ISSUE No. 20
Recently, my mother, my wife, and the other ladies in our house were watching one of those movies.
You know the kind. I’m not going to name it because I don’t need that trouble.
I sat down for maybe five minutes and started predicting what was going to happen next. At one point, a character started talking and I said what I thought his next line would be.
A few seconds later, he basically said it.
Everybody looked at me.
“Have you seen this before?”
Nope.
It was just that predictable.
There’s something fun about doing that with a movie. You recognize the pattern, and pretty soon you know where the story is headed.
I’ve been thinking about how often we do something similar with eachother.
We expect others to respond a certain way. We think they should know what we need, what we meant, or what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes the other person doesn’t even know there’s a script.
They just know somehow they got their line wrong.
Psychologists Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill have studied this through their work on perfectionism. One form they study is socially prescribed perfectionism, the pressure we feel from what we believe other people expect from us. Their research has found that this kind of pressure has increased considerably among young people over time.
That makes me wonder how many people are walking around trying to live up to a script they’re not even sure they’ve read correctly.
It happens everywhere.
In marriage, You should know I need help.
With a friend, They should have called.
With our kids, They should know better.
And at work, one of the easiest ones is:
They should know this.
I’ve learned to be careful with that sentence.
How should they know?
Where did we teach it? When did we explain why it’s important? Is the expectation actually clear, or has it been around so long that those of us who know it have forgotten somebody once had to teach it to us too?
That doesn’t remove anyone’s responsibility. Certainly, there comes a point when we have to own what they’ve agreed to own.
But there’s another side to this that I don't want to miss.
Sometimes I’m the one who feels like I’m getting the line wrong.
I can feel the disappointment. I know something is off. Maybe I’m not sure what someone wants from me, or I feel like I’m falling short of an expectation nobody has actually explained.
That’s where I have a choice too.
I can fill in the blanks myself.
They don’t think I’m good enough.
They don’t trust me.
I’m disappointing them.
Or I can have the conversation.
“What are you expecting from me here?”
“Am I missing something?”
“Can we get clearer about what good looks like?”
That takes some courage. But so does leadership.
The person holding the expectation has a responsibility to make it clear. The person carrying the uncertainty has a responsibility to ask.
That’s where accountability starts to look less like something one person does to another and more like a partnership.
We talk about what we’re trying to accomplish and why. We get clear about what you own and what I own. We make sure we understand it the same way. Then we come back to it.
There’s cadence to that. Not constant checking or hovering. Just enough conversation that neither of us has to guess where we stand.
And this isn’t only a work thing.
Sometimes we expect someone to respond a certain way because they know us, love us, or have been around us long enough.
If I mattered to them, I wouldn’t have had to ask.
That sentence gets me.
Because now I’m not only dealing with what happened. I’m deciding what it means.
Before long, something I expected has become something I believe about you.
Expectations aren’t the problem. We need expectations. Commitments mean something. Standards mean something.
But a shared expectation and a silent script are not the same thing.
The movie the other night was easy. Those characters didn’t have much choice. Somebody else had already written their lines.
People aren’t handed a script. They can’t respond to an expectation they don’t know exists.
And when they don’t know, we both have a tendency to fill in the blanks. I decide what you should know. You decide what my disappointment must mean.
So when the script isn’t clear, maybe the answer isn’t to write the missing lines for each other.
Talk.
THIS WEEK’S FIELD TOOL
The next time you catch yourself thinking They should know this or I should know what they want from me, don’t fill in the blanks.
Ask:
What is actually expected?
Do we understand it the same way?
What conversation needs to happen next?
If you’re holding the expectation, make it clear.
If you’re feeling the expectation, ask.
Move toward clarity, together.
— Jason