Disappointment, Frustration, Anger and all such
related feelings, stem out of the same root cause. The root cause being, that
many a time the reality does not match expectation or in other words the
reality falls short of our expectations.
Let us examine the truth of the above statement in
light of a few illustrations.
Your child is very intelligent, but somehow he
does not score good marks when it comes to his academics. Every time, you hope
he would score better next time, but the marks never seem to improve. In spite
of your constant advice stressing the importance of marks, you do not see any
visible result. You are disappointed.
You start a business venture, trusting one of
your good old school day friends, who you have known for years. You have been
pally pally all through your life. At some point of time during the course of
business dealings, there is a misunderstanding between you and your friend. He behaves very differently. You are shocked.
His careless behavior leads you to a big financial loss.. You feel cheated. You
feel betrayed. You experience disappointment.
One of your newly appointed manager, is able to
show tremendous improvement in your sales volume. Your business starts to boom.
You feel like a lucky star and start building so much faith on him, that you delegate
most of your work to him and move into your comfort zone. All of a sudden, he
hands over a resignation letter, because he is got a better package somewhere
in a foreign country. You feel helpless. You sense a fear of your business
future. You never thought, he would quit all of a sudden. You are disappointed.
Does any of this situation , sound similar to
your experience. Well many of us would have had some unpleasant experience of
this sort.
The expectation was we wanted our child to score
good marks, our friend to be trustworthy, our staffs to be faithful, but in
reality things did not happen the way we wanted it to happen. Repeated disappointments
leads to frustration and this frustration leads to anger. Is it not? At the end
of the day, we are either angry with others or angry with ourselves.
All external anger, when given a deep reflection
will boil down to internal anger. We will realize that it was our mistake to
trust someone or expect someone to behave in a way that according to our
perception is right. But they were their own selves. And as always they will
have their own side of the story for the purpose of justification.
The truth is, it is difficult for anyone to
match our expectations. Expectations often lead to disappointment at work
place, at family and amidst friends. We
expect our close friend to remember our birthday, but he may not call up. We expect
our staff to be self motivated, but very often find ourselves pushing them to
do the work. We expect our home to be always clean and tidy, but our kids throw
up their things, all over the place. As an end result we end up with so many
day to day disappointments, that life gets really frustrating at times
I am not advocating that we should not have
trust, faith or expectations on anyone. But what we need to look at is the
limitations of the people, from who we expect and manage our expectations
accordingly. Your trust in people should be based on the tried and tested
method. We need to assess their ability, their interest and their integrity
before we could set our expectations on them.
Expectations are like a seed planted on soil.
Before we plant the seed we should know whether that particular soil has the
potential for the seed to grow into a tree. Once we are convinced and sow the
seed of expectation, we need to water it with words of motivation and
appreciation, and provide the sunlight of affirmation and confidence.
Eventually, we will realize that more and more of our expectations, start to
turn into reality.
In short, people management is nothing but
expectation management.
Happy Reading
D. Senthil Kannan
Article dated July 2009