The power of expectations

For this summer my husband and I decided to really work on our relationship, we are generally fine and we live a good life together, but, like every couple, we also have corners that could be a little bit soften up. As everybody we have to deal with life and life is not always this beautiful fairy tail, is it? However in our home, weather we are in a couple or single or a multitude of people, we can always improve the style we handle things and the way we treat each other, or ourselves. So we picked a couple of books to read/put to practice, mine is ‘The happiness project’ by Gretchen Rubin, and the other is ‘How your unconscious mind rules your behaviour’ by Leonard Mlodinow. Both books are really nice and there are many suggestions we can actually put to practice. 
For this particular article though there was something about the second book that really caught my attention, although the subject was familiar and known: we can influence each other’s life by projecting our expectations, we all know and experience it, but this research helped me to find solutions to really put this behaviour to serve me and my life. 
“…weather or not we wish to, we communicate our expectations to others, and they often respond by fulfilling those expectations…. and they have expectations of you.” Leonard Mlodinow 
The author explains how teacher expectations, for example, changed the IQ test of their students, the students took all the IQ test at one given moment and the results were average. But the teachers had in mind that some students were more intelligent than others. Those who were believed to be more clever (although they were average at the beginning) in a second test scored much better than the others, simply because they were thought to be ‘cleverer’. 

We all do expect certain outcomes from certain people. As matter of fact in those periods in which I believe my husband is great, he really surprise me in many ways; on the contrary when I doubt that he can’t simply do anything right, he fails even to load the dishwasher… I know it and he knows it, so, why shall we carry on doubting about one another and make our lives less than great? Good question!
Here are some practical tools I decided to use in my life in order to change this non sense:

1. What are you grateful for: Every night before sleeping I ask this question to my husband or myself (when I am on a trip), and the goal is to find at least 3 things/people to be grateful for.
2. What was my best quality: that’s the second question, I ask him what made him proud of myself (again you can do it with yourself if your partner is not there).

NB this routine goes together with the Self Care, I found it really nice to feel in the body the gratitude and the proudness. 
In a few days this routine proved to be really efficient and to give immediate results in therms of welcoming life with gratitude and to do your best in what you are busy with. Look at yourself as if you were a toddler learning how to walk: would you tell yourself “you are never going to walk, just give up” or you would think “I am really proud of you, little one, I am looking forward to see you running”!?!?!  
You will run, one day, but before that you might fall many times, just keep on going, I HAVE FAITH IN YOU!
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Love
Gloria