Expectations & Resentment

Ever found yourself expecting the impossible; perhaps frustrated, angry or even hurt when it failed to materialize?

Sounds foolish when said out loud, but too often I find myself succumbing to this brand of fantastical thinking. When I don’t get what I’m after, I can get angry and make the situation worse.

Essentially, it’s like Sisyphus blaming gravity for his burden. Can you relate?

Let me bring this closer to home with an example. 

I am a middle manager in an industrial manufacturing operation. I’m no Elon Musk, but I love what I do and the people I work with. 

If asked, others would say I lead with my gut, often causing me to ignore obvious roadblocks or to prioritize action over fact finding. They would also say that, at the end of the day, I am open to feedback and am committed to correcting mistakes. At a 50,000’ level, you might say I have a ‘forgiveness is better than permission’ flavor to my leadership.

Although I have demonstrable success with this approach over multiple years and in various capacities, I work inside a process driven organization with a strong preference for permission seekers. Rather than adjust, I keep driving to change the mindset of my leadership, if not the entire 10,000+ employee culture.

In a recent bought of misguided ‘heroics’ I escalated to the brink of unemployment. Peak fantastical thinking.

The interesting question now becomes – what next?

Perhaps the answer is as simple as dropping the expectation that my track record of strong results justifies special handling? Perhaps I should pursue a new opportunity where coloring outside the lines is more highly valued?

Am I standing on principle or am I just addicted to the conflict? My therapist points out I have a tendency to extremes and reminds me to pace myself and seek out my emotional center.

For now at least the move is to keep my head down as I continue to reflect, here’s what I konw for sure:

Unrealistic Expectations = Premeditated Resentments

2 Replies to “Expectations & Resentment”

  1. Hello. I have checked your oldschoolmilennial.com and i see you’ve got some duplicate
    content so probably it is the reason that you don’t rank high in google.
    But you can fix this issue fast. There is a tool that creates articles like human, just search
    in google: miftolo’s tools

  2. Good article. It is extremely unfortunate that over the last decade, the travel industry has already been able to to tackle terrorism, SARS, tsunamis, bird flu, swine flu, and also the first ever real global economic depression. Through everything the industry has really proven to be robust, resilient and dynamic, finding new strategies to deal with difficulty. There are generally fresh issues and the opportunity to which the sector must again adapt and react.

Comments are closed.