Those who are fans of the 70s British Monty Python comedy troupe will recognize the reference to the sudden, unexpected appearance of the Spanish Inquisition as mentioned in the title, although I have mangled the concept a tad to make a point.

Every day, we wake up and dust off our expectations, charge the batteries on them and set off to live our life, bringing them in tow behind us. We encounter a situation and expect it to match what we have encountered before. This can be anything from where the sun will rise to the effects of gravity to what happens when we push a door closed.

All is well with these sorts of expectations as they generally refer to situations which will evolve in essentially the same way each time. Scientists who study how our minds work consider this to be a form of mental shorthand, which saves us time and mental energy. This is related to how we can quickly figure out that this new object we see is a chair, because it matches the general profile and features of so many previous chairs that we have seen.

Problems can occur when we apply our expectations to new people and new situations, or when we do not allow for evolution in the actions and reactions of people we think we know.  And, to add just another bit of complexity to this discussion, our expectations can be conscious or not.

The man with the black hat

An example of a non-conscious expectation is when we expect someone who looks somewhat like someone we have encountered in the past to behave in the same manner. Therapists see this sort of thing all the time, as clients appear with issues which derive from associations with traumatic incidents from childhood. If you were 12 months old and a man wearing a black hat scared you badly, it is entirely possible, even as an adult 30 years later, that each time you see someone wearing a black hat, your internal survival system will trigger a response, typically some level of fear or anxiety. Your system has stored the memory of  “black hat = danger” and until you use something like AER to release that stored memory, it will remain with you. (I have witnessed people release stored feelings/traumatic memories that were more than 60 years old, so it is never too late to start releasing.)

Experiments have shown that our internal survival system is aware of things that we are not consciously able to notice. Just one example of this is when people who had a fear of spiders were shown a film with some embedded/subliminal  images of spiders – although they could not explain why they started to feel nervous, they certainly were noticing their physical and emotional response to the film. The researchers monitored these people for their heart rates and skin galvanic response, and it was easy to see the correlation between the timing of the  images and their levels of fear response. These sorts of experiments clearly show that any attempt to control ourselves by relying purely on mental processes are doomed to fail, as our state of being is not determined solely by our thoughts, and in times of distress, our thoughts follow our feelings, not the other way around. But, I digress.

Although there are many things for which we have non-conscious expectations and it is harder to deal with these as they fly under our radar screens, so to speak, we can be aware of our conscious expectations.

What value would we derive from noticing our expectations? Possibly the greatest value would be that of self-awareness and conscious decisions about how we approach the world. Having expectations which are more in alignment with what is actually around us makes for a much easier life as we are not resisting the world and hopefully not being constantly disappointed.

According to neuroscience, for the first part of our life (up until around age 20 or so) our brains are in intense learn and develop mode. Environmental cues provide much wanted clues to the world and how to interact with it, and our neural circuits wire themselves in response.We form an interpretation of the world and our internal map to navigate it.

The rest of our lives is often spent trying to make the outside world match up with our internal map. This gets more and more stressful as the years pass, as the world is in constant evolution (some might say devolution).  The internal map we carefully constructed about how the world works was never really all that accurate anyway, as it was so influenced by our perceptions. But it was the best map we had, and we made do with it as best we could. If the world was static, we could probably get away with keeping our original internal map without many problems. Ah, if only it was so easy.

Given that we live in an ever-changing world and that our expectations are guided by our map, it makes sense to update this map of ours regularly. The first step is to become aware of the existence of this map and its associated expectations. Notice what you are expecting to happen in the benign situations you encounter every day.  As you are reading this article, for example, you almost certainly have a few expectations:

– you expect the sentences to make some measure of sense
– you expect that the author will eventually stop writing
– you expect that when you look up from this text, the world around you will still be in basically the same state as when you turned your focus here.

If you wanted, you could take a moment and notice what expectations you have right now. You could even take as long as you like, and I promise that I’ll hardly notice and will be right here when you return. 🙂

You could also take a fresh look at what you expect from those who interact with you and how you react when you do not get what you expected. You might even ask yourself if you had clearly communicated this expectation and had a clear agreement with the other party on this. It is possible to change our expectations to be more in line with the world and what we can realistically count on happening, and this starts by noticing.

Noticing your expectations, without judging them, is a form of self-awareness that can lead to opportunities to discover hidden treasures.

Instead of expecting the world to be a certain way, take a closer look and notice it. Who knows what you might find, hidden in plain sight.

Copyright 2009 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved