Episode 83. High Expectations Are Your Greatest Advantage

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - "High Expectations are Your Greatest Advantage.”

For some of us, it's hard to see our peers surpassing us in the world. We want to believe that none of our friends are superior to us in any way. So, we sometimes get into the bad habit of tearing down people that aspire for more than we do. For some reason, seeing our friends pass us up, threatens our egos.

We choose to curse them with low expectations. When they succeed, we like to remind them of when they were as pathetic as ourselves. It is as if we want them to remember that deep down inside, they are no better than the rest of us. The sad thing is, that your low expectations are effective, reminding those people that aspire to more, that they're undeserving or that they're incapable.

Or that they're stupid will successfully keep a lot of people in the same mud puddle as you. And just as it is painful to see our peers rise above us, it is even more painful to be the only one falling behind. When everyone expects excellence out of a person, it is hard for that person to not be excellent when everyone expects you to be subpar.

It can be hard to believe you could be something more. There are phrases we like to use that move the locus of power in our lives to someplace other than ourselves. We like to say things like; I've had it hard in life and because of that I can't succeed. Or we say, I was around some bad influences. Or maybe we say I got carried away, but I'd ask by what?

Who carried you away? At the end of the day, the decisions we make are made by us. No doubt, a hard upbringing and bad situations make it harder to be our best, but even still, when we entertain those thoughts, we give up the power to do something about our lives and hand it over to our bad circumstances.

If anything, those bad situations just further created low expectations for you. When we believe that our situation is something we have power over, we gain power over it. For years, people have been preaching to us that we need to be understanding of the unfortunate, and I think I agree that we should, but I think we also like to take it a step too far sometimes.

And tell them that they're stuck in that situation because of the other people keeping them down when we could be sympathetic to their hardships, while still expecting more out of them. We're social creatures. What an incentive does a person have to improve upon themselves? When people constantly reinforce the idea that you can't help your actions?

We buy into the lie that we cannot be greater than what our circumstances have dictated. Yes, circumstances make a difference, but no, we don't have to be powerless to them. Somebody that relies on their bad circumstances to justify their lack of success might be thinking right now. Seth, you've probably had it easy your whole life, so you don't even know.

And it's certainly true that I don't know what it's like to be anyone other than myself, but what I do know. Is that holding everyone and everything other than ourselves responsible for our outcome in life will take us nowhere. If you believe you have no control over your circumstances, then you are choosing to be blown around by the wind, whatever direction that may be.

Taking back power in our lives means that we need to scrub away the notion that others decide what heights we will rise to. It means to throw away our low expectations of ourselves and to stop playing the blame game. You know why kids born to rich families often grow up to be rich themselves. Because people expect them to, and therefore they expect themselves to do it. For the same reason, children of poor families often stay poor, but they don't have to.

We rise to the level of expectations we hold ourselves to. In the West, we're fortunate that for the most part, we actually live in a class system and not a caste system. Yes, some people at the top of the social hierarchy live very different lives from those at the bottom, but no one is demanding that we stay at the bottom, even if it seems like everyone expects us to.

The people that most want the system we live in to be a caste system where no one escapes the level they were born into. Are the people you are leaving behind. It is often easier for a person to see a complete stranger succeed than it is to see a peer surpass us. The peer that surpasses us is more likely to make us feel inadequate than inspired.

It's easier for some reason, to see our friend succeed in us falling behind than it is to see it as an example of what is possible for us. We're not truly limited in our path to success. We may have more obstacles than some, but a person willing to move around those obstacles will always get further than someone that doesn't, no matter how much the odds are stacked in their favor.

One of the greatest gifts you can offer to another person is high expectations. Do not let the people around you use excuses to squander their potential. Few things will bring a person more peace than to know they have the ability to shape their world. When we allow our world to shape us entirely, how are we any different from an automaton or an inanimate object?

If things just happen to us, then we really aren't taking part in the world, but for those of us that do, the world can be an exciting place, expect more from others. But also, yourself, we can bring that locus of power back to us, so we don't have to stay a victim. To the circumstances of our lives, this is Skipping Stones -"High Expectations are Your Greatest Advantage.”

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