Standards of perfection
I just read an interesting blog post by Dale H. Emery: Standards of perfection. (If you don’t follow Dales blog, you should start to do so.) He points out that we often seam to implicitly measure ourselves and others against standards of perfection, that are unreasonable.
He was wondering, why we do so? So I’m trying to take this question a little further.
It occured to me, that I can still hear my parents requesting standards of perfection, that were more or less unreasonable. I oftern request myself to perform the best I can possibly do and I am dissapointed, when I don’t always live up to my own standards. And I can also hear myself requesting a lot from my own kids.
So why am I doing this? First of all it seams so “natural”, that I often don’t even notice it. Thanks for pointing that out again, Dale! But I can also think up a reasoning behind it: By setting high expectations, I want my kids and myself to rais up to the challenge. Not expecting the best that they or I can do, feels like opening the door to mediocracy. And my standards don’t seam to be so unreasonable after all, since I usually expect standards, that my kids or I were able to achieve at least sometimes before. If I only expect what I routinely get, will they or will I improve at all? How often will they or will I perform better than expected?
But there is a catch. I think we are mixing up expectations and aspirations. I aspire a lot, but how much should I expect?
I have been working hard to achieve reasonable expectations and not be dissapointed, if my high expectations aren’t met. Exceeding my reasonable expectations also feels better, than hardly ever achieving my perfect expectations.
So, setting another expectation for myself, I want to further improve my expectation setting. In particular, I want to state my expectations of others more explicitly. We’ll see how that works out.
I picture myself bringing our kids to bed. Brushing teeth and getting dressed for the night often works so wonderfully seamless, it’s a joy. At other times, it can be such a hassle. I can’t yet hear myself the next time we have a hassle. Maybe I can even think up something, that can make my reasonable expectation explicit in a way, that challenges my kids to over achieve my expectations? ;-)
Thinking about it, making high expectations explicit, also might make failure an option and not a desaster.
Is it nature or nurture? From what I just stated above, it might have a high bias towards nurture. And I’m sure that it can be mitigated with some attention to it.
