Brett: We were traveling back from Mexico and we had been driving for four hours, why we decided to drive to Mexico, I’m not sure. But we were still a couple hours from home and we found a sweet deal on a hotel room in Vegas. It was going to be right along the highway, it was a too good to be true price. We knew that it didn’t have any type of complimentary breakfast or anything, but it was pretty ideal. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, you and I had to sleep on the floor.
Welcome to the Discover your Wilderness podcast
Defining Expectations
Alicia: Alright, so today we’re going to dive into two ideas: expectations and assumptions. So let’s start out defining these two ideas. Brett, how would you define expectations?
Brett: I see expectations as your vision for how you expect (is that breaking the rules using the word in the definition?) but how you envision something resulting, what you expect it or what you anticipate it to look like in the end.
Alicia: So all of your ideas, identified or subconscious that go into how you think something will play out.
Brett: I’m tempted to say, if they’re unidentified, than they’re assumptions. We’re talking expectations and assumptions and I feel like that falls in the assumption realm, if you haven’t identified it.
Alicia: So you are always very aware of your expectations?
Brett: I think so. I have expectations of when I’m going to wake up, or what kind of work I’m going to get done. But I have assumptions of things that I just expect to happen, until they don’t.
Alicia: Expectations are identified and known and assumptions are not.
The Dangers of Assumptions
Brett: Yeah. I guess something you don’t realize about expectations is how long it takes to form them. And then oftentimes they’re subliminal. Unless you take the time to lay out everything you were thinking that you didn’t even realize you were thinking, you don’t realize something is an assumption until you realize it’s wrong. I was working on a project at work and I was super late on it. My boss came to me and said, “Why isn’t this done yet?” I said, “Well, I assumed that someone who was going to be giving me their part of the project was going to be done in time for me to start it with enough time for me to do everything I needed to get done. He turned to me and said, “Well, why didn’t you ask?” And I said, “Because it was an assumption.” Like that’s the definition of an assumption is that I didn’t think that I needed to ask, because I assumed that it was going to get done. And I didn’t realize it was an assumption until I was in the process of defending my house assumption.
Alicia: And I think that is one of the greatest dangers of assumptions is that defending part. I love that you sent that because it’s so often in a negative emotional state or a painful emotion state, such as anger or sadness, where we suddenly reach that hindsight and realize that we’ve made an assumption. So we’re trying to balance this assumption, which is essentially a blind spot that we’d had, and awareness gap that we’d had, and we’re trying to balance that with the fact that we’re also feeling emotional, we’re feeling defensive, were painfully aware of our insecurities, our weaknesses, whatever that may be and so they become very volatile at that point. Which is interesting because the very concept of checking an assumption, just doesn’t make sense. It’s a gross misunderstanding of what an assumption is. You never make an assumption thinking, “Maybe this is wrong.” Because you’re working from a box. I actually even heard someone earlier today say, “You can’t go through life doubting everything that you’re told. We don’t have the mental bandwidth and capability to critically think about every fact that’s presented to us. So we often go with the default right out of the box. We have frameworks that we’re using. And it’s not until something is vastly different than what we expected, and it requires us to use our conscious thought to say, “Wait. that was an unfounded assumption that I’m operating off of.” So I guess the real question here is: how do you stop and ask yourself or how do you evaluate “what assumptions am I making here that I need to test?”
Overcoming Blind Spots
Brett: Right. And I like that use of “blind spot” because, when you’re driving car you have blind spots. That you can check all your mirrors and you’re still not going to see, it unless you physically turn your head and look where your blind spot is. But this idea of, when we were talking earlier you said, “with the negative emotion”, I misunderstood what you were saying as we only make assumptions when we’re in a negative space. But what I heard you just say now was “oftentimes, you don’t need to check those assumptions, because we make them so often, that when we find out that we incorrectly made those assumptions, then it becomes painful.” So this gets easier, checking the blind spots, turning your head and looking in the blind spot of your car, and checking your assumptions can be made easier with experience. So our mom comes to visit we love our mom, and I try to make it a point to explicitly ask her, “Mom, what kind of restaurants do you want to go to? What activities do you anticipate visiting while you’re here? How much time do you think that we’re going to be spending with you?” Because I only have so many days of PTO. Last week we talked about…
Alicia: That you keep losing.
Brett: I’m losing five days. I only have so much PTO that I’m taking. So I try to check her assumptions. Because she’ll often say, “I thought we were going to eat at this restaurant.” And it had never been verbalized to us. But she had this idea of what it was going to be. And maybe it’s easier for me to recognize that in her, than it is in myself. “Oh yeah sure, when my mom comes I’ll take a day and go do something with her. And I might still have work. And I still have my job and she’s got to, I assume she has to understand that that’s the situation we’re in. But by doing this activity, by saying, “What are the things you want to do? What does your calendar look like?” it helps me understand the assumptions that require her to verbalize her assumptions and expectations. So that we don’t run into issues of unmet expectations on her side, and assumptions I’m making an assumption she’s making conflicting with each other. So my question for you Alicia how do we do that for ourselves I don’t know how necessarily to see that in myself, but I know how to check it in mom. How do how do you suggest we check our own assumptions?
