Breaking Away From Overly High Expectations of Yourself (and Others)
Hi there. Welcome to One Day You Finally Knew: A Podcast for Folks Breaking Away. I'm your host, Jessica Chasnoff. And I am thrilled to be here, a partner walking alongside you, as we explore and uncover what no longer serves us and how we might be able to let those things go and set them down. Let's see where our walk takes us today.
Hello. Hey, hi! Oh my, I think we're, I think we're in business here. Let me just say before I go any further that I have the great fortune of having a really sweet, lovely, patient computer person who was able to get everything sorted for me earlier in the week. I wasn't holding my breath that things would actually work.
And so I'm sitting here in real-time having the experience of like, oh, okay, it's working. We're in business. This is great. So, um, hello, hello to you. I'm going to talk a little bit about breaking away from overly high expectations of ourselves.
So if you're like me, you set a pretty high standard for yourself and there's this way that it seems like a good idea at the time. We expect a lot of ourselves. We want to be seen as somebody who's, you know, fill in the blank. We also hope that others will do unto us as we do to them.
We would like to be able to get it all done. To do all the things. And we'd like to have people do the same in return, right? So there's a quality of this being, um, you know, kind of the way that we wish the world would be. Right. We give all of ourselves, the world gives all of itself to us, the people in it.
We know that that isn't necessarily how it works, but somehow, in this process, we have for various reasons, set certain standards for ourselves. I don't know if this has happened to you. It's happened to me. It's happened to quite a few clients that I've worked with.
I hear this a lot, actually. "This is what I expect of myself and then I don't get that out in the world, necessarily." " I do this for other people and I don't get it back" or "I would never do that to someone else, so why would they do that?" So there's this way that we hold ourselves up to these standards that set us up for a couple of disappointments. They set us up for the disappointment of others not giving us what we hope they would give us. And we put ourselves up on this pedestal that we will eventually fall from. Right. Either in someone else's eyes or, or in our own.
So an example that I have of this is many years ago, this would have been about, I mean, when I say many years ago, I really mean it. It really kind of feels to me like once upon a time. Yeah. So like this would have been 2001, I think.
Yeah. Almost 22 years ago. We won't get started on how 2022 is peeking at us from around the corner. So I was doing my psychology internship. And part of that is you go in and you sit with your supervisor once a week and you play a tape. Well, they're not tapes anymore.
I don't know how you youngsters do it. Maybe on your phones, now? But in my day it was cassette tapes and we also used to have those in our cars by the way.
So basically I was sitting with my supervisor and I was playing a tape.
And I was feeling really disappointed in myself. I was feeling like I just didn't feel like I was performing as a therapist, the way that I had hoped. And you know, of course, there's always anxiety about sitting with a supervisor and having them hear your work.
But, I just said," I don't feel like I'm doing a really good job here. I expected more of myself." I think I said something like "I'm disappointed in myself". And she was really great. She gave me some fierce, compassionate love, and she said to me "You need to listen to me when I tell you that I'm sitting here right now and I'm listening to this tape.
And if you keep thinking that you're not good enough and keep having these expectations of more from yourself, you're actually gonna miss the fact that you're doing a really good job, that you're actually really skilled as a therapist." And. I was stunned really and felt like, wow, okay, this is a new perspective.
And it really shifted for me the way that I am with myself in terms of what I expect of myself. What I've realized is that if I have super high expectations and I don't feel like I'm meeting them, I can really get taken down by that. I can go into a place of feeling like I'm shutting down, I'm immobilized.
I feel paralyzed to do the things as I was doing them, or maybe new things. If this is something that you struggle with too maybe look at what you're already doing now and how others might actually be seeing that you're doing a pretty darn good job and that the lens that you're using to look at yourself is what is actually the problem. Not the fact that you're doing a bad job. Okay. Like I've said before, I talked about negative self-talk in a previous episode, this is something that is a practice that we continually work with.
Having to come back to it over and over again, because as we continue to move through life and do new things, we will be working with expectations that we have for ourselves around these things. And if we can keep working with them as they come up and we can adjust our expectations and frankly lower them, we'll actually be better off.
The magic of this, the magic of letting ourselves off the hook and lowering our expectations for ourselves is that we will also let other people off the hook. So coming back to what I was saying a little bit earlier about, " I always do this, but then I don't get this" I'm thinking of several clients that I've worked with over the years. I see this a lot with my clients who identify as women. The giving and the offering, and then the showing up with the nurturing and then feeling like they aren't getting that.
