Alicia: So we had been dreaming of coconut strewn beaches, and wild monkeys, and the sunset on the ocean, while we’re enjoying these beaches in Costa Rica. And in the first few days of our trip, the locals all let us know, “you can find all of that magic in Manuel Antonio.” So we reworked our entire itinerary in order to go to Manuel Antonio, and see the wild monkeys, and the sloths, and drink from coconuts.
Welcome to the Discovery your Wilderness podcast
Recap on Assumptions
Alicia: Last week we talked about assumptions and how they can be useful for us and create some efficiencies, but they can also cause problems for us if we aren’t constantly doing an assumptions evaluation and we checking our assumptions.
Brett: And we covered asking yourself the same questions that you would ask of someone else to be able to understand, recognize what those assumptions are. And I’ve found that to be the most effective way for me to identify those is to ask explicitly a question that you need to answer.
Alicia: Right. And I like how you say “most effective”. There are a lot of things that we can do, or that we can have happen to us. But that when we try to get ahead of it, it’s going to be more effective. And that’s what we really want to dive into today is how to get ahead of it, and how to use those assumption evaluations that we’re doing in order to be more intentional with our expectations – as we’re planning on, and going on trips.
We Need Realistic Expectations
Brett: Right. Now, our brother sent a medium article by Nick Wignall, I hope that’s how you say that, we’ll include a link in the show notes – and the comment that Nick made really struck true to me when I heard it because we were planning this, we were thinking through how to communicate about expectations and setting expectations. His quote was, “Lowering your expectations to a realistic level doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means you’re being honest with yourself.” And I’d like to he says in there a realistic level we’re aspirational, we’re hopeful as humankind. But not having realistic expectations – thinking that we’re going to go eat at five different restaurants in a two-day period of time, it’s unbelievable. So reining that in, recognizing what’s realistic, you’re being kind to yourself, because then you’re not dealing with regret and FOMO after the fact.
Alicia: And it’s hard because vacations are about dreaming. They’re about “how can I escape the humdrum of my normal life and go do something that will enrich my soul, that will re-energize me?” And so we want to dream big, and “I’m going to go to this new city that I’ve never been to, and see all these things that I’ve never seen,” or “I’m going to a place that I’ve been and I want to experience all the things that I know I love there.” So they lend themselves so well to getting carried away. But it’s in getting carried away that we can tend to be so disappointed with the outcome if we’re not being very intentional about what realistic expectations even looks like.
Brett: Right. Can you think of a time when you were able to effectively manage your expectations prior to to going on a trip sometime?
Alicia: So, we talked last week about our trip to Europe and just how, I think that was a turning point for us because it was the first time that we were really trying to be intentional with our expectations, and with what we knew we could accomplish. But we hadn’t refined them quite enough. Because you had a couple of things on your bucket list that you really wanted to see in Italy, and so we were going to get those things done. And one of them was seeing the David. And it magical, it was a magical experience. But getting to the David ended up being a little bit messy because I feel like we hadn’t fully identified what our expectation for the city of Florence and for getting to the David involved.
Brett: And we had each heard about Florence for our entire lives. Our family is a huge While You Were Sleeping fan: Sandra Bullock, Christmas classic. And where she’s always wanted to travel is Florence, Italy. And so our expectations were really high of what Florence was going to look like. And if you’re in Florence, you can’t not see the David. So we go, that morning – I have to include this – we had the most delicious Nutella pastry we have ever had in my entire life. I still have dreams about that pastry, it exceeded all expectations.
Alicia: But the irony of that is we didn’t have much expectation going into it. Because that was in a tiny little bakery that we found on our way to the main part of the city. And we just went, “Hey they have a bunch of breakfast-y things. Let’s grab some stuff while we go.” And you picked this Nutella thing because it’s always a good choice. So our expectations were very low and then it blew your mind.
Brett: Well, and then we went immediately from there, early in the morning to beat the crowds, to the museum in which the Davis is housed, along with every other tourist in Florence.
Alicia: We all had the same idea.
