The more you follow your own rhythms, using your internal world as your compass, the more you deviate from the norm and live a more thrilling and expansive life. But be on the lookout – your deviations may cause others to trip over their own expectations.
To gain the fabulous benefits of being a deviant, you must be willing to risk upsetting other people’s expectations. If you succumb to other people’s agendas, your navigation will flounder in a fog of confusing motivations and you’ll end up pleasing others first. Then you’re just a hollow robot, plodding around in a circle until you rust to death.
An expectation is not an agreement. Know the difference.
An expectation without an explicit agreement is a land mine waiting to explode. If you land with both feet on someone else’s land mine, so what? They put it there. Let them clean up the mess.
Responsibility for an expectation always rests with its owner.
If the life that rises up – pure and compelling – from within you goes against someone else’s expectations, free yourself from the tangle by asking yourself two questions: Is there an explicit agreement? and Who owns the outraged expectation?
If there’s no explicit agreement being violated and it’s not your expectation that’s blowing up, then proceed along your merry, deviant way. Get used to the idea that it’s impossible to fix other people’s expectations of you. Let them go so you can go.
Remove the shackles. Take the weird road. Claim your inner deviant.
{ PEP TALKS deliver a bracing blast of Grace }
Flickr photo: A New Path, by jurvetson
Further reading: Pep Talk | Defend Your Territory, Crying and Staying
4 Comments
Wow. Just wow.
Choirs of angels and harps are playing and trumpets sounding as the truth of this echos in my heart.
Just last night, I was telling my great friend that I had recently reviewed my life (what’s been done, what I still want to do, etc.) and realized that I had (and am) fulfilling the pledge I made to myself at 21: at 55/60+, I will *not* ask what would have happened if – if I did thus or so. I did it. And I know what happened. And I have marvelous wonderful memories because. What I do not know is what it means to work a lifetime for one company or marry and raise children in the frame of traditional Norman Rockwell family picture (although I did marry and did help raise a son).
And now your post. Don’t know when I have felt sooooo validated. Thank you Grace!
That’s great, Jo.
This whole double-whammy of being sensitive enough to perceive others’ wishes/desires/expectations and also unwilling/uncomfortable with/reluctant to make waves creates a crucial challenge for sensitive people.
Sometimes I feel as though a lot of what I write about on this site is repetitive, but I think I’m (semi-consciously) trying to say the few things I think are most crucial to empowerment in as many ways as I can think of, in the hopes that one or more of those ways will strike a chord with each person who arrives at the site looking for encouragement or even just cameraderie.
Thanks for being such a constant presence here, Jo, and for leaving comments that come from the heart. I adore you.
This is especially powerful and something it seems I deal with more as I get older (probably because I am less willing to politely meet others’ expectations and completely disregard my own!). And still, for me it is a struggle, finding the livable balance between being true to me versus being what others EXPECT of me (not merely as a rote chore but also as a form of honoring those individuals in my innermost circle). And it IS a balance as opposed to doing what I want 100% and letting everyone’s expectations blow up. Even though I realize the bombs are others’ issues and mess to clean up, if I let them all explode, I also have to walk through the aftermath.
Thank you for writing this post. It is a wonderful challenge as I root out more ways to be my glorious deviant self (while, sigh, being mindful not to set off huge explosions).
Hmmm…yes, huge explosions. Good point, Emily-Sarah. I think the big explosions are more likely to happen when we go from zero to 100, when we have a habit of bending to others’ wishes, then suddenly go somewhat postal. It makes me think that a stealth strategy can work wonders — just deviating more here and more there, over time, if that’s more comfortable, until both parties are more used to it.
That said, I still think that a big explosion of someone else’s expectations is sometimes warranted, whether we have to wade through the aftermath or not. Sometimes, the big movement is the one that makes all the difference internally. Sometimes, the big movement is the only one we can make.
Best of all, we each find our own way, whether by stealth or jumping or everything in between and combinations of the two. And THAT is my real point.
Thanks for your comment.