But the problem here is not necessarily what they're looking for on the outside. It's what they're looking for on the inside. Right. If I have expectations for myself that are too high, then guess what I'm going to do. I'm going to imbue my whole worldview, everything I look at, every person I look at, I'm going to hang those same overly high expectations onto those other people.
And then I'm going to be disappointed by them. So if I actually let myself off the hook more, then I will actually not be so disappointed or hurt by what other people are doing. Okay. So, the client that I'm thinking of here worked with several years ago and there was this way, and boy, I will just say like, boy, did I feel her, I was just like, sister, I know, I know. I do this too. So her thing was, she would go walking on these trails and this would be an exercise walk, right. She'd be moving. She'd be hustling. And you know, there's a rule on trails, right? I mean, I feel like this is pretty much a universal rule.
Maybe not universal, but a rule on most of the trails in this country, that I have seen. I'm not sure what it is in other countries. By the way. Hello, Ecuador. And thank you for making me number 26 in your mental health podcasts. So I don't know what side of the trail is the passing side over there in Ecuador.
Maybe in places like England and Australia, you know, places where the drivers are on the other side of the road, maybe this changes in trails, but generally in the US, if you are coming at each other, somebody should, if people are in like two or three across, somebody should go behind someone else so that they could be in single file for you to be able to pass them. So you can like literally share the road. Okay.
So it was infuriating for her because she would be hustling on her walks and she would have to be the one to move for everybody else. It didn't matter which direction. Nobody would move for her. People would just be lollygagging and enjoying, talking to each other, like sometimes 2, 3, 4 deep on these trails and she would lose her mind.
When we would talk about it in session, she would get really enraged about this. And the theme that would come up and again, this might sound familiar, is " I move over for other people, I do that for other people. And this is the expectation I hold myself to that I will move over for somebody else. I will give them that courtesy. But nobody will do that for me. It was really upsetting for her. It got to the point, there was actually one time when people weren't moving and she was hustling and she realized they weren't gonna move for her.
And she went around them and clipped somebody on the shoulder. And then that nearly started a bit of an altercation. She just kind of moved on like, "oh, sorry, I can't hear you. I've got my headphones on". She just got to the point where she was like, "I just don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired of it." So the way that we worked with this was.
Okay, so what would happen? Oh, I should say another piece about this. It got to the point where it was starting to immobilize her. She was like, "I don't even feel like I want to be out on these trails anymore. Like, yes, the trails are beautiful and I love them, but maybe I just need to walk down my street, but I don't really want to walk down my street, it's not as pretty as these trails."
Right. There was this way that she was just getting so stuck with this. It was really challenging. And so, first of all, the place to go is, of course, you feel this way. I get it. Why should you always have to be the one that moves?
And of course, from the perspective of people who identify as women or people who don't identify as women, but are in these meat suits where we look like what people have been conditioned to believe are women, we get pushed around in this way by people that appear more like what we've been conditioned to believe men look like that meat suit and also other women.
There's a way that we push each other around. Anybody who's in a marginalized community or is part of a group that doesn't get seen, doesn't get their needs met. We the oppressed can wind up becoming the oppressor. We can be the victim, but then we become the victimizer. The person that she clipped on the shoulder. It was like a gaggle of girls. Right.
So the way that we worked with this, and this is what I'm going to ask you to get curious about is, what if I didn't feel like I needed to be the one that moved or I needed to be the one that did the kind thing in other circumstances. I asked her to take this out of the being on the walks because it was so loaded at that point. There was going to be a time where she was going to wind up being like DeNiro in Taxi Driver. You talking to me, you talking to me, you want me to move? Like it was going to potentially get bad. So we had her start working that into other areas.
So, if she was in the grocery store and she had the cart. When someone was coming through, maybe she wasn't going to move her cart aside. Maybe she was going to let that person move around her. Okay. So she tried that. We also worked on it when she was driving. Maybe she would for once in her life, not let somebody in, in traffic. Right. And again, these are all things that are nice things to do. It's a kindness and it is a courtesy and it's great to do all these things, but for the purpose of this exercise, I really wanted her to be able to feel the power of like, no, you move.
