The simple, fixable trigger behind 99% of your stress
A LOT of stress can be boiled down to one core sentiment—
“I’m not meeting expectations.”
If you’re anything like me, you get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of meeting or exceeding expectations, whether they’re your own or someone else’s…
But the flip side of that is that you get pretty stressed when you feel like you’re NOT meeting expectations, whether they’re your own or someone else’s.
If you have this joy/stress relationship with expectations…
And you hold a high bar for everything you do…
And you have a busy life with a lot going on…
You can find yourself with “brain chatter” in the back of your head… 🧠
Saying “You’re behind~ You’re doing a bad job~ Get your shit together~” 🗣️
And that stressed-out chatter can start to feel like the soundtrack to your entire life 🎶
If you have this soundtrack in your head, the first thing I want to tell you is:
You are not crazy.
You don’t have an anxiety problem. You don’t have a self-esteem problem.
You don’t hate yourself. Your brain isn’t broken.
You just have a metrics problem.
And here’s how you’re going to solve it.
Set 4D Expectations:
Deliberate | Defined | Doable | De-Conflicted
Let’s break these down one by one.
Deliberate: you set it consciously for this specific situation
Your brain will probably have an automatic expectation regardless of whether or not you deliberately set one.
But those automatic expectations are often…not that great.
When I left consulting to become chief of staff to an executive, I unconsciously brought a lot of consulting expectations with me.
One of them was: If someone asks you to do something, it needs to be done by end of day (ideally) or end of week (if you were really stretched thin).
I didn’t even realize I had this expectation in my head. It was so unconscious and ingrained that I didn’t even notice it.
Until one day, my boss (probably noticing that I seemed more and more stressed as time went on), sat me down and said,
“Hey, that thing I sent you yesterday? I’m expecting that to be done five weeks from now.
And that other thing? It doesn’t need to get done till next quarter.”
And I realized — I had never sat down and deliberately defined the timeline expectations for anything I was doing.
I’d never asked my boss. And more importantly, I’d never asked myself.
I’d never said, “Hey, when do I think this NEEDS to be done by, in the context of everything else I’m doing?”
I was just running with my automatic expectations without ever questioning them.
And there are probably a bunch of areas in your life where you are too!
So take the time to sit down and deliberately create your own expectations, for this specific situation.
Defined: it’s clear where you stand, either way
I often shy away from defining clear expectations if I’m not sure I’ll be able to achieve them.
But having unclear expectations is pretty stressful too — it can create a constant, overhanging sense of “I need to be working on this” without any way of actually checking the thing off your list.
For example, I have a MASSIVE list of things I have to get done in order to launch my course & coaching program.
Each item on the list is well-defined. But for a long time, I didn’t define how many of the items I wanted to get done every day.
Instead, I’d tell myself “Just work down the list and do as much as you can.”
I really didn’t want to commit to a certain number of things because I knew I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t get it all done.
But telling myself “Just do as much as you can” wasn’t very relaxing either.
Instead, it just made me feel like I was constantly behind and needed to spend every waking moment working down the list.
And at the end of every day, I just felt uneasy.
HAD I done as much as I could? I don’t know. I took time off to eat meals. And I spent an hour booking summer travel. And an hour responding to emails.
Was that all time that I should have spent working down my course launch list?
Had I done a good job? Had I done a bad job? I could never tell.
(Now, I’m not saying you need to define a precise numerical goal for every single thing in your life.
There are plenty of places in my life when I have relatively undefined expectations and it doesn’t stress me out because I know whether or not I’m on track just “by feel.”
I know where I stand, even if I don’t have precise numbers backing me up.
But if you ARE feeling uneasy and having stressed-out brain chatter, it’s worth checking whether it’s caused by an undefined expectation and your brain therefore feeling uncertain about where you stand.)
Doable: it’s realistic and achievable with the time and bandwidth you have
This is the hardest one for me.
My eyes are bigger than my calendar. Everything takes 2-3 times longer to do than I think it should.
I’m very prone to having a free Sunday and thinking…
You know what I’ll do today?
I’ll set up a personal financial management system.
I’ll hire a contractor for those odd jobs around the house.
I’ll renew Global Entry.
I’ll make all my social plans for the next month.
I’ll make all my travel plans for the summer.
And then go out to dinner at 8!
And then I go all Surprised Pikachu Face when I only get one half of one of those things done.
Realistic planning takes real, concerted effort.
Chances are, the plans, standards, and expectations your brain spins up automatically are NOT realistic. (My brain’s plans certainly aren’t!)
So slow down, do the time math, cross-check your list against the number of hours in the day and the amount of mental/emotional/physical gas in your tank, and set a doable expectation.
De-Conflicted: it doesn’t conflict with any of your other expectations
When two of your expectations conflict with each other, it’s like trying to drive forward while one wheel of your car is turning backwards.
You’re working against yourself, it’s frustrating as hell, and you don’t get very far.
It was a conflicted expectation that ultimately led me to leave my corporate job and become a coach.
Because as much as I wanted to do an amazing job and impress my boss and get promoted as fast as I could… (three wheels turning forward 🛞🛞🛞➡️)
I also had a voice in the back of my head, whispering: “Wait, but this isn’t the career path you want to be on!! You don’t want to do this!” (one wheel turning backward ⬅️🛞)
And I couldn’t meet EITHER expectation until I resolved the conflict.
I couldn’t crush it at my job, because that voice in the back of my head kept holding me back.
And I also couldn’t figure out what else I wanted to do, because I wanted to crush it at my job!
Which meant I always felt uneasy, until I resolved the conflict.
If you’re juggling multiple things in your life…
Multiple projects at work
Your work life vs. your home life
Your hobbies vs. your career
Being healthy and working out vs. staying out late and being social
…it’s inevitable that you’ll run into conflicting expectations.
And when you find them, all you have to do is talk them out — with yourself or with someone else — and figure out how to resolve the conflict.
(And if you’re not sure how to do that, no worries — that’s a big thing I work on with my one-on-one coaching clients :)
Here’s the amazing thing about you.
When you set 4D Expectations, you lock in, get in the zone, and get shit DONE.
That’s the joy side of your relationship with expectations.
You LOVE checking the box, meeting the bar, and knocking it out of the park.
You can trust yourself 100% to do that, every single time.
And if you ever notice that you’re NOT doing that…
Or that doing that has suddenly become more stressful for you…
All that means is that you’ve given yourself a Non-4D Expectation.
And when that stress chatter goes off in your brain…
You’re not actually off track.
(The chatter isn’t true.)
And you’re not a crazy person with a broken brain.
(There’s nothing wrong with you for having brain chatter.)
You just have a Non-4D Expectation somewhere in your life.
Find it, fix it, and you’ll be back in flow in no time :)
If you can’t tell from the 300+ articles I’ve written on this topic…
I am passionate about helping my clients create less stress and more flow in their lives.
It’s pretty much my singular full-time obsession.
And if you’ve found my articles helpful…
Just think how much more helpful it will be to talk to me live and get my custom perspective on your situation :)
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