Brett: So we got there and we thought, “Oh, We’ll go in the morning, and it costs this much (we checked how much it was going to cost), and we’ll go see the David, and then go about our day.” But the line wrapped from the front door, around the corner, around the side, and it was not moving. It was moving as fast as Nutella in December. So, there are a lot of people saying, Do you want premium access? You give us so much money, we’ll take you on a tour. We’ll go inside right now.” and we were like, “Nah, I don’t really want to pay so we’ll just stand in line.” And we stood in line for what seemed like an hour and a half? Two hours?
Alicia: Yeah, I think it was close to two hours by the end.
Brett: And we finally got in, we saw the David, and it wasn’t until after the fact that we thought, “Given the amount of time and money we spent getting to Italy, two hours of standing in a line was not intentional.” We were not using the data that was being presented to us, and really actioning off of that. I’d wish afterward, I regretted not just saying, “Let’s just pay to go do the tour and get inside right now.” And still have seen it, but then had those two hours back something able to have the experience of seeing the David among all of the other sculptures and paintings and artwork in the museum. But then still had another two hours of standing in line converted into doing something else that we could have done in Florence.
Alicia: Yeah, so we in spite of our albeit novice intentions at the beginning to say, “Here is going to be our focus for the trip. We want to spend quality time in these cities. We want to get to know these cities and explore all that we can. We’re not going for quantity, we’re going for quality.” But in our not understanding some of the trade-offs in order to really accomplish quality, we still ended up missing some quantity that we could have gotten in. We didn’t explore the Duomo at all
Brett: We never went inside.
Alicia: Yeah, and I think the tower, like going up into the duomo was the cool thing about the duomo to see all of Florence. We didn’t have time for that, because by the time we finished in the museum and then hit the market, which we wanted to for souvenirs (which is a whole other story).
Brett: Oh no.
Alicia: We ended up not having time for some of the other stuff because we hadn’t accounted for some of these trade-offs that we might have to make.
Brett: We also spoke about Venice last week and how awesome of a time and experience we had there. It seems, after the fact, that those experiences were flip-flopped for us. Because we expected Florence to be this just ecstatic awesome trip. That we would love every moment of it. And that Venice we had even said, “Well, we’re going all the way to Italy, and we’re coming from Germany (we took a train trip down), we might as well hit Venice but will only do it for like a day, day and a half, and then we’ll leave. Everyone says it’s smelly. Everyone says it’s falling apart. And so we don’t really want to make it a point to spend a lot of time there.”
Alicia: Yeah, it was a bucket-list item for us. We very much made it a “we have to check this off, because we can’t look people in the eye and say, ‘Yes we went to Italy but we skipped Venice.’” That just seemed like an abomination. So we said, “We’ll go to Venice.” And then we ended up loving it. I think Venice might have been one of my favorite cities of our whole trip. But that’s because we went into it with such low expectations, that in the end, we’re like, “This was an adventure. We saw some beautiful sights in the city. We were exploring. Every time we got lost was, “Okay, let’s turn and try again.” It wasn’t ever disappointing because our expectations were so flexible.
Brett: And I think that ties back to the quote about having realistic expectations. Because we had less time in Florence than we had planned for Venice. But we wanted to see the David. We wanted to see the Duomo. We wanted to see the market. We wanted to eat at a restaurant. And it was unrealistic the number of things that we have accomplished in the amount of time that we had. Even, had we optimized, or, maybe, if we optimized the trip to the David, we could have gone in the Duomo. But there’s that trade-off of “what are the realistic expectations for this”?
Alicia: There will always be more to do than time. What is that the Parkinson law of like, you’ll fill whatever time, whatever space, whatever you have, you’re going to fill it and then some.
Brett: Yeah, that’s why you’re always running late. There’s always a project that’s overdue at work and such.
Alicia: Now realistic is an interesting idea though, because of realistic changes. Because, despite all your best efforts, you can’t know what’s going to come up. You can’t know how dramatically things might shift at any point in the trip. And so realistic has to be intentional up front, but I feel like it also has to be flexible. Do you have experience with thoughts? Or thoughts about that?
