Where Do Our High Expectations Come From?

“3 laps around the school for not being sharp enough!” Cheerleading practice- 1998. You never wanted to be the one who caused such a disturbance at practice. It could mean social shame and your friends rolling their eyes at you or even avoiding you the rest of the night. Wow, being 9 was hard. So, you make sure all your moves are perfect, and when they aren’t you try to hide them, hoping that no one noticed you turned the wrong way. You get through the night on edge, but relieved that no one saw your mistakes. Your friends and most importantly the coaches still like you and for a 9 year old girl, social acceptance is everything. 

Avoiding failure, openly shaming my body, and brown-nosing were all a part of my quest to be accepted into the girl world. All things I can look back on now and purse my lips at (like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada) thinking why did I do this? Well, I’ve learned there were a lot of reasons why I acted this way and they all came back to the terrifying word: Expectations.

This little word can cause us to completely change who we are, derail us from our true passion, and be surrounded by a world that doesn’t bring us true happiness, all because we were trying to please others. It can also keep us from productivity and success. I could go into a whole other blog post about why women strive their entire lives giving to others more than they give to themselves, but I digress. Today I wanted to talk about something different, where these expectations even come from.

Why are Our Expectations Important? 

Expectations can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be clear as day, spoken straight to your face, or be a hidden message in a series of images that our brain manipulates into fact. The point is, expectations for our life and how it’s supposed to run are freaking everywhere. I know because I’ve gone searching for them. Watching documentary after documentary trying to find other answers for the disappointment I had in myself. In general, I’m an inquisitive person and always long to know the ‘why’ behind something. Yet, the biggest question of my entire life, “Why do I want this?”, I couldn’t seem to find the answer to. Until I started broadening my mind, seeking out different ways of living, changed who I was around, and even tried different ways of educating myself, I found that my life was not being defined by me, but FOR me, and that was not ok. 

There are a few different ways that personal expectations can dictate how we show up in the world and the choices that we make. Below I’ve outlined some of the more popular ways that affect most of us.

Parents & Family

Obviously, you get all of your knowledge as a human, just starting out in this world, from the people closest to you, your family. Watching and listening to them is all you do. That is your main focus. Parents and family, know more than you because of their life experience, but you also believe EVERYTHING they say as fact. This includes things like religious or political standpoints, their beauty standards, how others should behave (including yourself), what jobs people should be striving for, how much money to have to be considered successful….literally everything. 

I was lucky enough not to have parents that pushed me toward a career I wasn’t passionate about, but I know many women that do things or have lives they didn’t want based on what their relatives expected of them. 

Young girls can also learn a lot from family about how she should look to please her friends at school or how she should act to not cause disruption. Pink bows, quiet activities, and having accommodating opinions are all common societal expectations from little girls that can be learned firstly in the home.

Friends

I started with family and parents because when you’re young, all of your friends come to school with all of those opinions from their home and project them onto you. Whatever their mom or dad told them was an ‘acceptable’ way to be, most will only like you if you are meeting this standard that they think is factual in their minds. 

Friend groups also don’t like conflict. So, when someone doesn’t agree with opinions or expectations from another, it can seem like a personal attack. To avoid an awkward social situation or losing your friend all together, everyone will go along with whoever has the most agreeable opinion of the group. You know that phrase, “walk like a duck, talk like a duck, then you are a duck?” Well, this can completely change your perception of what is expected of you outside of your home, in the ‘real’ world. All because you wanted to fit in with someone else’s idea of what life is supposed to look like. 

Magazines & Advertisements

This one was a big one for me. Most of my friends were reading all sorts of fashion & health magazines, so I thought these must be reliable sources when it came to being a woman. I mean, in every movie I saw, there was some woman reading a magazine mindlessly. Whether they were at the hair salon, by the pool, or in waiting rooms, it was a cultural norm that I saw everywhere. 

Have you every REALLY looked at magazines or advertisements with a fine tooth comb? They are overwhelmingly deceptive. Let’s be real, most of the magazine pages are filled with companies trying to sell products. Yet, most of the words and images are telling you that your life isn’t good enough. Magazines convince you to buy this product in order to find a partner, make a lot of money, be popular, be skinny, have a great job, and so on. Because these types of ads are common and familiar, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking “this must be an expectation for my life.” So, you buy the things because society says that you’ll be happier with the life they manufactured in front of you. Which essentially is not the case. They want you to buy their products and don’t give a darn about you, just making money. When we mistake magazines for reality, we’re buying into a life that.. 1. Isn’t ours 2. Convinces us that we will never be satisfied with what we have. Because (hate to break it to you) this life that they are creating on billboards, on a plasticy filmed booklet, or perky voice memos on your car radio is meant to be unobtainable. What would happen if everyone got everything that society expected of them? Then, these companies wouldn’t make any money. Duh. 

