Expectations

I'll let you in on a little secret...life delivers pretty much what you expect it will. If you want to have success in life, you must train yourself to expect success.

The English word expect is actually a contraction of 2 Latin roots "ex" and "spect" and its literal meaning is "to out-picture". When you look at the world, you do not perceive what is actually there, you see what your mind expects to see. What does your mind expect to see? What it has been trained to see. The world, as you see and experience it, is just your personal internal reality picture out-pictured or expected. Your reality is first pre-conceived or visualized inside your mind. Your mind then projects that internal image onto the world and that internal picture thus becomes your external reality. What you have in life is based on your expectations.

Your expectations are, in turn, built upon your beliefs... what you believe you could have, or what you believe you should have, or what you believe you deserve to have. Where do you get those beliefs about your possibilities, potentials, limitations and deservingness? Mostly, you inherit them. You just take them on, assume them without examining them for veracity or usefulness.

If you ask most people "why do you believe such and such?" Most will answer, "because it is true." No matter what rationalizations or intellectual convolutions are brought to bear to attempt to prove how or why something is true, in the end it is really no different than the childish refrain, "Why?"