What are your goals? What do you expect you can achieve?
Earlier this week I was engaging in some negative thinking about a future event that I expected would just bring difficulty and negative outcomes.
Some of you many have a similar psychic ability where you can see the future in detail, where the outcome is bad, where the people involved act to ruin your perfect world, where everything that could go wrong goes wrong, where you fail. Psychologists call it 'catastrophic thinking'....I call it 'having a tea party in my head'.
During one of these 'tea parties' I happened to look at a tweet that simply said...'don't see how you will feel, plan how you will think', and this really resonated with me.
I was allowing myself to be at the whim of my emotions that were being fuelled by my expectations about how other people will behave and how I would react. I don't have a magical ability to predict how a situation will turn out or how a person to behave, so where do these expectations come from?
Our past life experiences and interactions with people subconsciously create our belief system that determines how we expect others will behave and how we expect we will respond. Our interactions with parents, with teachers, with friends, with lovers, teach us what to expect. Sometimes this is a helpful learning experience that prepares us for the future; but equally this can lead us to behave in ways that actually hold us back from achieving or from engaging positively with people or situations.
For example, being told through your school years that 'sports just isn't your thing' and being picked last on any sports team, can lead to an expectation that you should not even try to get involved in exercise or fitness ...you are not sporty! You will fail, or at the very least you will embarrass yourself. But is that belief or expectation about yourself serving you positively now you are an adult? Is it real?
Having an expectation that you can't do sports reduces your expectation of any success if you try. Your concept of what you can achieve is unrealistically low. Your expectation of failure or embarrassment is like a wall that stops you trying. There is no way you are going to try a gym class because you just know you have no sense of timing. You can't possibly try yoga because you know people will think you are fat and hopeless.
I think most people set their goals too low due to their low expectations based on old experiences. As a health coach I don't want to analysis and dissect your childhood searching for reasons for your beliefs. I want to work with you to examine where you are now, what you are doing now that is holding you back, and how can you work forward into the future with new expectations and new ways to approach life so you can aim high and get there.
I expect that you will succeed, so should you.
Stay groovy
Kim
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