A popular position to take in life is that of the “realist”—meaning you try to set real expectations and not get your hopes up because they might get crushed. It is a middle ground between optimism and pessimism, where in the former you try to see life events in as positive as a light as possible and the latter in a negative light. The pessimist and the realist share one thing in common: they set their expectations in life lower for the purposes of emotional safety. In the pessimist’s rationale (and I know this because I was a pessimist for a long time), expecting negative outcomes makes you either pleasantly surprised if something good happens or even-keeled that the experience met your low expectations if something bad happens. The idea of the realist is to align your expectations with the most likely outcome so that you’re neither too high or too low on an idea and work toward a reasonable goal.
So what are the pros and cons of this approach? Well, it all traces back to the risks regarding beliefs: because beliefs are what you accept to be true (or, in this case, what you expect to be true in the future) and allow you to make assumptions to supplement your knowledge, you risk assuming something is true that is not or assuming something is not true that is. In either case, if your belief is wrong, it can be detrimental to your growth. With positive expectations that don’t pan out, you risk being disappointed or making bad decisions (like spending more money than you have because you expected to get a raise or windfall). With negative expectations that don’t pan out, you might overly protect yourself, avoid risks, or otherwise not invest as much time, money, or effort in something because you don’t believe it will work out.
And that’s the focus for today: the risks of negative expectations. The reason is that what is at stake with getting your hopes up is pretty clear: disappointment, taking too much risk, embarrassing yourself, or falling into a depression from the loss or miss. But the risk of negative expectations are less discussed because they are difficult to see: after all, it’s hard to prove a counterfactual (i.e., the probability that something would occur if you behaved differently). Therefore, if you expect something not to happen and it doesn’t happen, you have no way of determining whether it would’ve happened had you had more optimism—after all, if you don’t believe in “magical thinking” then it doesn’t matter what you think, right? If you expect something not to happen and it does happen, then there seem to be no downsides to that as well. So it seems like rock-solid logic to temper your expectations to protect yourself because you’re either protected from disappointment or get an unexpected bonus to your life.
The problem is that your thoughts do affect your reality in one tangible way: your effort. Ignoring the “your thoughts influence your reality” belief for a moment (which is a possibility but not provable and so out of the scope of this blog), the tangible impact on low expectations is low effort. After all, if it’s not going to happen, why try? That’s the risk that negative expectations play in behavior. In pessimism, you believe that something won’t happen no matter what you do, so you won’t try at all. As a realist, you might give a half-hearted effort to see if anything comes of it and then not be surprised if nothing happens. As an optimist, you are likely to try your hardest since you believe that it is possible (yes, it is risky that if you believe it’s inevitable that you won’t try as hard as well—see showboating winners that lose at the last moment).
So that’s the takeaway for today: be careful how your limiting beliefs affect your actions. If lowering your expectations lowers your effort, that might be good if you’re taking a “fail fast, fail cheap” kind of approach but terrible if you are accidentally creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that way in that your low effort leads to poor results and then you immediately give up. In short, if the greater effort would’ve led to better outcomes and had you keep going or if the higher expectations would’ve sustained your effort long enough to produce positive outcomes, then you should try to be more positive. Examples of this include:
In short, you never know how your negative expectation is not only repelling people around you but is also negatively affecting your effort and causing you to fail. So if you’re going to go after something that you’re really passionate about, it’s better to either hold the highest expectation possible (without doing something too risky as a result) and hold a positive intent and attitude toward it to minimize the risk that your negativity could cause the very outcome that you’re afraid of. Limiting beliefs can affect your effort, your persistence, and your resilience (if you think that negative events will keep happening in the future no matter what you do). So ensure that your attitude at anything you do as positive as possible to minimize these risks up until the point at which you might become arrogant and careless as a result. If you optimize your outlook, you’ll ensure that you’re doing everything within your power to realize the best outcome.