You go around me. Okay. And so she practiced that for a while. And then was able to bring that into her walks. And when she brought it into her walks with the expectation that she didn't have to necessarily be the one to do the nice thing, the courteous thing in other areas of her life, it softened how she felt about the expectation of people moving for her on the trail.
And so it didn't bother her so much to be the one that moved around them. Interestingly and look, I've said it before. I'll say it again. I don't know how it works. I don't know how it works, but it was almost like there was an energy there that when she let go of that energy of like "you better move" when she let go of that and it didn't bother her if she was the one to move, she noticed that other people were moving for her. Okay.
That's a really interesting thing to consider too. That energetic shift that she made, which was about holding herself to an expectation that was less lofty, she was able to ease up on other people, and then paradoxically, they moved. Not all the time. She would still go around people, but it wasn't an irritant anymore, the way that it had been. Okay. So yeah. I'd like you to think about that. I'd like you to bring that into your life.
And, you know, because I talk about this with so many clients and so many of us are women and folx who look like again, what people think are women. There's this expectation of us that we're going to be the givers. I don't want to get repetitive about that, you know, but just to say, because that is already out there, societally, whatever the world is going to do about their expectations of us, that's going to be what it's going to be, and it's going to change as it's able to change. Right. But if we work with our expectations about ourselves, we let ourselves off the hook. We make that shift within us. Then we are going to see the world differently and it's gonna potentially look a little bit kinder. Even if people aren't doing the kind thing.
Okay. Yeah. So. Play with this. See what happens. See how you can bring this into your own life. I would be delighted to hear how this is something that you're bringing in. Again, I do just want to say, it's lovely to let people in your lane of traffic, right. It's lovely to move your cart.
I'm tall. So when I'm in a grocery store, if somebody is trying to get something off the higher shelf, I'm always the one that's like, " Hey, do you want me to get that for you?" it's lovely to do lovely things. And it's also really important that we don't wind up coupling that with, "but nobody's doing that for me."
Okay. And so if you work with letting yourself just follow the impulse of what you want to do in that moment, as opposed to the thing that you think that you should do, that we've been socialized to do, you're going to get somewhere with that. I have definitely seen this in my clients and I've seen it in myself.
See what happens for you when you try this and enjoy this little practice. I want to give you one more thing. Because as you know, I'm really into the somatic therapies and there is also something energetically that happens when we give ourselves some self-compassion around working with our expectations of ourselves.
Okay. So what I'd love for you to do, if you can't do it now, you can try it later. Okay. But I would love for you to just take a moment. Sit comfortably. Put your hand on your chest, over your heart, whichever hand. You can put two hands. You could put one hand over the other if you want, which I really love, but I'm holding a mic.
So I'm just going to do one right now. And I'd love for you to say to yourself if you feel comfortable saying it out loud, great. If not, you can say it inside. I am enough.
And just breathe with that for a moment and notice what happens. What happens when you actually say to yourself, and you actually are saying to your heart with your hand on your heart, "I am enough just as I am." Notice what happens in your body. And track the sensations that you're having around that. I know that for me, when I do this, immediately there's like this lovely, luscious, ah, exhale and let down.
It's like those expectations keep us up on tenterhooks. All the musculature in my back, it's like, it's up on a hanger. Oh, I can kind of bring myself down from those tenterhooks, from that hanger. See what that does for you when you do that. Give that a try. See what happens. Enjoy this practice. Okay. Remember it is a practice. You're not going to perfect this.. I have to do this all the time. I'm always working with expectations that are overly high.
Okay. I mean, really I'm having to work with that a lot. And so I do this practice a lot of the hand on my heart and I also do the practice of "what if you just cruised through this thing that you do with lowering expectations, so that maybe you don't get your knickers in a twist when other people aren't behaving the way that you would expect yourself to, because you're expecting that of them.
And you really just don't need to expect that of anybody. Yourself included. Okay. Lovelies, I've talked at you enough. Super happy to be back here with you. If you have any feedback about how this feels for you to try these practices, I'd love to hear. That is all for now. Big juicy hug coming your way and yes, until next time, let's see what unfolds.
Thank you so much for listening today. If you are enjoying this podcast, please consider writing a review and giving it a five-star rating. This is something that can make the podcast more visible to others who might benefit. And if you are wanting to connect with me, I would love it. My contact info and socials are in the show notes. Until we meet again, be gentle and good to yourself.