What do you expect from others?
What we expect from people can shape how we treat them and, over time, what we eventually see from them. This is one of the ideas behind the Pygmalion effect. Whether conscious or unconscious, expectations can affect what we notice, how we interpret another person’s actions and how we respond to them. Our response then becomes part of the interaction, often reinforcing the expectation we started with.
In leadership, someone we expect to grow may receive more challenging goals, greater responsibility, better feedback or more opportunities to learn. In relationships, expectations can shape how carefully we listen, what we notice and how quickly we assume we already know what another person meant. If we expect a partner to dismiss or misunderstand us, we may enter a conversation already prepared for that outcome, and this will inevitably affect the interaction that follows.
The same process becomes particularly interesting when we turn our attention to the expectations we have of ourselves.
Self-Efficacy and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Many of our expectations about ourselves are based on real experiences. We know what we have struggled with, what has gone badly before and which situations have repeatedly been difficult for us. But those experiences belong to particular periods of our lives, while our skills, capacities and ways of responding continue to develop.
Self-efficacy describes our perception of our ability to manage a particular task or situation. It can affect what we are willing to attempt, how much effort we invest and how we respond when something becomes difficult. Someone who thinks, I’m terrible at difficult conversations, may have good reasons for that expectation. Perhaps that has genuinely been their experience. But while their communication skills, emotional regulation and experience may develop over time, the expectation can remain remarkably unchanged. If they continue expecting the conversation to go badly, they may avoid it, postpone it or enter it already anticipating what will go wrong. That gives them fewer opportunities to practice, but also fewer opportunities to discover that they might respond differently now. The expectation can then become self-fulfilling, partly because it keeps limiting the experiences that might provide evidence against it.
The same can happen with many of the expectations we hold about ourselves. They may have been accurate when they were formed. The question is whether they are still accurate now.
The Expectations We Bring to Our Own Lives
The expectations we have of ourselves aren’t limited to what we believe we can or cannot do. They also show up in the way we approach other people. In professional relationships, we can expect ourselves to recognize potential, communicate clearly, listen before reaching conclusions and trust others with responsibility. In doing so, we create more opportunities to see what people are capable of, including abilities we may not have had the chance to see before.
The same applies to close relationships. We can expect openness, understanding and support from ourselves, and contribute through our own behaviour to the way the relationship develops. We can communicate our needs clearly and genuinely listen to what the other person is telling us. When someone responds differently from what we expected, what matters is whether we notice that difference or immediately interpret their behaviour through the expectations we already have.
And this is where what we expect of ourselves meets what we expect of others. When we recognize how much we have developed and changed over time, it becomes easier to allow for the same possibility in someone else. What we know about another person is based on the experiences we have had with them, but no experience captures everything a person is or everything they may still become. Expectations help us make sense of what we already know, but they can also limit what we are prepared to notice. New experiences can change what we thought we knew, about ourselves and about others.
Our expectations cannot tell us what the future will be but they can affect whether we give ourselves enough opportunities to discover what we are capable of becoming.
Author Ivana Song.
Where clarity becomes direction. Inspired by Song.