Brett: Do I have experience with that? So we also don’t only travel abroad, we also love national parks. We love visiting the nature right here in our neck of the woods. And for a lot of people, they don’t have the luxury of being able to travel abroad to other countries. An experience that comes to mind is Glacier National Park in Montana, near Canada. And when we went to Glacier we drove our car up to Glacier and we were going to take the road to the – what was it called? The road to the Sun (Going-to-the-Sun Road) and we were going to explore all sides of Glacier, and we were going to hit up everything. And our expectations going into it weren’t always adequately set. Especially when we pull in and they have signs saying the road to the sun is closed halfway through. So if you want to get to the other side of the park you have to leave the park drive all the way around to explore the other side, and that took a while. So we said we’re going to make it a day to go to the far side of the park from where our campsite was and explore. And our understanding was that we would have the full half-day unfortunately we did not know that there was construction also going on on that road that was going to delay us for another, what two hours?
Alicia: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a theme.
Brett: Two hours is coming up quite often. So we had to ingest new data as we were learning “Oh, we’re going to be stuck here for an unknown period of time. How are we going to prioritize what we want to do? Because the longer we sit here the more reality sunk in that the five things that we wanted to do would have to be the four things or the three things.”
Alicia: Well, and as you may recall, as we were sitting in our car, losing enthusiasm very quickly because of the traffic, we were in standstill traffic – we were not moving for the most part for roughly two hours and we had a whole list of: we want to do this hike still, and we want to go see the lodge, and kayak on the lake, and we want to do some hammocking by the lake. And we had a long list of things to do. And as we’re inching along this road, we look down the road towards the lodge, and we realized that: if we try and see the lodge we are signing up for probably another two hours in traffic to get back to where we were at. And so even then there was: okay, pivot again, pivot again. And we had to talk through with our group: if we can only do two things today with the rest of the day, what two things do we want to do?
Brett: Yeah. And that was that kind of resetting of reality, the realistic expectations. Because none of us could have known that that was going to happen. And it takes saying, “Okay, the new reality is that this is the situation we’re in. We’ll go more in-depth on this later, but having priorities of: “This is number 1. Okay great, the lodge was not, so we weren’t going to say well, we’ll give up our number 1 to do our number 4.” And that was helpful because we could say, “well, we’re going to have a path towards our number 1 priority.” And if 2 and 3 can still happen after that, that’s fine. But it gives you something to strive for to say, “Given our circumstances, we’ll do 1 and then re-evaluate. Do number 2 and reevaluate.”
Alicia: Yeah, start at the top of the list, and work our way down as we’re able. So we know for sure we’ve hit the things we really want. So coming back around to my experience in Costa Rica, the way that we were able to pivot enabled us to have a very different schedule than we’d intended – in fact, we didn’t even see one area that we planned on, and we booked a hotel in that area, that was part of our itinerary. But it wasn’t about seeing that area, it was about seeing certain things that we thought would be in that area. And instead, we had to pivot when we gained new information and when we learned what we really want to see and what we really want to do is over here. Our expectations will be more appropriately met if we change our plan. And we didn’t change everything about our plan from that point on. But we were able to see what it is we wanted to see and have all of our expectations met through a very different path than we’d anticipated at the beginning.
Brett: Just plan on things not turning out – oh my goodness, not only have we come full circle but basically quoting While You Were Sleeping: “things don’t always turn out the way you plan.” Plan on things not working out, some thing’s not working out. We can’t tell you what that’s going to be. You probably won’t know what that’s going to be. But if you can plan for that then that’s being realistic. That’s bringing in the realism of what expectations can look like in the end.
Alicia: And next week, we’re going to dive even deeper into this idea of priorities, because they are so integral in setting realistic expectations and being able to pivot for those expectations. So stay tuned for that. If you’ve enjoyed this episode or other episodes and feel like somebody else would benefit from this feel free to pass this podcast along.
Brett: And thank you for sharing, and comments you’ve been making. We read those and we appreciate them.
(Brett: You know what assuming does, right?…)
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