Managing Expectations.

Think for a second about your life and where you are at today.

Now think about what expectations you have at this present moment.

Are they realistic?

Do you get discouraged easily when you do not live your expectations?

And do you rely on others to make your expectations come true.

I want you to think about this today and really go deep inside and ask yourself.

Are you good at managing expectations or do you get really frustrated easily when things do not go as planned.

When your done thinking, I want you to have the guts to post your thoughts so I can learn more about you.

Looking forward to reading all of your posts!

So many people have expectations about their life. They think, “If I take this job, my life is going to be so much easier” or “If I learn how to talk to women, my life is going to be so much better.”

What having expectations really means is that you’re not living in the present, because life is never what you think it’s going to be. Life is never exactly what your expectations envision.

Ask yourself these questions: Is your life exactly what you thought it was going to be? Did your career go exactly according to plan? Did your marriage go exactly according to plan? Are you making the exact amount of money you thought you’d make? Are you living in the exact type of home you thought you’d buy?

Every time we take on a new task, we take on expectations. I’ve heard guys say things like “I’m going to learn to meet women, and then meet ten women every day.” Anytime you have expectations, though, you are going to be let down. Having expectations means you are not living in the present and in the moment.

The only way to live is in the present . . . every minute and every second of every day. If you’re living in the present, life is going to come to you. When you have expectations, you are not living in the present.

The less you expect from life, the more you will receive in life. The only way to live is in the present.

If you get a new job, just go in there and kick ass every second of every day. If you want to meet women, go out there and enjoy every moment of every day.

When you have expectations, what happens is that you are putting pressure on yourself. You will not be able to concentrate on what’s happening in the moment because you are going to be comparing the actual moment with how you expected the moment to be. The problem is that expectations are almost always far greater (or at the very least different) than what’s really happening.

I know so many guys who allow their expectations to distort their perception of their day. They’ll think, “Wow, I only talked to three women today and I wanted to talk to ten.” So they are looking at their day as a failure instead of embracing what a great day it was. They look at their day as a failure because it didn’t match their expectations.

Not only can expectations negatively affect and distort how you view what’s happening around you, but they can also affect how people interact with you. When you have expectations (and thus are not present), people around you will see that you’re not present and will respond to you in a much different way than if you were completely present and in the moment when you were around them.

When you are not present, you are manifesting your own results. You will project a closed energy and not be attracting people to you like you otherwise would. You will end up missing the true energy of life.

Think about how you have seen this happen in your own life. How many times have you gotten really excited about a certain party? You have all these expectations about what the party will be like, who will be there, and what kind of experience the party will be for you.

More often than not, you don’t really have a great time at these events because of all the expectations you had. Think if you had just gone to that same party with no expectations and planned to just enjoy yourself. Think how many of those nights might have turned out differently.

How about on dates? Do you think that expectations might have played a role in the outcome of some of your dates? Think how many times you went out on your dates with high expectations, only to realize that you don’t even really like the person.

So take a look at your life and take a look at your expectations, and tell me if they’ve ever matched. The amazing thing about life is all the great little surprises that happen when you’re present in the moment.

Have a wonderful Tuesday!

So you grab your ham sandwich and run out of there as quickly as you possibly can, saying to yourself “I will NEVER do that again. This doesn’t work. The next time I go back there I am just not going to smile anymore.” Is this the best way to deal with rejection? How do you personally deal with rejection? More importantly, are you someone who believes that if you become “good” at dating that you will no longer get rejected?

The truth is that being able to deal with rejection is the key to being successful at going out and meeting people. It’s also not the ultra-significant event so many make it out to be. So here are 5 essential tips on how to handle rejection which you need to embrace if you are going to have a full and successful dating life:

1. Change Your Expectations. One of the first and most important things you need to understand is that no matter what you do, not everybody is going to respond positively to you. Not everyone you smile at will smile back at you. Not everyone you say hello to is going to say hello back to you. Not everyone you make any sort of gesture to is going to respond to you positively (and in some cases won’t respond to you at all). This happens, and it will always happen at one time or another. You need to stop expecting a positive response 100% of the time. What you have to realize is that just because somebody did not smile back at you, does not mean that you’re not an attractive person or that you made a mistake by smiling at people. The only thing it means is that it did not work with that ONE person.

2. Life Is All About Rejection. Think about everything that you do in life. Everything in life has rejection involved in it. If you’re a sales person who makes ten sales calls, you may only get one or two of those people to say yes. In baseball, a player whose batting average is around 300 will likely end up in the Hall of Fame. In football, if a quarterback can complete 55% of his passes then he is doing pretty well. You get the idea. If you go to a store to buy a pair of jeans, you may have to try on five pairs before you find the perfect pair. Everything in life is about percentages. In any area of your life other than your dating life, you wouldn’t just quit simply because you experienced some rejection. Think if quit looking for work after your very first interview didn’t result you getting hired. That would, of course, be ridiculous. So remember that you also need to keep going in your dating life when you’re rejected, because you want to keep increasing your odds of success in that area of your life.

