Monday, March 1, 2010

managing our expectations and influencing someone else's

How do you manage expectations of a situation? How does your sharing of an experience alter someone's expectation of a similar situation?

I went to my 1st John Friend workshop the other weekend. When I returned everyone was asking me how it was and my response was "I had fun, it was good, I learned a great deal". Each time their response back to me was - "Just good?"

For years now I have been hearing that his workshops were "amazing, life changing, like nothing else out there". This is a very unfair expectation to put on a situation and a person. How can any one situation possibly live up to that expectation. It is very much like a movie that everyone is raving about for weeks telling you that is the funniest thing they have ever seen. You finally go to the movie expecting to laugh so hard you will pee in your pants. Well, it is funny but your bladder is intact. It has been built up so much that there is no way it could possibly live up to the expectation.

We need to be more aware of how the sharing of our own experience can effect another person's opportunity to create their own expectation from a similar experience.