“If you are not clear about your expectation, no one can.”If you perform some search on Google about how to set your expectation for something accurately (e.g. for your projects), you can easilly find many good articles or guidelines about it. Therefore, I don’t want to repeat them here. In this article, I would like to share a significant lesson I learned from a situation involving my son and it teaches me about setting realistics expectation.
The situation is that I want my son to practice more writing because his texts are not good-looking. Therefore, I setup a schedule for him to practice 30 minutes everyday. After several days, I realize that he just finishes the sessions with 2-3 lines of texts and he does not concentrate much on doing it. In addition, I see that sometimes he just spends time on waiting for 30 minutes to pass. I asked myself why?
I realize that I didn’t give him the instructions on what should he does and what I expect after each writing session. My instructions is just “practice in 30 mins” and that’s all. Recognizing this shortcoming, I changed my approach in the next session. Instead of telling him “practice in 30 mins”, I change it to “writing ‘x’ words and ‘y’ lines of this senstence. after that, you can relax”. And guess what, he finishes everything in less than 30 mins. Amazing!
That’s the case when I realize the most important factor when setting the expectation for anything: Define your goals and desired outcome. In the story above, at the beginning, I just set the goals for my son to practice but didn’t give him what he should do and the results is not as I expected. So, be specific about what success looks like for you. This will provide a foundation for setting realistic expectations.
Keep calm and good things will come!
Subscribe to our newsletter • About the author