Expectations are sneaky little buggers!
“Realistic expectations don’t lead to stress.” Nedra Glover Tawwab
Hello Dear Ones,
I love this quote from Nedra Glover Tawwab, the author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace and Drama Free (both incredible books). It’s a reminder that when we are aware of our expectations and can manage them well, with good boundaries with ourselves and others, we’re actively working to manage our stress.
Expectations are something that frequently comes up for my clients as something that causes them stress and emotional and mental pain. Often, the expectations we have for ourselves, others, or situations are something we’re not consciously aware of. And then when things go differently than we had hoped or expected, we get disappointed or upset.
We’ve all had this happen. I think about this a lot with the work that I do. Often, when I meet with a potential client for the first time, they tell me about a time when they’ve paid for another service, with a provider or a company around weight loss where they were promised the world, and whatever the plan was worked for a while, but then the client didn’t see lasting success.
Their expectations aren’t met and the client ends up stressed, disappointed, frustrated, and sometimes a little bit hopeless.
If you have experienced this, know you’re not alone.
Many people in the health and wellness industry like to promise the world, I’ve even experienced this myself with a program years ago. It’s disheartening when it doesn’t pan out.
It’s also why I feel strongly about managing expectations when I start working with someone and talking about them consistently along the way.
Each of us has conscious and unconscious expectations of ourselves, and it’s my job as a coach to check in with my clients to see if the goals or experiments we’re working on align for my clients, and also, check to ensure that each person is being reasonable in what they’re expecting from themselves.
Just as most of us struggle with self-compassion, we also struggle to be compassionate and realistic in setting goals for ourselves. We expect the moon and stars from ourselves and believe we will be able to be successful when reaching too high too soon is setting ourselves up to fail.
We have to crawl before we can walk, and walk before we can run.
I’m curious, dear one, what are your current expectations for yourself?
If you’ve been working on weight loss or changing a behavior in some way, how do you expect yourself to keep that up?
We have to think about our ability to sustain whatever change we’re trying to make. Short-term eating plans or restricting for a time will not give us lasting success and, in fact, make some significant impacts on our bodies and metabolism.
If you find yourself in the cycle of:
I invite you to think about trying something new with an open mind and managed expectations.
My 16-session Eating Freely Program offers something new and different.
We cover the neuroscience of overeating, binging, and emotional eating. You get access to practical tools for breaking bad food habits. We go through nutrition and gut rehabilitation. And finally, we incorporate mindfulness and self-compassion practices to make sure you see lasting success.
If this sounds refreshing or interesting to you, I’d love to connect. I offer free 45-minute consultations to make sure you’re a good fit for the program and that I’m a good fit for you.
In the meantime, I hope you are being compassionate with what you’re expecting of yourself and others, friend.
With love and kindness,
Jessica
PS The fun thing I’ve been doing to take care of myself lately has been diving back into reading fiction. I’m reading the series A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas. If you’ve read it I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Upcoming Events:
I don’t personally have any events upcoming, but I wanted to share this one for the coming summer solstice!
If you’ve never been to a sound bath, and you’re in the Minneapolis area, I encourage you to check out these amazing events from Heart of Earth.
