Do you know when I feel the worst mentally and emotionally?
When I expect some results and I fall short even with all the hard work done.
Do you know what sabotages in my clients high performance, consistency, grit, and the ability to do hard things more than almost anything else?
Unmet expectations.
This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn.
It’s also one of the hardest things for my clients to navigate.
The good news?
Once you learn how to work with your expectations, very little in life can defeat your spirit.
Here’s how unmet expectations quietly derail us.
We see a business succeeding. From the outside, it looks obvious. Logical. Almost easy.
So we think, I can do that too.
Then we start.
And very quickly we discover there are hundreds of things that can go wrong, things we didn’t know existed, couldn’t have predicted, and weren’t warned about. There’s a reason most businesses take years to take off. And that’s before you count the years of experience people bring into them.
That gap, between what we expected and what reality delivers, is where the biggest frustrations live.
And that frustration is the biggest reason for quitting.
But what if we expected the journey to be hard from the start?
What if we assumed it would take far more effort, time, and failed attempts than we initially thought?
A) We might think twice before starting.
B) But once we did start, we’d last much longer, without constant disappointment, because we’d know exactly what we signed up for.
Take your health goals.
If you expect to lose 10–20 pounds easily (as most people do), you’re setting yourself up for a lot of frustration, and usually quitting, by about January 21st, back to your “normal life.”
If you expect it to be hard.
To take at least twice as long.
To not work on the first attempt.
You suffer less.
And paradoxically, you give yourself a real chance to get there.
I often come back to this thought from Alex Hormozi:
“All your goals are possible, just not on the timeline you think.”
Most of the biggest successes you see today aren’t overnight wins.
They’re a lifetime of work. YOU just learn about them overnight.
A lifetime of skill acquisition.
A lifetime of adjusting expectations without lowering standards.
A note to self from this morning’s weekly reflection:
Think and plan negatively.
Assume things will be harder than you want them to be.
Then act like you can bend the odds in your favor.
Do that consistently, long enough, and reality starts bending for you.
Over to you dear reader,
Are you hoping for luck?
Or are you prepared to work so hard that, even in the worst-case scenario, it would be unreasonable to expect you to fail?
Or maybe the simplest move of all is to extend the timeline.
