As someone who has a lot of goals in life, I have pretty high expectations of myself. I want to get things done, I want to do them well and I want to be as efficient as possible.
Humans beings naturally want to do well. We crave praise, deep down, so that we know that we’re doing alright. When things go right at work, you expect some kind of acknowledgement, even if it is just a “well done” from someone else. At home, it’s more difficult to quantify what is going well and what isn’t; for some people just getting out of bed and managing to get through the day is a big achievement. For others, having a clean, tidy house and everything in the right place is an achievement. Each and every individual person will have expectations in their own lives, but they differ from person to person.
I admitted recently that life has been a bit rough lately. Nothing that is unmanageable, luckily, but I have not been my usual, happy self during the work day. I have mentioned a couple of times that I have had the support of some of my colleagues recently which has been very helpful and very much appreciated. But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was not doing enough, that what I was doing wasn’t good enough.
Sometimes, the expectations we put on ourselves are too high. As someone who is somewhat a perfectionist, who gets very frustrated when things don’t got perfectly according to plan, I have very high expectations of myself. And lately, at work, I have found myself missing the mark. But, no one else has commented on anything to say I’m not doing well; in fact, I was told the other day how well I’m doing. So why do I still feel like I need to do more?
High expectations only work when they are positive and make you strive for more. For me, high expectations can be a bad thing. They make me feel pressure more and more, and it makes me feel like I can never achieve what I want to. I need to remember that sometimes, good enough is just fine and it doesn’t have to be a million percent all in to be the best. I feel at the moment that I’m not doing as well with money as I should be – I read so many finance blogs who save 70%/80% of their income every month and manage to get impressively low spends in lots of categories. I sometimes feel like I should be spending less, doing better with finances and generally understand more. But then I take a step back and try to appreciate how well we’re doing – yes, we could do more – but what we are doing is good. Most people we have in our circle of friends, if they need our circumstances, would say they’re very good, and even may be envious.
As we continue down the road to a simpler life, I need to remember not to put such high expectations on myself. After all, when things start to seem hopeless and unobtainable, then maybe the target is too far, for now. As I posted on Brian’s post about working because there’s a goal in mind, sometimes I need to do what is right, not what’s expected. Life is pressured enough, without me being so critical of myself!
Do you agree? Do you sometimes set too-high expectations? I’d love to hear from you!
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I think part of simplifying your life is simplifying all the clutter in your head. I think it’s great that you’re trying to cut yourself a break.
An excellent point about the clutter in your head – probably have a lot of that at the moment! I’m working on it though 🙂
I feel ya! I’ve always had high expectations for myself. I find that I have to make a goal to make myself happy. No one else is going to make me happy. I have to do it.
YES. A thousand times, yes. I don’t particularly like to admit it (though my boyfriend loves to point it out), but a large part of my unhappiness at my last job was because I was expecting more from myself than my bosses were. I put a lot of pressure on myself. At the same time, I thought that if I didn’t, my bosses wouldn’t be pleased. It was hard to balance. Now that I’m self-employed, the only person I have to worry about is myself, but I still go above and beyond with getting things done.
Does being self-employed make it even more pressured though? I’d be afraid it would make things even worse if I was the only person accountable for my income/work situation.
It does and it doesn’t. I can be really hard on myself, but I am slowly realizing it’s important to put myself first and take care of myself. It’s very easy to go crazy by taking on too much work, too quickly! Working for yourself, you have the freedom to scale back or re-prioritize if need be, which is nice.
I guess the flexibility will help in those scenarios 🙂
Definitely! I set high expectations like always. It’s been a custom of mine I want to break. Actually, I agree with you that it can be good or bad but it depends on how we view our expectations. Me? I consider it a challenge to push myself more to reach that expectations. When I fail, I just learn and move on. That’s life. It’s about learning and relearning.
All the time! I am my worst enemy when it comes to setting high expectations. I think we all do it. Sometimes we need to cut ourselves some slack!
From what I see you are doing amazingly well and you are certainly an inspiration to me. Don’t be so hard on yourself x
Thank you – what a lovely thing for you to say 🙂
The main reason I started sharing my net worth every month on my blog was that I felt like the only people who were doing it were either so far beyond me with hundreds of thousands of dollars saved up or super far in debt – it didn’t seem like anyone who was just chugging along and trying their best was sharing theirs.
It’s so easy to see how much better everyone else is doing. On the flip side, there’s always someone worse off too, who would be ecstatic to be doing as well as you or I are doing. I try to remember that.
That’s a very good point – there are always going to people who are worse off than me and I have a lot to be grateful for.
I’m so guilty of this too! I can get myself into knots over unrealistically high expectations. Fortunately, Mr. FW pulls me back and helps me realize what I have accomplished. I need to get better about being happy with incremental progress–I want to see everything done at once, which is completely untenable. Hang in there and reward yourself for everything that you’ve done!
I think rewards are a good thing – I need to reward myself more I think 🙂