Leading With Authenticity - What If You Freed Yourself From Expectation?

Good morning, Cadre family. It's Monday. We're here after a long holiday weekend getting started. Oh, and we have our special guest for today. Major. Look it. He says, hello. He says, good morning, everybody. He also says, please pet me. Hopefully I didn't make any of you dizzy with the twirling around of the camera. Good morning, Speak, Wonder. Hello, Nikki. Hello, Amar. Amar, this is the big week. Interview week. I'm excited to have you guys here today. And after this long holiday weekend, jumping into Monday, I'm gonna ask how you're doing today.

Speak, Wonder. How are you feeling today? Yesterday was a different day. Today's a new one. It's an opportunity to explore new possibilities. So as we dive into Monday, I'm just gonna jump right in. Why not? First things first. Nikki feels. Oof. You know what? I like that. I like that. That's good. Now I'm gonna ask you a different question. What is a phrase that you would like to feel right now? Something slightly different. So I woke up this morning. I had a bit of a headache. I think I had too much sugar yesterday, to be honest.

Or too much sunshine, most likely. And definitely got dehydrated because I was outside a lot and doing some workouts. So I feel a little bit flat. But what I would like to feel is just a little bit more light. So things that I can do in my body to just help me. Nikki says wee things that I can do in my body to help me feel more light. I can try to sit up taller. I can try to relax my shoulders a little bit. I can hydrate a lot right now because that's what my body is craving. You want to feel hungry, but you feel normal.

See, we have all these things right just percolating in our head, but sometimes there's just a lot of beauty and being present right now with exactly how we feel and recognizing that we have some opportunity to help us feel slightly different, tad more hopeful. Speak, Wonder. Great. I'm gonna send you a note today. Let's chat. So we have opportunities to start to shift our perspectives a little bit, which maybe they work, maybe they don't. And maybe today just gets to be the day I feel dehydrated or today just gets to be the day that you feel normal, and we just honor it, sit with it, and move through it and try to get to the other things in our day without overthinking.

So today, freedom of setting ourselves from expectations. So when I say that statement, my brain goes a couple of different ways. The first place that it goes to is what is expectation? Is it an expectation from others? Is it an expectation that I put on myself? One of them I can control, the other one I can control how I perceive it. So what if there was the possibility that all those expectations that have been layered on us either internally or externally, poof, disappeared? What would we do now?

There's a certain amount of expectation on us that it's good to have. Right. It holds us accountable to forward progress. So if you think about a deadline at work for a project, setting that expectation can help us feel motivated to get to the finish line. Because maybe the project is something that we like. Maybe it's something that's draining us. So not all expectations are bad, but let's maybe strip that thought process out of it. What if we removed good or bad from an expectation? And I love that, Nikki.

I need a poof around expectations. Yeah. What if we released from our mindset that there's a good or a bad expectation? Or what if we were able to release the weight of an expectation and maybe reframe it, give it a different need, different terminology. So speak Wonder says, seems like there's layers of expectations woven into our society. They have become the norm, yet many are unnecessary. Exactly. Poof. Now the only person that is actually in control of changing, of unpacking some of that expectation, at least individually, is us.

So we might not be able to change the expectation of a society, but how might we start to voice our new opinion? How might we start to redefine what expectation feels like for ourselves? So an example for me, and I shared this a little bit yesterday with me time. I have been feeling really overwhelmed and feeling like I'm failing a lot lately. And it's not that I'm not, you know, getting things done. It's that feeling of failing everyone else because of everyone else's expectations around me and not choosing myself enough.

So then I feel like I'm failing myself because I'm not choosing myself. Right. See the spiral that we get into? So. So I'm looking at starting to reshape how I perceive that feeling of failure, which is a big one for me, and I know it is for many too. But looking at it bit by bit. So what's expected of me today? What's expected of me in this moment? Well, in this moment, my personal expectation is to do a good job having a conversation with all of you. We'll see how that goes. But similar to Amar, I often don't feel hungry.

So I have an expectation of myself that I eat a certain amount every single day, and it's not because I have an issue with food. And that is a whole different conversation. It's more about I work out a lot and I feel stronger when I eat better. And so it's really just taking the opportunity to say, right now I need to fuel my body so that I can feel stronger for the things I need to do now. Adding into that, I also need to hydrate more. I'm definitely under hydrated, which is what caused my headache this morning.

And I know this because yesterday I ran outside, I taught a spin class, I went to Texas, Minnesota, ate a bunch of salty foods, and I just didn't hydrate enough. So the expectations I'm putting on myself are, how might I eat and drink a little more? Now, here's something that's true for me. Whenever I have to track anything, I get really deflated by that because it goes back to that feeling of failing. So I've given myself permission to create a note in my notes tab on my phone. And every day it just says, and at the top it says hydration and protein.