TV, Movies & Celebrities

Oh man…those 90’s classics. I used to be obsessed with movies like “Never Been Kissed,” “Mean Girls,” “A League of Their Own,” & “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.” I took a trip down memory lane to amuse myself and watched some the other day. Oh boy. The unrealistic images of what high school was, or how women are supposed to act in relationships, or how girls needed to dress to get attention, was shocking. No wonder a lot of what I was focusing on in school was relationships, being liked, and looking nice. There were some meaningful sections where the protagonist is moving her herself up in her career or she finally finds love, but these were not the film’s main area of focus or skimmed over quickly. 

In the US, we worship celebrities. We copy what they dress, follow them on social media, and are following their latest diet regime. We trust them and even mimic them to some extent. Yet, by surrounding ourselves with the idea of a lavish lifestyle, it never seems to make us feel better about our own. We are always seeking more because we see these things accessible by others, but who are you comparing yourself to? People who are rich, selling you products that they probably don’t use themselves, and flaunting a life that is beyond our reach. We start to believe that this is the life we should be striving for…to be famous.

Social Media 

Social media has been a hot topic these days when it comes to mental health. We are constantly scrolling through images of other people’s lives. The problem is, we are only seeing the good parts. We don’t see a mom struggling with her health because she doesn’t have enough time to herself. We don’t see the fitness coach in the bikini shot doing all this personal and photography prep to feel confident about her body. We also don’t see the sacrifice, budgeting, and stress it took to plan a family’s vacation, we only see end result. 

We just don’t know what’s behind these photos. Most of us base how people are doing in their lives by what they’re posting on social media. Also, most of the time people exaggerate an experience in a post because they want to either impress people, get validation, or be considered ‘keeping up’ with their friends. Isn’t it all just a game? Whoever gets the most likes or has the best photos has the best life? NO. 

Comparing your life to these images of family, friends, and mostly strangers is unrealistic. We don’t see the shit parts of anyone’s life, because who wants to share that? Based on these platforms, the only difficult experiences I see are deaths and extreme illnesses. I see beautfiul trips, nights out on the town, weight loss success stories, successful relationships, cute pet photos, etc. It’s no wonder that we look at that, think about why we aren’t doing those things, and think about all the bad things happening in our lives and not theirs. Our expectations from social media are fragmented. We are competing with an ideal life, not a real one. 

Industry or Career

This one may not be for everyone, but it was certainly relevant to me. No matter what industry you’re in, there is an unwritten standard of the path you should be striving for. Whether it be to get your degree, move up to CEO, make X amount of money, work from home, or travel the world. Every career path has an expectation of what “making it” is. 

For the performing industry it was to be on Broadway. Yet, what if I never get there? Does this mean that I am unsuccessful at my career? When we take these industry standards based on who came before us or someone we idealize, and use them as something we MUST accomplish, we are setting us up for failure. Your career path is yours alone. Having goals is one thing, but feeling like we need to do that best thing in our career to even feel accomplished is another.

Expectations can hold us back from living the life that we’ve always wanted. Not for anyone else, but for our own means. Knowing where our expectations come from is key to moving forward or even letting them go. When I discovered all of these opinions that were controlling my future based on what I was consuming, I started to question EVERYTHING. We have the power to take what we want and throw everything else away. We don’t have to believe everything we see or hear as truth or as the holy grail of a perfect life. We have the power to choose our own expectations. Better yet, why have any? Sometimes it’s even more thrilling when you take life as it comes, not thinking it should be a certain way or not. 

Now that you know where expectations come from, you can discover the origin of your own. It could be all of these areas or only a few, but I’m almost certain that it’s at least one. Don’t let other people’s opinions get in the way of who you want to be.

Interested in working through your own limiting beliefs about what success could look like for you? Join my community. Every week, I send out a love letter filled with what I’m up to, inspiration, and resources all about that Perfectionist mindset. I’d love to have you there.