Why you are frustrated (and how to fix it)

(Watch the podcast version of this article on YouTube here.)

I want to talk to you today about happiness and about why people are happy and why they're unhappy. I'll tell you what it relates to: it relates directly to expectations — because, you see, all frustration comes from unmet expectations.

There's no such thing as someone who's frustrated that didn't have a specific expectation.

It's like picking up a stick. I'm gonna pick up this stick here, and this stick has, at one end of it has frustration, on the other end it has expectations. I can't just pick up one end of the stick, I pick up both ends of the stick at the same time. So all of our frustrations, we go back.

Now sometimes, I'm gonna tell you, in a counseling environment, I might ask somebody, can you tell me what your expectations are?

And oftentimes people have a difficult time identifying their expectations. But when I say, tell me what your frustrations are, all of a sudden, boom, they can identify frustrations. Now once they identify their frustration, then we go to the other end and say, oh, that's because you have this specific expectation. So expectations and frustrations are tied together, and that's the first point I want to make here, all right?

But I'd like you to think about our life and about happiness over which we have control and over those things over which we don't have control.

I'll give you an example. I want to redefine a word that you won't find in your dictionary. And that word that we're gonna talk about is goal. What is a goal? Well, in the dictionary it might say it's an objective, it might say a number of other things. But I want to use the word goal to mean something over which I have control. That a goal is something that I can control, all right? But...

A wish, now that's something that depends upon somebody else. They've got to act in a certain way in order for me to have my expectation met.

Well, how much of my life and happiness depends upon the expectations that I have that are unrealistic, that require other people to perform in certain ways before I'm gonna be happy? I'm turning my power for happiness over to others.

I want to give you an example of an expectation that I've dealt with recently. And that's an expectation: of my wife not putting the chore girl in the sink.

When the chore girl is in the sink, when the water comes down, it goes rushing down into the disposal. Now it doesn't do it every time, but since we've divided up our work differently and we're retired, why I'm able to do some of the housework, and that's the housework that I've been doing, is doing the dishes.

The problem is my hands are too big to fit in the disposal to retrieve the chore girl.

So I had the expectation, and I said to my wife, "It'd mean a lot to me if you would put that chore girl up on the edge and not let it go down into the sink."

But because she's human, it goes down in the sink quite a few times.

And of course I am frustrated because my expectation was that she would hearken to my wonderful counsel and we would avoid that frustration.

But here's the reality. The reality is I was getting unhappy and upset because my expectation wasn't met.

So what I decided to do was let go of that expectation.

Some things really matter in life, and some things don't matter.

And does really having the chore girl up on the sink, does that really, really matter? Because the worst case scenario is it goes down there into the disposal, and then somebody's gotta put their hand down and get it and pull it back out.

Well, rather than have the frustration of the chore girl being in the sink and anticipating it going down, I asked my wife that if it does go down in the sink, would you mind pulling it out? Because if that's the way, rather than me being frustrated about you not putting the chore girl up on the edge of the sink.

Now if that made any sense to you, what I'm saying is that there are some expectations that matter and some that don't matter.

But if my life depended upon my wife always putting that chore girl up on the sink and she doesn't do it, then I'm going to be constantly frustrated. Why should I do that?

And why should you do that?

And you might want to take a look at your life for a minute and ask yourself how much of your life do you have control over versus the part that you don't have control over.

And I want to give you one more example, a concrete example, and that is losing weight.

Now, I'm in the process of trying to lose weight right now and I feel pretty good about what I've done. I've lost about six pounds. I hope to lose another six or so. But that's a goal because I have control over that.

But if I want my wife or a friend or somebody else to lose weight, that's a wish.

That's going to require that they perform, they act in a certain way in order for me to have my expectation met. Maybe I need to let go of the expectations that require other people to do so much before I can be happy.

Because you see, if you tie your happiness to everybody else performing, let's say you had this set of expectations: "I'll be happy when everybody that I love does everything I want them to do the way I want it done."

Well, I say welcome to a world of unhappiness because you set yourself up now for failure actually and you set them up for failure because you have all these expectations that they've got to perform in these certain ways.

Now, I think we can have expectations, but there are a lot of expectations that are unreasonable and unrealistic.

What I'm asking you to do today is to think about your life in terms of how many expectations you have that are maybe expectations you could let go of.

Think about that today and have a good day.