Because those are the two things I'm focused on right now. And here's what I do every morning, I delete yesterday. Don't even look at it, really. I just delete it because yesterday is gone. I can't change what I did yesterday. And I go into today and I start with tracking just like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, how many glasses of water. I just put water and hydration up there, and then underneath it, I put protein. And then when I eat or drink my protein shake, I pop on In, I type 20 grams. And I just do simple math all day long because I know in my head I want to get to a minimum of 10 glasses of water for me.

And I say 10 for me because I know how active I am. So I have to a bit, little, little bit overcompensate for normal, everyday hydration. And I know that I want to eat about 120 grams of protein every day. And so by doing this, it just helps me to know how I'm doing today. But if I went into one of those macro trackers, and I've done that before, I've had nutritionists ask me to do that. I literally get so overwhelmed, I can't do it because I literally feel like I'm failing if I'm not meeting those goals.

I don't know if I feel like I'm feeling myself or I'm feeling my coach, but it doesn't Work for me. So I love eating, I love drinking. I just get so busy in my day with part two, the expectations on what to get done around me that I put myself, my nutrition and hydration at the bottom. This helps me to keep it at the top. So this is just one way that we can try to identify, you know, when we have expectations that we have on ourselves, what are some tips and tricks to help it not feel so overwhelming?

Because that is what the societal norm that Speak Wonder u mentioned. It's this list of requirements of who we're supposed to be, how we're supposed to live, all these things that we're supposed to do. And you know, if you think about and reflect on JC's enoughness and if I just pull that in here grazingly, what if, what if I. What if. What if I did today was just enough or more than enough or exactly enough. What if I redefined how I set an expectation around how I eat? Now I am stripping out if anybody has an eating disorder because I am not a nutritionist and therefore I am not qualified to help in that space.

But as someone who has had someone with a severe eating disorder, on my team, our team, our instructor team, while I wasn't able to help this individual with her nutrition, that's what her doctors were for, I was able to help be an accountability buddy for her so that we had different agreements that we could check in with and that it would be okay in a safe space for us to check in. So we all need something very different. We all do. I'm a strengthsfinder coach. Just simply by that personality inventory, there's a 1 in 33 million chance that any of us, anyone, has the same top five strengths themes in the same order.

And that includes twins. So that means we are all perfectly unique individuals. So how might we look at all the expectations? And if you need to write them down, write them down. Go into your journal and write down on one half of a page the expectations you put on yourself. And then on the other half of the page, what are the expectations that other people put on you? And if you want to go really crazy, what are the expectations that society puts on you or the work puts on you? What if we just wrote them all out to see how overwhelmed with expectation we are?

And what if we allowed ourselves the opportunity to take a red pen? I say red because you remember back in the old days when a teacher would red pen your papers. What if we took a red pen and we struck out? The expectations that don't work for us anymore. The ones in society that we don't believe in, that are hanging out there, that aren't us. And then what if we took a green marker or pen and we circled the ones that are really core to who we are as a person and what we want to give to the world, what we want to give to our work?

How different would that list look? How, for lack of better terminology, free might we feel? Because we just took that power back. We just allowed ourselves to set our own boundary around what expectations can be or not be. Now, here's the deal. Have I done this yet? No. Have I visually done this in my head? Yeah, a million times. Will I commit to doing this on paper this week? Absolutely. I'm going to do this with us to see what that looks like. And this is different than a to do list, right? It can be like a to do list, but expectations hit different than to dos Expectations for me, Jean.

As I mentioned yesterday in my live stream, I oftentimes will wake up and do everything for everybody else when the list of things that I would like to do for myself continues to grow. So what if instead I allowed myself to set an expectation that I showed up for myself first? I allowed myself to say yes, no, or maybe a little more often instead of always yes. Because the expectation I've set is that IG will say yes to everything. And so now, retraining that is going to take some time. It's going to take time for me, but it's going to take time for people to get used to me saying yes, no, and here's why.

Or maybe let me get back to you. So, food for thought on this beautiful Monday. How might we free ourselves from so many expectations and really decide which ones are important for us right now? So we're gonna do it. If you're listening in to this live stream, we're gonna, by the end of the week, start a post about expectations. I'm giving us till the end of the week, but if somebody gets there first, post it first and we'll all comment inside of that and then other people might be curious about what we're doing.

Team, I love you. I hope you have the best Monday, the best day, and give yourself some grace today. It's the Monday after a long holiday weekend and we're going to feel overwhelmed with so much, so many things to do, so many expectations today. Make sure you move, make sure you get outside and walk, make sure you hydrate. Amar, you and I, let's eat a little bit and let's have the best day. See you all soon. Love you.