We are born into a world that doesn’t expect much out of us. Just be average, fit in, blend with the crowd, and you will be all right. This is fine if you want to be an average Joe with an average Jane by his side living an average life, but it is not so fine if you want more than this.
Yet you may have a tough time breaking out of the “mold” these low expectations place you in. From an early age we are all trained to expect average things of ourselves. Lifting one’s sights to see what is truly achievable takes work.
Having low expectations placed on you sucks.
However, when you are a kid there is nothing you can do about it except “grow up”, so you end up agonizing on this desire to change during what should be one of the most care free periods of your life.
We get crammed into school systems, graded like we must perform a service adequately, and pushed into the social confines of routine. We are left to drift away into obscurity until we grow up, and at that point it seems too late to change anything. The system that supposedly is meant to make us match expectations instead lulls us away from the best ways to exceed them.
Where is the Fun?
With women, as in life, you have to TAKE UP the chains of all the past BS and forge a strength inside yourself that can weather the forces that would push you into those roles.
As a kid, I was treated like one, and it made me want to grow up faster than everyone else, and as I did I missed out on all the fun of being young. When it comes to girls, a lot of guys “just want to grow up” and they want a girl to play a very specific part in their idea of adulthood; they want her to be sex relief and a symbol of independence for the people who had low expectations of them.
So they chase that girl hoping to look good to everyone or prove something to themselves.
But where is the joy?
Where is that awesome time?
And why are we all so darn serious!!!
Well I’m going to tell you where the fun is right NOW!
The fun is in opening your eyes.
And after you open your eyes and see that all this stuff pushed on us robs us of ever breaking the mold, you start to realize that the key to freedom from self-sabotage is your own innate sense of originality.
Once you find your spark – that thing that moves you – protect it, keep it secret, because it is going to take strength, spontaneity, and strategy to keep it alive.
At First
At first it is going to feel weird to be “responsible” for your own choices, instead of following the beaten path that everyone else follows, and you are going to start looking to others to see what to do; asking friends for advice who don’t know anything anyway and being tempted to go back to old comforts like your family or old habits. But you must resist these initial pulls.
These pulls never really go away completely because people stuck in the matrix (the “be a nice guy and you will get her eventually” matrix, the “go to uni and get a stable 9-to-5 job so you don’t get left behind” matrix, the “picking up and moving to a foreign place is for irresponsible people” matrix, or plenty others) want company more than anything; so they’ll beg, cry, and scream, until you comply, and if you do, you’ll lead a mediocre existence and comfortably slide along with the BS.
You have to find your own personal reason to continue through this trial of forging your own personal paths to the ends you want, and hopefully you still remain generous and not bitter by the task’s difficulty.
You can’t expect trail blazing to be easy, you just have to expect it to be whatever it needs to be for the time it needs to be it.
Once you build enough of a habit of shrugging off conventional wisdom and enough of a conviction in your ability to succeed in unconventional ways that these carry you through the trail blaze process consistently, you will then have to adopted some strategies to keep those nasty low expectations of others at bay.
Let us go through some habits you can build and conviction you can muster.
Who Cares – Just Look Ahead
One thing I’ve learned over the years is “who cares”; let others think what they think until the moments you need them to see something else... and when you need them to see something else, be VERY good at making them see it, so it shocks them out of apathy and into wonder.
Expectations are really hard to break if you are guessing at the next steps, but if you stop focusing on what people “know about you” and start focusing on what is coming up, you can get ten times more stuff done and “WOW!” is the result every time.
Eventually, through the years of self-sufficiency and diligence, you start to see what happens next:
- The next thing the guy acting all big and tough is going to
propose
- The next thing the girl you are speaking to is going to think or
do
- The next thing that will happen in the group you are with
... and you will smile a smirk of anticipation as you await the inevitable gorgeous wonder to unfold. That vision of the future – that ability to see what lays ahead, because you have already been through a thousand situations just like this one – will give you the willpower to endure any low expectations anyone has of you during those early stages.
And it is just the same with women. They will think you are “just a guy” at first glance, someone that fits perfectly into their expectations of life. And as soon as you say “no that isn’t true” and try to prove that you’re different, you’ve just put all her low expectations on your shoulders.
Don’t do that!
Ignore whatever stuff she thinks about guys, or about you at first – there is plenty of time to address that later – and if she isn’t on the lookout for a guy like you, she isn’t too special in the role of your life anyways... so don’t sweat it, just handle it.
Be Aware of Why People Have Certain Expectations
Sometimes, when people gather in groups or get swept up in some kind of social trend, a lot of “low expectations” will come with anyone seen as “outside” that trend. So if a girl is really into one team of guys it’s possible she may have low expectations of you simply because you do not immediately strike her as part of that group.
It is not a bad thing, it is just how preferences work – we tend to put low expectations upon every group outside of our own (and low expectations upon our groups too, but we’ll talk about that another time).
A party girl might walk past you because you are in a quiet coffee shop catching up on some business at the end of the day because her radar is switched onto “party guy” mode.
