A Letter from Chris Suarez
DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON ME
In the past, I’ve written about expectations.
Both the positives of setting expectations and the underbelly of unmet expectations.
This year is setting up nicely to not hit many of your expectations.
Your expectations of the financial markets is probably not being hit at the moment.
Your expectations that covid was going to be over is probably not being hit at the moment.
Your expectations of humans finally becoming good global citizens is probably not being hit at the moment.
Your expectations of how quickly you’d reach all of your goals this year is probably not being hit at the moment.
And all of those things are ok. They were expectations set either consciously or subconsciously. They were best case scenarios in our mind or ideals hoped for. When internalized or left uncompartmented, unmet expectations have the ability to disrupt every area of our lives.
Let’s just take the first one - the expectations we had of the financial market and the economy as we started 2022. Most just hoped or imagined the market would continue to climb. The growth they had built in fixed income assets, futures, equities, even real estate would just continue to increase. The meteoric rise of the market would just continue. Some would argue those were probably unrealistic expectations, but at the same time few would have expected their stock portfolios to be down 20% for the year just half way through the month of May.
And here-in lies a valuable lesson. Often in life, when one of our expectations is unmet, we begin quickly looking at which other expectations are not perfectly being hit. We begin to become overly fearful and disproportionately reactive to anything in our life that we worry about.
We wake up and look at our stock portfolio: wildly missed expectations. We head to work for the scheduled meeting with our team. Maybe someone shows up late, someone didn’t do exactly what they said they would do, or targets aren’t being met. Don’t get me wrong, each of those could be cause for frustration. Our expectations in a human are not met at that moment - and our sentiment about the market now transfers to a human. So we respond in an overly emotional way. We use phrases such as “I thought you knew better”, or “I’m disappointed”, or “I expected more”. Maybe it isn’t a work meeting but an interaction with our spouse. Maybe it’s an interaction with our children. Maybe it’s an interaction with our partner. It could even be an interaction with our dog.
We have a visceral reaction in that interaction because of expectations elsewhere in our lives not being met. Our disappointment from one expectation bleeds over to others. We deliver a response that is not warranted and would have otherwise not been typical of us. Perhaps a past personality trait that we have been working on resurfaces. We take frustrations out on people, impute wrong motives on others, overreact, blame others for things they don’t control. In the process we damage relationships with people that we care about - people that thought we cared about them.
This situation calls for exercising our EQ muscle for sure. As we navigate 2022 be prepared for unmet expectations. It doesn’t mean that those closest to you have done something wrong or could have prevented your pain. Don’t take that out on them.
It doesn’t mean that even if they have, our immediate reactions are necessary. Remember, what goes down always comes back up. No negative situation ever lasts forever. We’ll never be firing on all cylinders across every area of our life. As we prepare for some unmet expectations in the coming months, be thoughtful about each situation, compartmentalize, take advantage of the pause before the reaction, and remember that the people in your world are more important than the expectations in your world.
Chris