Alicia: Well, it’s interesting because something you just said really resonated with me as you said it, because yes, it’s obviously going to be easier to see it in someone else – because you have a different perspective. And so when they give you a piece of information, you’re going to be very aware of round-peg square-hole issue that these are not together, because you know, “oh you just said on Friday we’re going to do this. I already had plans for that.” And so you are seeing assumptions that she’s not even aware of to look for because to her at all flows easily. It’s smooth, it makes sense, there are no other inputs. So now just by having additional input, now you can check those assumptions or start seeing where the inputs don’t line up. So experience has taught you, but it’s also having additional sources. It’s a having additional information that enables you to use your experience to know that you need to be asking some questions and you need to be gathering that input.
Keep Reminding Yourself of the Expectations That You’ve Set
Brett: That actually reminds me of our trip to Europe from we backpacked in Italy and Germany. I ask these questions of my mom when she comes to visit, but I can ask the same questions of myself because when we went to Europe we made it a point to say “we only have so much time,” and verbalize put into words with others – because I think going off on our own – if we were to go on a trip by ourselves, which is for an extrovert like me not quite as exciting, you your assumptions don’t really bump up into anyone else. But by verbalizing “oh hey, here are things that I want to do. Do you have any issue with that?” And kind of doing the questioning that I do to my mom to myself or my travel party, then it opens up, it allows for an opportunity to work through and discuss the things that might have conflict between two different people’s expectations.
Alicia: And I think it even allows you to identify inputs that you even on your own have. That you even aren’t aware of certain assumptions that you’re making. That are important to be aware of to get the most out of an experience and to be satisfied from that experience.
Brett: So going back to the Europe example, when we were planning for that, we kind of let our hopes get ahead of reality and we said, “Well, since we’re flying all the way to Europe, we might as well also go to Budapest. We might as well also go – London can probably be on my way.” And it spiraled out of control.
Alicia: Well, and even when we were there, you remember we kept getting distracted.
Brett: Yeah, we were on a train and we were passing Pisa in Italy, and I said, “hey, Let’s just pop off and go see the Leaning Tower and jump back on.” And you had to check me – “That is not in our plans.” And so it was good. I verbalized what I wanted to do, and you verbalized, “Hey check your assumptions. Check your expectations. Because that’s not in the shared expectations that we had as a group.”
Flexible Plans
Alicia: And I think it’s important to qualify that yes, you can be flexible. You can see all the things and do all the activities, if your resetting other aspects of your expectations. Yes, we could have hit Pisa, but there’s a certain trade-off that has to come when you’re trying to mark everything off. That you’re not going to quality time that you wanted. So for us, we made a very intentional choice that we wanted to get to know each city fairly well and so we wanted to be able to spend a day or two or three in each of these cities. Which is what we were able to do, and I feel like we were able to get to know each area pretty well. It did take twenty-four hours to figure out Venice, but we had quality time in those areas. So you can see Pisa. You can jump off the train and run to the tower, if you’re aware of what your expectations are and if it fits with those expectations.
Brett: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we figured out Venice. I still remember several times where we would walk down the road, and then I all of a sudden that road was a canal.
Alicia: Which is the magic of Venice. But yes, it was good that we wanted to wander, because that is exactly what we did. That was part of our priorities. But it comes down to the – I call it a business principal but it’s actually a principle of life. You have three priorities that are always competing with each other: you can get two of the three. So, in the example you can have speed, you can have quality, or you can have frugality. If you wanted to spend as much money as possible you could have high quality, but not have the time. So you get you get two of the three. You can never have all three. You can’t save money and save time and get high quality. But going into it knowing which two you’re going to pick helps. Such as in our example where we said, “We don’t have the time, so we’re going to make the quality in the places we do go higher.
Alicia: So you can have a great experience. But it requires a certain level of awareness of your own expectations and the ability to questions that will check your assumptions.
Sleeping on the Ground
Brett: So we slept on the ground in the hotel. Do you want to go into why? What happened there?
Alicia: Well, and it’s interesting because as you check off the items that we knew it had going into it, we wanted it to have free parking. We wanted a place to sleep for the night. We wanted it proximate to our route. And it was everything we had explicitly said that we wanted. What it didn’t have were beds for all of us, spare blankets for all of us, or…
Brett: Spare pillows…
Alicia: Spare pillows. Or an A.C. with a low setting. So we laid on the ground, you and I, and slept, and it was a rock solid floor. I don’t remember…
Brett: Yeah, what hotels have hard floor, hard vinyl floor. The one hotel in Vegas that doesn’t have carpet.
Alicia: And the A.C. was blasting all night long and we had one little blanket that we shared between the two of us, because we didn’t stop and say, “We want x, y, and z. But we also need it to have this. Or we’re NOT okay, here are our deal breakers.” And maybe if we’d been more conscious of our dealbreakers, like, “No, we all need adequate bedding. Let’s just go find another place to stay tonight.”
Brett: Yeah, and the trade off from that was wanting to spend. If we had spent more money and gotten two rooms, gotten a more expensive hotel room, we probably would have had beds for four people. But where we didn’t, we ended up on the ground.
Alicia: With a great story to tell. I’m still a little cold from that night, by the way.
So this was our initial dive into assumptions and expectations. Next week we wants to touch more on what that can mean, and what happens when your expectations are not addressed in a proactive way. So join us next week.
Brett: Share with your friends if you found this helpful. We’ll continue to podcast about how you can make your future travels and hopefully life less assuming-y. Is that a word?
Alicia: That’s totally a word.
Brett: It is now.
Up Next:
Don’t assume you have heard all our episodes, go listen to episode 3 which goes deeper into expectations.