficial for you to engage in a particular course of action but your emotions are not in tune with you and they put up resistance to the thing you know you ought to do. They can be things like going to the gym, studying, sticking to your diet or any other endeavour that requires an exertion of willpower. I personally struggle with this a lot and I am sure almost everyone does to varying degrees. I have been trying to work on this for quite a while and have written articles on this very blog about the things I have discovered and tried. They include strategies such as mini-habits where you trick your brain into getting past the resistance and starting the activity by setting the bar very low and several other ways to overcome resistance so that I can do things that I know will be beneficial to me.

Recently, I came across something interesting in this regard in Stephen Guise’s book “How to be an Imperfectionist” which really resonated with things I had experienced. In the book he talks about how emotions are to a large extent determined by our own expectations especially with regard to certain things. A simple example of this would be as follows: Imagine you expected to make 10 dollars at work today and you end up making 100 dollars, you will feel amazing and will be on cloud 9. On the other hand if you expected to make 1000 dollars and you end up making a 100 dollars, you will feel dejected and disappointed. So here we see that though the result in both the instances were the same, the emotions that we would experience are completely different. The difference in the emotions arise due to the expectations that we had and when reality met or better yet exceeded our expectations, we end up feeling positive emotions but when reality does not meet our expectations we experience negative emotions. At the beginning of this year, I decided that I wanted to work on my public speaking and presentation skills. I did my research and ended up joining Toastmasters which is a club dedicated to helping its members improve their public speaking and communication skills. When I began my journey I started with a very simple goal. Since I always felt anxious and uncomfortable at the thought of getting up in front of a crowd and speaking, I thought to myself that by the end of the year, I just wanted to overcome this fear and be more comfortable on stage. This seemed like a simple and realistic goal that I could achieve during the course of the year. In order to get more comfortable on stage, I set myself a task of ensuring that I give a minimum of 10 speeches during the course of the year. The expectation I had for myself was very clear, I was not aiming to give mind blowing speeches, I just wanted to get up on stage 10 times and get desensitised to the fear of being the centre of attention. When I gave my first few speeches, I felt amazing, just the fact that I was able to push through my anxiety and give a speech gave me a lot of positive emotions and I thought very well of myself. The fact that I got positive feedback from the other members added to it and I felt amazing as I was not just meeting my expectations by giving the speeches but it seemed like I was doing a good job even as far as the quality of the speeches were concerned.

This pushed me to give more speeches in a short period of time and the more speeches I gave the less anxious I became and the less anxious I became, the better the quality of my speeches got as I was able to relax on stage. But then a peculiar thing happened, I had completed around 6 speeches and had 4 more to go. At this stage I started to feel anxious again and I was feeling a bit more reluctant to give the next speech. When I reflected on why I was feeling so, I realised it was because unconsciously in my head I had revised my expectations. Though, my initial expectation was just to give 10 speeches by the end of the year, I had now raised those expectations and was expecting myself to give “good quality speeches” and when I thought of giving my next speech, I was left second guessing and wondering whether the speech was “good enough”. This made my subconscious brain aware that if I do not give a good speech i.e. that I do not get feedback from the audience that my speech was good, I will not experience positive emotions as I would have fallen below my unconsciously set higher expectations. After realising this, I had to remind myself consciously that my only goal was to give 10 speeches and as long as I gave a speech, I would be fulfilling my objective. This helped me to stop worrying and give the remaining speeches and they did turn out to be quite good. But then you may ask, what is wrong in expecting more of yourself and having higher expectations? Isn’t holding ourselves to a higher standard essential to be able to improve and get better at something?

Well, to that I would say yes and no. As Stephen Guise explains in the book, having high expectations is great, but it is great if you have high general expectations while having very low specific expectations. In other words, when we are learning a skill, something that we are obviously not yet good at, if we have high specific expectations, it is unrealistic as we are not going to be performing amazingly well in our first few attempts until we get the hang of it. So expecting yourself to perform something very well when you have zero experience in it, leads to perfectionist tendencies which then very often leads to procrastination. You think, “If I do it, I should do it right” and that “quality is more important than quantity” etc. and convince yourself that this is not the right time to start and that you need more time to prepare so that you do a great job. But the irony being that the best way to learn to do quality work is to put in more repetitions get feedback and then improve. Therefore, in this case it is better to have low specific expectations as it pushes you to try more times and makes you feel good for just trying and the more you do something, the better you will get at it and therefore end up fulfilling the high general expectations that you have for yourself.

Applying this to my journey in public speaking, whenever I wanted to give a speech, I convinced myself that how the very next speech turned out was not the most important thing. It did not matter if this speech was not amazing, what was more important was that I gave the speech and that if I continued giving speeches, in a year or two I would inevitably be far better at giving speeches. Nowadays, I have begun applying this even to other areas of life. I remind myself consciously to not get excited or worried about the next gym session or the next article I write or the next video I make, or the next anything I do but rather get excited about how much progress I could make if I just continued working on something for months or years. I am sure a lot of you are not able to get yourself to do things because you have set very high expectations for yourself, maybe you can tweak them and lower your specific expectations and raise your general expectations and get on the path of developing whatever skill it is that you wish to learn. Until next time…