What’s your expectation?

“True faith is never found alone; it is accompanied by expectation.” – C. S. Lewis

My assistant likes to forward me pertinent posts that she gets from a daily inspirational email list she’s on. Today, I found this one sitting in my inbox.

Lewis was known as a Christian apologist, but that’s not where I’m going today. Today, I want to talk about the “expectation” part of the quote. Because as I sat there reading it, I realized how much of what we get out of life is dependent upon what we’re expecting.

I like to tell my coaching clients they need to “expect more to get more.” Expect better to get better. Believe you deserve something greater than your current circumstance and your brain (specifically the RAS) will force you to take action to change your situation.

Where are your expectations?

The key to this seemingly simple concept is the power of belief. When you believe something, it’s a deep, inner knowing. You just KNOW that something is going to happen, something is going to change, the hero will beat the bad guy. You just know. You believe it. You just know.

What is it that you know – you absolutely believe – about yourself, your life, your business? That’s the foundation to everything you’re building in this world.

If you truly believe your business and your life are amazing and life-giving, they are.

If you truly believe you’re a screw up, you are.

As Napoleon Hill said “Whatever the mind can conceive, and believe, the mind can achieve.”

This isn’t about mystical “Law of Attraction” woo-woo stuff. This is about getting your mind and your goals in alignment. I don’t want you sitting there day after day saying “I am rich and powerful” when you’ve got thirteen cents in the bank. I want you to be honest about where you’re at so you can start adjusting your course to where you truly want to be in your life.

Expect better to get better. Expect more to get more.

The problem with belief is that we can’t get there without faith. Faith in something. It’s the reason you’re so nervous when you first started driving lessons: you had no faith in your abilities. You believed that you could learn how to drive, and you probably also believed that you didn’t know what to expect when you started driving.

So, in a controlled environment, you began to learn how to do drive, acting in faith that eventually you would increase your skill and confidence to the point that you would one day be driving with your knees while you’re talking on your hands free cell and applying lipstick.

Faith made it possible.

You expected that you could learn and that eventually there’d be evidence of your competence.

It’s also why we don’t drive in a world full of auto-accidents. We genuinely believe that the drive coming at us will stay on his side of the road. Why? Because we’ve had enough evidence over the years to validate that belief.

Belief comes after validation. Faith is the seed that must be planted to take the first steps toward new beliefs.

Look at what you truly believe. Look at what you WANT to believe. Notice the gap and start looking for ways to provide your brain with evidence to close the gap. That’s the only way to create a new belief that sticks.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you want to make a million dollars, but you’ve never even earned $50,000 in a single year. Don’t shoot for the million unless you KNOW it’s possible. Shoot for $50,000 first. That’s more possible in your mind. It’s more believeable. You’ve got a foundation behind you that says you’re more likely to achieve that anyway. Make that your goal, and as you get closer to it, inch up your goal.

Today, $50,000. Tomorrow, $75k. Next month, $150k.

Remember when you finally got that driver’s license? You thought you could take on the world, right? Autobahn here we come!

That’s what happens when your mind is in sync with your beliefs. You feel invincible, and you’re ready for a bigger goal.

Stop short changing what I call “pit stop goals”. You need them to build confidence and ultimately provide enough evidence in your mind that you CAN accomplish whatever you desire. Sometimes it pays to dream SMALL instead of thinking BIG all the time.

I learned this the hard way… but that’s another story for another day.

Scientists do this all the time. They create a hypothesis to test and then act in faith to test that hypothesis. If the evidence from the tests proves positive, they’ve got a new belief. If it doesn’t, they’ve disproven their hypothesis.

You can do this, too. Repeat after me:

“I think that I would like to (accomplish/have/be) ______. In order to do that, I would need _________. So I’m going to start collecting what I need to test my hypothesis, and track the results.”

Expect that there will be an outcome, but don’t make an emotional investment just yet in what the outcome might be. Emotional investments trap us in vicious spirals of doubt, anxiety, and fear. Just test it and see what happens. If it doesn’t work, then you know you need to try things differently.

Oh, and don’t start big. Start very, very small. The smallest next step you can think of. What is the very next step to achieving that $50,000? Maybe it’s making $100 this week (or $10 tomorrow). Start there. Start as small as you can to see what evidence results. Then keep testing as you go along. Keep the stakes low until you’ve built up a solid case of evidence in favor of your new belief. Then, momentum kind of has a way of rolling things along from there.

Questions? Think I’m up in the night on this? Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think!