3. Focus On Increasing Your Odds: When you feel like you are getting more than your fair share of rejections, instead of focusing on those rejections you need to focus on increasing your odds of success. The fact is that by playing the percentages as I mentioned above, that you WILL be successful. The reason is that every time you take action – every time you smile, say hello or walk over and initiate a conversation – you get better at it. If you’re going to go out there and only talk to one person a day, and that’s it, then your chances of success are not going to be great. If you are this person, you need to increase your odds every single day and in everything you’re doing. You need to understand that if you approach someone and get rejected, it’s not a reflection on you. It doesn’t mean you did it wrong or shouldn’t have done it at all. It in fact could mean a million different things. Maybe the person was having a bad day. Maybe they have just lost every cent they have in the stock market. You’ll never know . . . and it doesn’t matter.

4. Keep Things In Perspective: I hear some version of this from clients of mine all the time: “David, what if I approach somebody, get rejected, and someone sees me? I’ll never be able to go in that store again (or that gym, that donut store, that Starbucks or wherever) and I’ll have to drive to the next town to do all my shopping!” You need to get a little perspective here. Let me tell you something – you’re not front page news! When you’re rejected, you need to just get over it. I promise that if you’re rejected by the deli counter at your grocery store, that the next day you will not see on Yahoo’s homepage or the front page of your local paper this headline “John Smith of Memphis, Tennessee was seen yesterday getting rejected at the deli counter of the local Whole Foods market … details on pg. 6 …” No one is talking about you. People are concerned about themselves and what is going on in their own lives, just as you are focused on what’s going on in yours. So the fact that you get rejected in front of other people at the market, at the gym, or anywhere else is not a big deal to anyone else but you. You need to keep this in it’s proper perspective: No one is going to be talking or thinking about you getting rejected except you.

5. Don’t Overreact: The other thing I most commonly hear from clients who have been rejected is some version of this: “I’m NEVER going to talk to that person ever again now that I was rejected by them.” This reaction is not only a total overreaction, but it is also absolutely the wrong thing to do. So you tried to talk (or smile or look) at someone, and they didn’t respond. As I mentioned above, there are a million possible reasons why that person did not respond to you. Maybe that person was simply having a bad day. Think about how many times you have been having a bad day and someone smiles at you, but you are just not in the mood to interact with others. So you have to realize that just like you have days when you just aren’t in the mood to talk to anyone, so might that person who didn’t respond to your hello at the deli counter. It doesn’t necessarily mean that person wouldn’t want to talk to you another time. If I smile at a woman and she doesn’t respond, I don’t play hide-and-go-seek the next time I see her. What I do is be equally friendly to her the next time I see her, because you never know what will happen that second time. You never know how someone will respond the second time. You never know what’s in their head or what they’re feeling. It’s a different day. Put the last time behind you.

These are some ways to help you get over rejection. You have to realize that in order to get good at interacting with the opposite sex, you are going to get rejected. In fact, you WANT to get rejected every single day, because if you’re not then it means that you’re not trying.

So ask yourselves this: Did you get rejected today, and how can you go out tomorrow and make it an even better day than today? Learn to not only handle, but indeed to embrace, rejection and you, too, will meet great new people and have an amazing social life.

A lot of times when a woman meets a new man and she feels like everything just “clicks,” she will immediately start to have all sorts of expectations about him. These are not things she expects him to do, however, but rather things she starts to expect that he is (or might be).

She starts to think to herself “This guy could be ‘the one.’ This can be the guy who gets rid of this annoying single binge I’ve been on for so long. This guy is different from all the rest.” She starts building all these expectations about a guy she’s just met.

Then she goes out on another date with that guy which also goes really well and, all of a sudden, she builds the expectations even more. She starts dreaming a little bit and thinking about how that guy might be her soulmate. She may start to think about how this guy could be someone with whom she can spend the rest of her life (and possibly have children).

By the next date, if things are still going really well, she will build the expectations further and already be picking out her wedding dress, thinking about their first vacation together or thinking about what kind of house they are going to eventually buy together. Who knows where the fantasy side of her mind may be going.

What happens every single time you build up expectations on a date or go into expectations mode, is that you become less present to what he really is (and is not) all about as a man. You stop noticing some of the little things, especially some of the little things about the guy that may not be right for you.

You stop noticing some of the behavior patterns that he may be showing you and, because you are lingering in expectation mode, you may go six months into a relationship that will ultimately self-destruct. Because you blinded yourself to what kind of guy this was due to your expectations, you will spend that six months thinking you are having an amazing relationship instead of seeing things through non-expectation colored glasses.

What happens here is you miss every single verbal and visual clue that is right in front of you which told you that this guy was not right for you. He was not right in so many ways, but you didn’t see that because of the fantasy expectations you put on the relationship.

I actually recently dated someone for six months who had much higher expectations of the relationship than I did. She had a whole different version of the relationship in her mind, even though my behavior was very consistent for the entirety of the relationship. She had all these high expectations that we were “meant to be together forever and ever” when, in reality, my expectations were just about being present in the moment and seeing where things took us.

You have to realize when you’re doing this that you have to dial back the whole expectations mode. You need to start paying attention to little things and start evaluating relationships on what is happening in the now.

Don’t think about the future so early in a relationship, and don’t think about the expectations you have for a particular guy (or a particular relationship). Instead, keep yourself present in the moment and think about what is going in a relationship right now.

It’s not that I want you to not be optimistic about a relationship’s possibilities, I just want to make sure that you don’t ignore its warning signs. Take a look at the guy and the relationship and evaluate them both on what is really there, because a lot of times when you think you’ve had the “perfect relationship” that has crashed and burned, the warning signs were there the whole time but you just chose to ignore them.