The Art of Handling Unmet Expectations in Real-Time

This was a journey from Los Angeles to Pune. Nothing unusual about it. An Uber ride to the airport - congestion at the LAX airport, car taking time to pull in at the curb. A very long line at the airline checkin, a checkin bag getting wrongly labelled, long security check lines, over crowded carry-on baggage compartment ... and the list goes on till at the arrival in Pune a baggage claim belt that wouldn't start till it was eventually fixed.

During this time I watching my mind respond to the situations ( and there were several) which did not happen according to my expectations. No calamity here, just some minor sources of irritations. The point here however is that the rate at which they were happening was enough to cumulate the minor irritations in the mind. Cumulated irritations causing a noticeable mood shift and accompanied by a reduction in the energy levels.

I was able to catch the mischief at the root. I realized that ignoring this "minor" mischief is the root cause of major mind and life events which led me to think in terms of prevention.

Realized that I need a skill of actively responding to unmet expectations as they happen in real-time. Allowing them to pile-up is never a good idea. On an average day all of us are facing several such "minor" irritants in the form of mildly unmet expectations.

What if I am able to handle these events in real-time ? What if my ability to process these is such that, there is no residual effect of each such event ? Thought this would be a highly useful preventive capability to manage my mental health.

Unmet expectations are of many kinds, some of them many in number - minor and benign, some are significant ( like a cancelled flight, major traffic jam", or very major such as loss of a near one or a job-loss.

I need a single thought process to process every unmet expectation. What would it consist of ?

1. Recognizing at each time the inevitability of some unmet expectations in life.

2. Recognizing that there is not necessarily an evil intention behind the each unmet expectation.

3. Recognizing that there could be a possibility of recalibrating some expectations in the future.

4. Recognizing that a change of solution or an innovative approach in the future is a possibility to rectify some situations.

5. Recognizing that in some cases it might be possible to just gracefully accept expectations around some unmet expectations

If points 1-5 could be combined into a single thought process and consciously applied efficiently at each such event, we will not have a unprocessed backlog, making mental hygiene management a much simpler task.

In reality, I used this approach sit down briefly to handle a batch of unmet expectations during the journey , before heading out of the airport while reflecting on the possibility of improving my capability to process these in real-time. People who had come to pick me up did not suffer the experience of an irritated me.

Wanted to share this with my friends hoping that this would be useful for anyone in any situation. I welcome you to share this with your friends too.