Does happiness really equal reality minus expectations?

Living by the beach was pretty darn sweet. I can’t wait to see what’s better!

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. Chalk it up to, oh, two hurricanes that rocked my small, Florida town and threw my carefully laid plans up in the air.

But also, I just wrapped up offering a private version of my popular Liminal Zone short course for an awesome organization of women. And the topic of expectations came up there, too. Many of the participants had had their own worlds thrown into uncertainty recently, too, and were trying to manage their own expectations.

There’s an expression that’s bandied about that says that happiness is reality minus expectations. I used to think about this as an admonishment to keep your expectations low. But, as I surf the sea of the unknown myself, and as I support others in the same situation (I’m a liminal zone guide), I’ve begun to think of it differently.

Rather than keeping our expectations low, the trick is to keep our expectations broad.

Instead of me thinking that my one path to Floridian contentment is living in the sweet beach cottage I’d grown to love (and is now inaccessible to me), what if I asked myself: What is it about that situation I appreciated so much? And then looked for other ways to make that happen?

What I loved about my tiny Florida cottage was access to nature and being right next door to my dear friends. Well guess what? There’s lots of nature in my town, and my friends were displaced as well. We started joking about finding a compound where we shared property, which, I don’t know, maybe isn’t so far fetched after all.

For a client who isn’t certain when or if her promotion is going to come through, what if she considers what she most desires out of that potential role, and looks for other ways to scratch that itch? Instead of waiting on that tenuous promotion, maybe she finds another organization with whom she can actually design her own role. Or maybe she starts a consulting business doing exactly the thing she loves, and charges her former organization to access her skills.

When I work with clients who are trying to forge new paths (and stuck along the way), I encourage identifying what’s most important, then coming up with a plethora of ways to make that happen. The more varied and audacious, the better. Because the more we follow the windy path of wild ideas, the more likely we are to stumble on one that’s so spectacular, we couldn’t possibly see it coming.

Case in point: another client of mine knew she wanted to live in a modern house by the mountains, and kept thinking she’d buy land and build (at great expense). By releasing that notion of what good looked like, she opened herself up to all kinds of creative possibilities. She ended up buying an ultra-modern (and very affordable) container home right in the heart of a buzzy mountain town. It was way better than she’d ever hoped. I could hear the giddiness in her voice when she told me. And it all happened in a couple of days, because she’d already gotten super clear on what mattered most to her, then let herself be open to all kinds of ways for that to come to life. Plus, this has opened up more exciting possibilities for her: she has plans to renovate as a way to learn about building in cold mountain climates… if I had to guess, where that takes her will be far more amazing than her original plans.

You see, a funny thing happens when you start to be open to a variety of possible paths… it takes the pressure off of any one thing to be the thing.

And then an even sweeter thing happens… that original thing loses its luster, because by creating more possibilities, you often find something way better than the OG expectation.

I’ve gotta say, my little beach life was pretty darn sweet, so I kinda can’t wait to see what even better looks like.