Expectations

Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the dogs admin podcast. I am glad you're here. This is the show where you learn to let your dog lead. Lead you back to love.

What the heck's going on out there? Guys? I am so glad you are back. What do you think of the last episode? were funny, goofy, dorky. Happy to hear from you about it. It's just a life experience. Maybe it was something that you didn't mind maybe was something completely unexpected. Which is what I want to talk about today. Expectations. Holy Hell, holy fucking hell, these little devices, seeds that are planted sometimes by us, but usually by others expectations. These have so much pull and power in our lives. Let's get into this a little bit. When you got up this morning, what did you expect would happen? Let's say you had to go to work? What did you expect? That you expect that your commute would be as it always has been? Did you expect that your partner would behave as they always have that your dog would do exactly what they've always done? Let's say one of these things did not go your way did not go as expected. How did you feel? How did you respond? Right? So where do all these expectations come from? Do they come from your parents, teachers, preachers, coaches, mentors, friends? Oh, yeah. All these and more, all these a lot more social media, the news, bosses, co workers, all these things, all these people telling us their version of how they believe we need to be. And we take that on, right? We we want to please others, we want to feel better about ourselves and think that by pleasing others, we will get there. It doesn't end up working that way. I'm not saying be a total weenie. But if you can't do the things and be the person that you are, do the things that make you happy first, then you don't really have a lot to offer someone else. What do I mean by that? If you don't know who you are, then you'll never, ever be able to come from a place where you can really help others. And you can't really please others. That's their job. Do you get that? Right?

We look for love from a partner or dog. And we get these temporary little hits. But we don't have this constant sense of I am okay, I am enough. I am awesome as I am that has to come from within that has to come from our doing the work. So how do you do that? Well, you start to look at all these expectations. What do you expect out of yourself? A lot of us are really good at beating ourselves up when we don't get a desired outcome from something. How do we change that? Oh, you got to change your expectations. You have to understand what your expectations are about. Right? You can't just look at it on paper. Where does it come from? This gets into some pretty deep and dark places that times a lot of my own crap came from when I was really small. It may be even before but I thought I had to behave a certain way in the house. At home, to receive love. I had to be a certain person I had to do certain things or not do certain things. And that that shaped a lot of the way I responded to the world or reacted to the world is more appropriate. And it took a long long time for me to realize that I wasn't being me. I was being all these other people for all these other people.

My dog showed me different my first dogs Age, he showed me differently showed me that I didn't have to be anybody else, just to be accepted and loved by Him. My next dog, Winston, same thing, then miles, same thing. Are you getting catching on to the theme here? And then Darby when that damn dog cracked it open for me. But same thing. And I think there's such a simple and deep message here. Right? Maybe not easy to grasp, but it's simple is that we can just be us, we can just be who we are not somebody else's version of who we are, but our version and be okay and be enough and, and fuck be happy and find joy and peace. And I think we're going to find it there. More than or we're going to find it somewhere else. anywhere else. Not some destination, not some fancy vacation or, or big house or fast car, or something that impresses other people. At the end of the day, the only person I really need to impress is me. Was I a good guy that day? Did I do something nice for somebody else? Was I more the person that my dog knows me to be? This is easy to think about? Not easy to execute. So how do I do this differently? How do I become that person that my dog believes me to be? Or knows that I am? Right? I gotta look at the expectations. I have to understand where the behaviors that I portray come from? What are those based on? Who am I basing myself on? I did all this stuff for for decades, to try and get my dad's attention and love and, and want him to think that I was a good guy and wanted him to be proud of me. It didn't matter. It didn't matter what I did what I said, how I acted. I never got what I wanted from him. So what was my expectation around all that? Right? Is it multi fold? Absolutely. Did I think I needed to do certain things to get something from him. Absolutely. Did it work? Nope. Never worked. Similarly, with my mom, I, I had these notions of how and who I needed to be. And it wasn't until recently, right much later in life, we ended up living together in Fort Collins, that I truly got to see who she was. And in my journey of finding myself, found out who I am, regardless of what her expectations were of who I needed to be as a son. Fantastic. Absolutely amazing. But anytime I need a reminder, I just look at my dog, I spend time with her. I've got this newer dog in my home.

I was smart, and energetic and stubborn as hell. No accident there. No accident at all. But I got this super smart stubborn dog to help me learn more about myself. So yeah, constantly daily learning lessons from her, and learning more patients for myself and her as well. And just coming from this other place. Tiny little tiny little changes one at a time. One at a time. Think of all the things over your life that have been piled on top of each other on the expectations that hundreds and 1000s of people told you how to be. I mean, it's kind of like, seriously, right? Why did we take all that on. So now it's time to start to remove those one at a time.