A couple of weeks ago I made a decision that completely changed me. Though this decision has made a profound change in my surrounds and emotional wellbeing, I was hesitant to share the principle with the world because of its novelty. But, here goes nothing…While visiting my family out in Arizona I realized the underlining cause in my emotional pain…expectations. So I surrendered my expectations of life, people and God.
I decided that I would no longer expect anything. I would no longer expect someone to love me just because I said that I loved him or her. I would no longer expect people to be grateful because I gave them a gift. I would no longer expect God to bless me with a million dollars. I would no longer expect that someone was going to treat me poorly. And I would no longer going to expect that I would not have enough money to do what I wanted. I decided that I would live my life void of expectation.
You Limit Life With Expectations
You have no idea how liberating and beautiful life can be when you refuse to limit people and God with your expectations. Some of you may be saying, ‘“Aren’t you supposed to expect good things from God?” “Aren’t you supposed to expect the love of your life to respect you?” “Aren’t you supposed to expect that your business is going to prosper?” “Aren’t you supposed to expect that you are going to live in health?”’
My response is, “No.” I no longer feel like expectations are needed in order to live in prosperity, enjoy a loving relationship or to experience blessings from God, in fact I believe that your expectations drive a wedge between you and the happiness you seek. Several years ago I was so mad at God…I mean pissed. I had owned an arena football team that failed and when I say “failed” I am talking about flat on its face had to file bankruptcy and start all over ago type of failure. My response? God aren’t you supposed to bless your people? Why did you not come to my rescue when I called? Do you enjoy seeing me hurt? Do you enjoy making a fool out of me? My expectations were if God loved me then He would make me rich, famous, influential and the list continued. However, when God did not do those things He let me down therefore I retaliated with verbal abuse because I felt like He rejected me.
Write Goals Not Expectations
So, should you live your life void of emotion with zero expectation of future goals and plans? No, I feel that you should set goals, plan for the future but then leave your expectation of how that goal is going to be achieve with your pen and paper and then live day-by-day full of love and let God play out the story. If you set a goal to become a millionaire by the age of 35 you envision that you will be living a certain lifestyle, driving a particular brand of car and have a certain amount of money in the bank by the time you are 35. Correct? So that is your expectation.
However, what if at the age of 35 you do not have the desired amount of money in the bank, or the car, the wife, house, etc? More than likely you would feel like you are behind schedule thinking, “I thought I would have accomplished so much more by now.” And now you feel like you have failed because you missed your expectation. Which can cause depression and relationship problems, which can cause health problems, which can even cause you to run away from God.
Goal Fulfilled Expectation Shattered
My goal was to be a millionaire by the age of 25 and I filed bankruptcy when I was 24…I fell horribly short of my expectations but not of my goal. But, several weeks ago when I began to evaluate my expectations I realized that I had actually achieved my goal! My business partner and I lost, 1 million dollars! However, I saw my accomplishment as a failure because I had a preconceived idea of how my million-dollar goal was supposed to look. Thought about from a different prospective, void of expectation, I can see that at the age of 24 I had learned how to raise one million dollars in capital! That is huge! Now I know that what I have done once I can easily do again when the time is right. My goal was fulfilled but my expectation was not therefore, I was depressed…very depressed off and on for the past 2 or 3 years causing problems in both my dating life and my relationship with God. Prospective is everything.
You can believe that God is going to bless any situation in your life but do not expect Him to manifest that blessing on your terms. That is how you get disappointed. In the past when God told me that He was going to do something for me I immediately began to set my expectations of how that blessing was going to appear and play out but the answer never happened the way I thought…not once. To me this is a HUGE secret to living a successful, satisfying life.
To be honest even in these few short weeks, with this new revelation fresh in my mind I have made some mistakes and acted out on expectations only to meet with shattered expectations. However, I am learning not to box in life or answers through my limited perspective. My goal for writing this post is that you will challenge yourself to live void of expectations for two days and see how the mindset change affects your life. I would also like you to leave a comment expressing your thoughts so I can obtain your feedback but you don’t have to, like I said, “No expectations.” ☺
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Related posts:
Now this is a mature perspective. I often wonder how you come to these conclusions at such an early age. This will have to be a huge shift for almost 100% of our Hemisphere. Western thinking is very much about expectancy. It is very much about what I want and me, me, me. We have heard from every type of leader and motivational speaker, whether a Preacher or Tony Robbins regarding expectation and its benefits. Our entire orientation has been about expectation. Lord help us to see right! I think that’s the right prayer.
Wow! I have noticed that most of the time when I get angry at my boyfriend it is because I “expect” him to let’s say compliment my outfit and when he doesn’t I get upset. However, I overlook the fact that he opened the car door for me b/c I was so focused on my missed expectations. Ouch this hit home for me!
I see a lot of these “excuses” people come up with for why it’s “ok” that they failed instead of succeeding….trying to call failure “success” and using semantic “games” to do it seems to be the answer to all success theory that doesn’t work. Just because you come up with a unique way of “re-wording” what happened doesn’t mean God gave you a million dollars….it means investors gave you a million dollars and you lost it for them….do you think the investors feel like you reached your goal? What about the people who depended on you? Is this a success for them?
If you take out of the word “success” all the factors that make it a positive, then sure you can explain anything you do as a success. next time you decide to do that, though, in advance, why don’t you explain that to your investors? You might find out that you have NOT reached “your” goal of learning how to raise capital after all, if you put the burden on yourself to inform your potential investors of your “new” definition of what you think constitutes “success”.
Seriously, folks, lets stop pretending and redefining what constitutes success just to make ourselves feel better after we fail and really investigate what CAUSES success. It’s really that simple.
Actually, Dwayne, who left the first comment, was the main investor with the arena football team and lost the most money…
Best,
Pingback: I am a mess. You? | Success Strategies For Successful People ~ Steven Roddy