It's a Dangerous Practice

There is a simple thing that can quickly bring instability to any relationship. It's been known to disrupt marriages, friendships, and even work environments. When I lead premarital counseling I always caution against the inherent danger in this common practice. It's the poison of unmet, unexpressed expectations. 

We all have expectations for how things should develop and how certain situations should unfold. By itself this isn't necessarily negative. Problems start to arise when we get upset or greatly disappointed when our expectations aren't met. When we allow this to impact the people around us when we have never shared those thoughts, we are now adding another qualifying characteristic: unreasonable. 

It's not very wise to believe other people will be able to anticipate how to respond exactly how we want them to. Learning to share these thoughts creates an opportunity to discover what is realistic while making our feelings known. A clear communication of desires may not necessarily bring the results we intended, but it does open up the pathway to honest expression. Too many relationships fail when one person gets upset and the other person has no idea why. 

Either learn to share these expectations (and make realistic adjustments) or stop taking things personally when they don't happen according to an internal, unshared script.

Reality Check

I doubt I'm the only one that has come back from vacation and said, "Back to reality!" It's as if we have separated family relaxation time from the normal daily activity portion of our lives. I really believe it's a reflection of the way we tend to compartmentalize. We keep things in separate boxes in our minds and miss the big picture of how everything fits together.

I think all of our life experiences: routine family events, work, hobbies, events to celebrate, tragedies to mourn, and difficulties to endure are all part of real life. It's the blending of these positive, negative and seemingly mundane things that make up who we are and define the life we are called to lead.

Every part of our life is valuable. We should pay attention to it as it goes by or we'll miss something important. We live in this reality every moment whether we recognize it or not.

See the Mess

I shared a quote from Madeline Albright on my blog a few weeks ago where she had been quoted as saying, "The world is a mess." I think that might be fairly evident to some people, but what if we're in denial about the true state of things?

• Are we calling something clean when it's dirty?
• Are we calling something right when it's wrong?
• Are we calling something orderly when it's in chaos?
• Are we calling something good when it's clearly not?
• Are we calling something healthy when it's sick & dying?

We can't begin to fix things if we can't admit things are broken. Let's get a realistic assessment of the world we live in and then let's get to work providing the solution.

Right Here

We want to grow, change, & generally improve who we are. We buy self-help books, sign up for gym memberships, solicit advice from people we trust (or think we trust), and work to better ourselves. Very often we get frustrated with what we perceive is a lack of progress and then quit. I believe that the problem isn't always the slow pace of transformation, but that we have underestimated how much we need to change & overestimated our abilities to get it done. 

Honest assessment of where we are is the only way to begin. How can we possibly get where we are going if we don't know where we're starting from?