What’s the difference between goals and expectations? - Video transcript

Hi everyone, this is Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and if you're looking for information and tips on coping with and managing anxiety, then you are in the right place. If you like what you hear today, go ahead and subscribe to my channel by clicking the little icon in the bottom right corner of the screen.

So today I'm going to be talking about the difference between expectations and goals. A lot of people who struggle with anxiety or perfectionism have very high expectations of themselves and they tend to set themselves up for disappointment if those expectations are not met. So expectations quite rigid. If you think about sort of how you talk to yourself in your mind, these types of statements usually consists of a should or a supposed to, so you feel like you should do something or you're supposed to do something for one reason or another and that turns into an expectation that then puts pressure on you to meet.

And if that doesn't happen again, you're left with disappointment. So we want to be really careful about how we think about expectations vs. Goals, goals on the other hand are flexible. I think goals are wonderful to have, they should feel motivating and encouraging and they should be able to be modified along the way.

So if you have a goal and you know, you start working toward it and you realize something's not quite fitting, not quite working out, then you can can shift that goal or if you feel if you find that something is going to maybe take longer than you anticipated, that goal can be shifted and it should continue to encourage you to work toward that goal and not feel like if you don't meet this goal that you're a failure or you're a disappointment at that point, it's a place to pivot and figure out, okay, well what what will help me get closer to my goal?

So a lot of times with anxiety and perfectionism were so fixated on the expectations we have of ourselves or others and not so much the goals and so expectations just tend to leave us feeling pretty negative whereas goals should be or can be more positive. I almost used a short statement there. Um they can be more positive and encouraging because we know that they're not set in stone.

We know that they can be modified one place. This shows up is in our relationships with other people, whereas a lot of times we have high expectations not only for ourselves but of others and we make the assumption that other people are going to act or think or behave in the same way we would in any given situation. And this is where we get into trouble as well because then we set an expectation or we have an assumption about how someone else is going to operate in a given situation and when that doesn't happen when they don't live up to that expectation, we can feel resentful, we can be disappointed.

We can feel angry or anxious and this is all self inflicted, right? It's not fair to another person to expect them to think the way we do or behave the way we do when they have their own set of beliefs, own set of values on set of past experiences and ways of interpreting and perceiving information. So just keep that in mind and really try to tune into where you set expectations for yourself and especially if you tend to be perfectionistic.

These are often unrealistic. So you're just in this self defeating cycle. Um so tune into where you set expectations for yourself as well as for other people and see if there's a way that you can just practice more acceptance and really focus on setting goals that can be modified and are more flexible and that encourage growth. Not disappointment.

Well that's all for today's episode. I hope you'll have a great weekend and I will talk to you next time. Take care.