The Intersection of Expectations and Reality:
Creating Space for Resilient Self-Confidence to Grow
What is the difference between a dream, an expectation and a goal?
Dreams are not important to your happiness and are generally harmless. For example, perhaps you like to dream about what you'd do if you won the lottery.
An expectation creates powerful emotions. It can create discontent with the way things are. For instance, a person may picture life after losing 20, 50, or more pounds and see a perfect, happy life awaiting. She may get frustrated that things are not different. She wants the expectation to come true but can't seem to take that first step to make it happen.
The difficulty is that she is mistaking her expectation for a concrete goal. "I want to lose 50 lbs" sounds like a goal. But for most people it's just a high expectation that remains a nice idea, a place they wish to be but never take action to achieve.
If you have you ever had high expectations that took a lot of your mental and physical energy (you want to weigh what you did when you got married, therefore you "diet" constantly) but you have never created a realistic map for how to get there, your expectations may be holding you back.
"In this world, you get what you pay for."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
What happens when you see a model on the cover of a magazine? Perhaps you think, "Wow, I have to look like her (to be happy and have what I want)!" And then that same magazine tells you that you can and, in fact, should look that way.
And it's easy. Just do this exercise or follow this diet and it'll all be yours.
Is it any wonder that most people overestimate the power that exercise has to make them "skinny" and beautiful? When you so desperately want to believe it, all the slick marketing begins to sound realistic and tempting. And before you know it your expectations are sky high.
If you're overweight, it's likely you're even more susceptible to falsely elevated expectations when it comes to exercise. In my own experience as a trainer and wellness coach, I've seen people who were desperate to believe the idea that exercise will make you thin, gorgeous and happy. And a recent study at George Washington University showed that overweight people believe that exercise will have more impact on their self-esteem and appearance than do normal weight people -- Attitudes of Overweight and Normal Weight Adults Regarding Exercise at a Health Club" by Wayne C. Miller, PhD; Todd A. Miller, PhD. It appears in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Volume 42, Issue 1, (January/February 2010).
The truth is exercise can have a tremendous effect on lowering body fat, improving fitness and lowering body weight. Anyone who has seen The Biggest Loser TV show has seen this at play. However, what most fail to realize is just how hard it is to achieve those results. As our world becomes more and more sedentary, many people have lost touch with what it means to do hard physical work.
You can walk and walk and walk at 3 mph and lift "light" weights for hours per week and still never come close to what you have seen on The Biggest Loser, or in Self or Cosmo for that matter. I regularly have clients lament that they are "working super hard and just not getting ANY results".
What these clients cannot tell as they slave away is just how far what they're doing is from what the contestants do on The Biggest Loser and how far what those contestants do is from what a really fit athlete can do. To get a super fit looking body you have to be super fit. Form follows function. But you don't have to be fit to walk at 3 to 4 mph. Even running one mile at 5 mph requires a far less than average fitness level for a 45 year old woman!
"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."
- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
I'm sure someone out there is saying, "Hey, wait a second. That's what I do" or "I can't even do THAT and he's saying it's not enough?" And it may sound like I'm downplaying the hard work you do or telling you that you're doomed to be overweight. Far from it.
The point is that to be successful with lifestyle change your vision, your ability and your behaviors need to have synergy. That is to say, your expectations may need an overhaul as much as your lifestyle. If your vision is to look as lean and muscular as an athlete, the pressure put on your ability is tremendous. You feel like you have to work out hard. You feel like you can't possibly take a day off. And you feel like a failure when the results don't come.
Once your inner critic grabs hold of the fact that your ability doesn't match up to your expectations, any further effort will seem fruitless. "Why try?" sets in. And soon your behaviors DO match your expectations, because your expectations have come full circle. You expect to quit and, lo and behold, you do.
But, if your expectations are challenging yet realistic and you focus on what you can do instead of what you think you should be doing, your whole world will open up. If you're "only" able to walk at 3 mph, heck, even if you can barely walk at all, it doesn't matter. You're getting more fit with each step. You can enjoy the activity for the activity's sake instead of wondering "Am I doing enough to lose weight?" And because your abilities match up with your expectations you're much more likely to maintain this behavior.
This is the resilience you're seeking. Resilience is the ability for your belief in yourself and your resolve to withstand any setback. We have found that an unyielding resilience is the key to consistency in healthy lifestyle behaviors. And in turn, consistency in healthy behaviors is the key to success with weight loss.
We have coached literally hundreds of people that started working out just a little bit or quite slowly or both. And those that achieved this resilience have gone on to lose 50, 100, and even 150 + lbs. They are not super models or super athletes. But they ARE athletes. And somewhere along the way the expectation that they needed to be a super model/athlete melted away and they began to understand that they were, step by step, getting their vitality and their happiness back.
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