My initial resistance to blogging was as mundane and commonplace as a European’s fear of eating tomatoes was in the first half of the second millennium AD. While I wasn’t afraid of being poisoned, I was afraid that what I had to say would not be useful to those who might read it. This resistance came to light during a conversation with Christine Gallagher, for which I’m very grateful. Seeing it enabled me to reason with it. And then get over it. Obviously.
I was invited to go to the next level of blogging earlier this year when I hired Dennis Baker to help me with search engine optimization. He stressed the importance of blogging regularly, not just for SEO, but because readers come to expect it and readers are important. And if you don’t continue providing valuable content for them, you fall off their radar and the connection breaks. Not meeting expectations is not good for relationships, in other words.
Which is what I heard reflected back to me on a brief phone call with my dad today when he gently ribbed me for not having posted for nearly two weeks. Good call, Dad.
I think it all boils down to that key word: expectations. The simple act of blogging roughly once per week for the last year, sometimes more, indicates that people can expect me to continue to do so, regardless of whether or not I tell them I will. Together, writer and reader establish a habit of connection. This is, for me, something I want, even if I don’t always maintain my end of the bargain.
But unlike my blogging life, we don’t always want to keep the expectations we’ve set. Sometimes, we get ourselves into relationship habits and work projects and ways of being that don’t really work for us. What then? We’ll here are some questions to think about that might help you begin to sort that very conundrum out.
- Are there any relationships – business or personal – where you’ve established expectations (either explicitly or implicitly) that no longer work for you?
- How do you continue to operate in a way that indicates others can hold those expectations of you?
- What would be the cost of changing those expectations?
- What would be the benefit?
December is a perfect month to be looking at expectations because they surface left and right in our personal lives due to the heightened sensitivity around family and holidays. We tend to expect so much from one another and feel the weight of others’ expectations of us, never stopping to figure out our role in crafting such scenarios.
Have you set the right expectations?
