As a former Army officer, senior NCO, senior leadership - leadership in general, to set expectations and in army, we call this expectation management. Basically, expectation management is communicating. It's communicating what is going well, what can go well, what is going wrong, what can go wrong, what you expect to happen because of what is going on, but it is the responsibility of that senior person, that leader, to communicate the expectations of a project, the expectations of the mission, the expectations of a meeting, the expectations of a budget, of buying all of these things. But what it basically is, is communicating well - communicating what's going on, what can go wrong, and just giving an awareness of a situation. Many of us do a great job of this at work. We do a great job of telling our bosses of what's going wrong, this is how we should engage the project, and this is how we should engage in buying this and selling that and doing these things and we do a great job of that. When it comes to expectation management of our self, we don’t do such a great job and we struggle to understand why don't people show up for us.
Today's lesson is expectation management for yourselves and showing people how to love you, showing people how to respect you and showing people how to care for you and unfortunately, the reason why people don't show up for you, the reason why people don't know how to love you is because you need a lot of work on showing up for yourself. No one has to know or wonder how to show up with me on my birthday. If you know me, you know my birthday is a thing. Why? Because I celebrate me every month on the 13th of every month. That is my monthly birthday. I celebrate me every single month. I am not going to wait a whole year to celebrate, so I know I at least have that to look forward to of me time through celebration of my time and you too, you can take that. But on the 30th of every month, that Nyota day. I am celebrating me and it’s my monthly birthday, so I said that to say I celebrate me so other people know to celebrate me. I know how to focus on and work on self-love and self-care and being my own advocate.
If you can't be your own advocate, how do you expect someone else to advocate for you or how can you expect to advocate for someone else? When we're setting expectations at work, don't forget that you need to be, we need to be setting expectations around ourselves and showing people how to love us, showing people how to treat us, showing people how to care for us and they do that by watching how we care and love and show up and treat ourselves.
