“Expectations” come from many different places: yourself, your family, peers, school, teammates, work and even society can expect you to behave, dress, date and work in certain ways.
“Expectations” are when you feel pressure to achieve certain goals, behave in a particular manner or even look a certain way. They can challenge or motivate you to do your best; however, unrealistic expectations could have a negative impact on your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
For every feeling and situation, you can accept that there is an alternative – you can choose to interpret the situation a different way, soothe yourself, and then feel something different. No one else causes our feelings. Only we can choose and change them.
Find the cause of the feeling you’re having and notice the effect, e.g. you didn’t give yourself enough time for homework, so now you feel stressed. Anytime you feel something uncomfortable that you’d rather avoid, put a magnifying glass on it. Once you know what you feel, you can now challenge both the cause and the effect.
It’s not always easy to understand a feeling when it happens, especially if you think you shouldn’t feel it – but forget about ‘should’. Instead, try to pinpoint exactly what you feel – scared, frustrated, ashamed, angry – and then pinpoint what might be the cause.
Low emotional intelligence: you might be oversensitive to other people’s feelings in response to you, obsess about problems until you find a concrete solution, frequently feel a flood of emotions that you can’t attribute to a specific life event: you may feel bad far more often than you feel good.
If you have high emotional intelligence, you likely regulate your emotions well; handle uncertainties and difficulties without excessive panic, stress, and fear; and avoid overreacting to situations before knowing the full details.
Emotional intelligence: you understand what’s going on in your head and heart; you don’t make hasty decisions on impulse; you can motivate yourself to delay gratification; you listen to, understand, and relate to other people well; you’re able to focus on other people.
To deal with emotional pain, you can develop emotional intelligence, learn to sit with negative feelings, and create situations for positive feelings.
Be aware that if you don’t deal with your feelings from events large and small now, they might end up later dealing with you.