Life Coaching Tip: The Secret To Changing Your Experience

I think we all know by now or have heard that we have the power/choice to influence and pretty much control how we experience things. We are often told to change our attitude to something and this would change how we experience it. How many times has this worked for you? I bet not as many as you want.

And that is the exact reason why it doesn’t work as well as we would like because of the expectations we place on what we want. Usually when we choose to do something or something happens to us, we set an expectation about this – and this happens so quick we don’t even realize that this is part of the process. So, we set an expectation and then we measure the experience against it and if it falls short of it we are disappointed.

Said differently this means that the choice to change our attitude is at its core influenced by the experience we attached to it – so to get to that ability to change we need to reset or even better let go of the expectation. If you think about it, it can be very tricky and could also end up in a circular loop as how do you really let of expectation? We all probably need to sign up for a masters degree to get that completely right … and that again is an expectation 😉

The first step is always being aware of it – so if you can access your expectation and see that this is what caused your disappointment then you could consider to at least change the expectation and remember expectation can also cause a positive experience. For example, your friends are telling you about this horrible movie they just saw and you already have tickets to the movie, so you go. And guess what you actually enjoy the movie. Most likely one of the key influences in this is because you set your expectations lower than your friends version of “horrible” resulting in it being better than expected.

Try this simple technique to test it out:

1. Think of something you are avoiding or not looking forward to.

2. Ask yourself what are you expecting from this. Take a few minutes and jot this down – aim for at least 3.

3. Now purposefully change each of those expectations. This will be a struggle. Try to negotiate with yourself and remember an expectation is something that isn’t reality, so it can be changed, it hasn’t happened yet.

4. Now how do you feel about the event you thought about?