By scanning for the why behind the low expectations, you can then just smirk at the irony, or at others’ amusing faux pas for a while.
Let Them Convince You
A lot of people try to sell others on how a low expectation was wrongly placed on them, but did you know you can do the opposite, that you can ask them to convince you to hold yourself to low expectations and then play coy as they show you the ropes?
An example:
You: What do you do for recreation?
Him: I’m a mixologist, but you don’t really look like someone who’d know a whole lot about that.
You: Maybe you can show me what you know.
Him: Well, all right. See this drink over here? It’s a Sidecar. Used to be extremely popular, but hardly anyone orders it but the old folks anymore. Not because it’s bad; it’s actually quite good. Just because drinks go in and out of style just like fashion does.
You: That’s really neat, man. You know, I like trying new cocktails I haven’t yet experienced. I will order that on my next round.
This “get me to play” kind of role can actually be pretty enticing, as it gives them the illusion of “successfully changing” someone by giving them a chance to show off, which helps them feel good about things and ease up on their judgements.
At the highest level, you tell women to convince you of things in such a way that they just KNOW you have something they need, and then, after that, you ask them to really sell you on why you should do the things you can do FOR THEM.
Don’t over do it of course; even highly valued people must be humble and cool about things, just use it to leverage your charm, and to pick and choose the best times to get involved and when not to.
Help Them Survive Without the Answers of How Awesome You Are
If you always prove yourself to people they will start to expect it from you, so don’t hand out justifications like candy at Halloween – that can get boring really fast. Instead, challenge people to accept you as you are; as unproven; as seemingly weak; as a guy they don’t know.
If people accept you as unproven, then you’ll never have to prove anything and you can help them live a life of surprises as you take them through the wonders that exist outside the matrix.
When you achieve this mentality you’ll become very alluring to girls, because you will always have more unknown attributes and abilities ready and waiting than you need for any one scenario, and having an answer for all kinds of things people did not expect you to have answers for is extremely attractive.
Balance is really the key here. Women will always try to box you in, a necessary thing they do so they can strategize toward their own needs, but if you keep breaking the boundaries of each box they apply to you in a subtle way (Byronic traits) it will make you mysterious and fascinating, and that’s a good thing to be inspiring in girls. Even more, it will help you avoid nasty stigmas, which is also pretty good in the long term.
Enjoy Things
I never like to prove myself if it gets in the way of enjoying myself. Why kiss her right now if I’m enjoying the way she is squirming? Why tell her about my plans for her? If she is hopping along, dancing, and having fun, why not just dive into that zone with her and play around a while?
When it comes to “doing” or “enjoying”, I typically choose to enjoy myself. Yes, I could get up, run around, impress everyone, but that sucks all the fun and spontaneity out of life! What I do instead is I just procure enough interest out of each scenario that I can have FUN with it.
Once it is there, I can just tease all the people that need it to go some place faster than I intend.
Be Relevant
I think one of the coolest things about having low expectations put on you is the reaction you get when you say and do relevant things. People never expect some guy they don’t know to be incredibly relevant, and if he only shows a little of himself he becomes quite intriguing and people jump at the chance to unravel him.
Keep that mystery and answer only when it is absolutely relevant, because you don’t want to be Mr. Perfect who solves all of their problems. That’s never all that fun, so why bother telling them the whole picture unless it is a need-to-know situation?
Sometimes Girls Have High Expectations and There is Little You Can Do About It
You kind of have to practice being good in low expectation situations to really handle situations where girls have extremely high expectations. Sometimes girls you connect really well with get such high expectations of you that they expect you to wash away everything that is difficult in their lives.
You can’t sustain that, so it is best to start bringing her expectations down a bit so she can “handle when you are not there for her” but still be good ENOUGH to be in the picture in a good way.
Lowering a girl’s expectations usually just means not poking her with how much you know but instead helping level her out with the right mix of positive reinforcement and encouraging her independence.
Laugh It Off
It can get pretty repetitive and grate on your nerves when people always expect the worst, so the best thing to do is learn to laugh it off, because at the end of the day you’ll never impress everybody and proving yourself to everyone and everybody every time, even when they are disrespectful, isn’t the best way to live.
Develop a process and start to form a cohesive approach to it that maximizes fun, lowers how many tasks you have to do to impress everybody, and lets you set up the right platforms for showing SOME PEOPLE who you really are, and have those moments be spectacular.
Don’t run, just walk as fast as the destination needs you to and go with a good attitude.
So to Sum Up...
While we were all made envious of growing up, and made to desire a symbolic girlfriend, we forgot that expectations are the very thing stopping us from taking advantage of our life’s opportunities.
Live it up while you are young by not getting caught in the web and applying some good strategies to keep clear of it, and while you are doing that, let the surprises come, have a good attitude, bend the rules just enough to always be playful, and, if you do that, I can guarantee that you will start to have moments in your life that you and the girls you meet will remember for a long time.
And once you find those precious memories, you will NEVER again let the matrix take you.
Cody Lyans
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