Expectations: The Less, The Better

      Expectations are a form of happiness that we would like to see in the future. They are ideas and thoughts that have not yet happened. When expectations are not met it leads to great disappointment. Our expectations stem from our beliefs and our beliefs flow from our needs. How? Let's take an example:

      Let's say If I'm lonely and call up a friend, I have an expectation that he will relieve my loneliness. If at the last minute he cancels, I will be disappointed. Notice that it's not his problem and he's probably fine with the situation. If I understand that I have made a request to my friend and if I allow him to make his own choice, I can be okay with whatever happens. I will have to find another way to solve my problem. It would be worse if I'm explicit with my expectation of him because that creates a demand on him. It causes pressure on the friendship and if he still bails, then the disappointment is greater knowing I made a request that was rebuffed. Sometimes disappointment can really hurt when it touches the ego and we take it personally.

      For our own sanity and happiness, managing our expectations is a better choice than continually being disappointed or giving up. Here are eight steps that will help you begin to short circuit your process of creating unrealistic expectations:

1. Become aware of expectations you are creating.
2. Understand the beliefs behind your expectations.
3. What are your needs in the situation? Are there other ways to meet them?
4. Is your expectation a reasonable or a likely outcome?
5. When your expectation turns out to be incorrect, notice and adjust accordingly.
6. When you are disappointed, don't take it personally.
7. Stay flexible: What other options do you have?

Our disappointment should be turned on its head: Instead of being disappointed with an outcome, we really should be disappointed in our own unrealistic expectations. We can ask for things but we don't always get them. When you adjust your expectations to fit reality, you are much less likely to experience disappointment. In time, it will become a rarer occurrence. You don't have to give up hope. We can still anticipate a good outcome, just be ready to be okay with "what if" and accept it. As the old saying goes: 

"Don't count your chickens before they've hatched."

Now, let's focus on some more aspects to expectations and it's solution:

Less Expectations, More Learning

      When you expect less from yourself you tend to be focus more on yourself and you allow great things to come to you. This requires trust. If you trust yourself, that everything you needed will come to you by simply focusing on your work rather than expecting something. Then it will surely happen. That's the only solution. If you expect less from yourself then you will be able to learn more. How? Simply, because when you expect less you tend to focus on the learning part rather than the result part of it.

      And Maybe the most peaceful and quickest way to achieve something is a way you haven't thought of yet. Be willing to go with the flow.

Change Your Thoughts

      If you are feeling disappointed, it's because of the thought you have about the situation. So if you don't want to feel disappointed, change your thoughts.

      The first thing I do when I feel any disturbance to my peace of mind is say to myself, "I am determined to see this person/situation differently." And if the situation is very big then at that moment I feel disturbed which is normal but after a day or two I say that statement to myself. This is how you step into your power. Everything happens for you, not to you.

      You'll be amazed at the shifts in perception that occur when you become willing to release fear and see love instead.

      When you focus on releasing the thoughts about how you imagined your life to be, your most loving, truthful self can come forward and guide you. There is nothing to figure out.

Be Realistic

      It's human to feel disappointed now and then. It's also human to expect things. But we must focus on reducing our expectations to minimal. So, that even if it doesn't happen we will not be disappointed about it.

Let's take another example:
      If you are a parent and your child is very hardworking and your child did everything that he can do to bring up good results in the exam. Here, the expectation of you as a parent will be that your child will top the school or college. But, predicting the future is not in our hands. So, here 2 situations can occur:

1. Either their child will really top his/her school or college. Which is the ideal situation which the parents want. But this situation is less likely to happen usually.
2. He/she will fail to top the school or college but he/she scored a decent marks. This situation which is more likely to happen will make the parents so disappointed that they will scold and treat their children very badly.

Sumail Hassan Syed. PHOTO: Source

      The second situation will make their child feel more bad about themselves because they did whatever they can do and had given their 100% and still if they can't top the college then it's not their fault. Not everyone is meant to do things which others do. Some are good at painting, coding, photography, playing instruments and one shocking thing for parents is that some people are very good at playing computer games. You might be thinking, so what? How playing games can be good or will help their child? The Answer is that recently, a 15-year old Sumail Hassan Syed from Karachi made history on February 9th, when he helped his team called "Evil Geniuses", claim the Defence of the Ancient 2(DOTA 2) Asian championship in China. For the people who don't know, Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena video game. And just by playing a computer game well enough his team won $1.2 million prize money. Can you Imagine? Such a big amount. So, to all the parents out there, I would just say that your child has ability to do well in at least 1 thing which only he/she can do exceptionally well as compared to others.

So, to end up with the article I would like to say that,

Big Pleasures Come in Small Packages

     Small things give us the greatest pleasure in life. For example, if you see a child smiling, you instantly get lots of energy and you will also smile back and start playing with that child. It's like you're converting to Super saiyan like Goku does in Dragon Ball Z . There’s a sudden burst of positive energy in you.

     No matter how much trouble you might be having in life, but for that moment you will completely forget all your problems. It is said that "Every little smile can touch somebody's heart. No one is born happy, but all of us are born with the ability to create happiness". And it's 100% true.

     If we take some realistic examples which might have occurred in your life too, then you will realize that these small things really matter: 

1) When you're getting ready for college, you reach into your pocket and find some money you didn't know was there. That feeling makes you feel really happy.

2) A lot of students like me have realized that, its music that makes us feel good after a long depressing day or after getting kicked out of class or after having a bad day. Who would have thought such a small activity like listening to music can make us feel good and it can be one of our greatest pleasures in life.

3) What could be better than hearing the right song at the right moment. We all have some thoughts in back of our minds and during that moment when suddenly our playlist plays a song which perfectly matches our current situation. This is such a small thing but it gives you immense pleasure which you might have experienced a lot of times.

4) When you get up in the morning and you have to go to college/office but soon you realize that you have some more time to sleep. It is not something big but this feeling gives us one of the greatest pleasure in life.

5) The feeling you get when your idea works. It is one of the best feelings and gives us a moral boost.

6) Also, making someone smile can make us happy too.

     And the List goes on and on... Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.

     Now, for a minute, let's think about something that you take for granted. Why do you think your mom takes care of you and does all the small things which will be beneficial to you, even after you treat her badly? You treat her like your maid or someone you're paying for doing all those things. You do things which will make your mom very sad and still she shows her love and takes care of you. Have you ever thought why? NO, because you're busy trying to impress people who don't even care whether you live or die. You're busy making friends out there and partying while the only thing she thinks of every moment while you're out is whether you are SAFE or not? Have you had something to eat? And when she calls to check on you? You feel like she is interfering in your life and you answer the call annoyed or maybe even ignore her call. This is what she gets for caring about you 24/7 and for being there in your difficult time. She does everything to make you smile. Saying a simple "Thank You" to your mom for doing so much, will not cost you anything, yet it will make her feel appreciated. Now, you may be thinking, how can a simple “thank you” make her feel like that? The answer to that is, acknowledging her work will make her feel wanted and appreciated. So, even a small "Thank You" can mean a lot to her. And to end this article, out of all those things mentioned above, my personal favorite is when I do something for my mom which can even be a very small thing and because of that, there's a smile on her face, that moment is when you will realize that one of the greatest pleasures of life are experienced in the smallest of things. So, go ahead and say Thank You to your mom right now. I guarantee, it will be one of the happiest moments in both of your lives.

Lastly, I would like to say,

Money can't buy Happiness

      A lot of people think that money can buy happiness, while some believe otherwise. In a way, both arguments are correct, but the first one is valid only when we use money for the well being of others and not entirely for ourselves. Like if we are donating some money or buying some food for poor people with all our heart then it will give you true happiness. It is only possible when we truly want to help others and not when we want to showoff.

      A spate of retail therapy is said to be good for boosting your mood, but it turns out spending money doesn't always buy happiness, especially if you're materialistic. It also brings us to a point that when you depend on things to be happy then you're soon going to be bored with it and will no longer will be happy to have it or buy some more things. Let me relate this with a real life example, How many of you love spending time either with your friends/family? Almost everyone. Why? because they are fun to be around and you understand each other well and help each other out whenever possible. But, if I ask some of you to spend some hours with your best friend and spend some hours with your gadgets which you like, then the result will be that you will have more fun and will be more happy when you spend time with your best friend rather than spending time playing around with gadgets. From this we can conclude that things or gadgets cannot give us happiness in long term but they can give us temporary happiness. 

      Have you ever got suddenly happy when you saw an infant smiling and you start playing with that infant even if you don't know the child? The Answer to this will be, Yes, for most people. Infants can bring such joy to us, have you ever wondered why? It is because human beings are meant to share their happiness with people around them and that is simply because happiness never decreases when shared, it only increases.

      You all might have thought and hoped that a lottery win will make you happy forever. Think again, because evidence suggests a big payout won't make that much of a difference. Many of us do think that it will make us happy forever, but it doesn't. Winning the lottery isn't a ticket to true happiness, however enticing it might be to imagine never working again and being able to afford anything you want. One study famously found that people who have big wins on the lottery ended up no happier than those who have bought tickets but didn't win. It seems that as long as you can afford to avoid the basic miseries of life, having loads of spare cash doesn't make you much happier than having very little.

      Happiness isn't a quality like height,weight,etc which could be measured, in fact a lot of people try to measure happiness so that they can make most out of it, but happiness can't be measured by anyone in this world. It even seems like the very act of trying to measuring it can distract us from what might make us most happy. An important study by Christopher Hsee of the Chicago School of Business and colleagues showed how this could happen.

      Hsee's study was based around a simple choice: participants were offered the option of working at a 6-minute task for a gallon of vanilla ice cream reward, or a 7-minute task for a gallon of pistachio ice cream. Under normal conditions, less than 30% of people chose the 7-minute task, mainly because they liked pistachio ice cream more than vanilla. For happiness scholars, this isn't hard to interpret - those who preferred pistachio ice cream had enough motivation to choose the longer task. But the experiment had a vital extra comparison. Another group of participants were offered the same choice, but with an intervening points system: the choice was between working for 6 minutes to earn 60 points, or 7 minutes to earn 100 points. With 50-99 points, participants were told they could receive a gallon of vanilla ice cream. For 100 points they could receive a gallon of pistachio ice cream. Although the actions and the effects are the same, introducing the points system dramatically affected the choices people made. Now, the majority chose the longer task and earn the 100 points, which they could spend on the pistachio reward -- even though the same proportion (about 70%) still said they preferred vanilla.

      Based on this, and other experiments, Hsee concluded that participants are maximizing their points at the expense of maximizing their happiness. The points are just a medium, something that allows us to get the thing that will create enjoyment. But because the points are so easy to measure and compare -- 100 is obviously much more than 60 -- this overshadows our knowledge of what kind of ice cream we enjoy most. So next time you are buying a lottery ticket because of the amount it is paying out, or comparing jobs by looking at the salaries, you might do well to remember to think hard about how much the bet, or job will really promote your happiness, rather than simply relying on the numbers to do the comparison. Money doesn't buy you happiness, and part of the reason for that might be that money itself distracts us from what we really enjoy.

     If you do something which can make others happy then, you will have the same feeling as I have at the moment and I will say it with the help of a quote,

Do you agree with me? You can comment below and share your views regarding it.