At HorseBack, we love being helpful, so today we thought we would share with you one of our favourite ways of getting through Christmas, and that is learning the fine art of expectation management.
We say ‘getting through’ Christmas because this time of year is not sparkly and magical for everyone. It is sold as a time of elves and mince pies and happy families and jolly old Santa and cheeky reindeer and general goodwill and love all round. That’s what you see on the television, in the social media, especially in the advertisements. But what if you have no family, or Christmas is the time you lost your dad, or you have just been sacked from your job? It doesn’t have to be anything as difficult as that; it can be the stone in the shoe of not getting on with your in-laws and having to do Christmas by their rules.
So instead of moving into the Christmas season with a song in your heart, you trudge into it with a shadow over your spirit, and you dare not say that out loud because everyone will think you are a Scrooge and start avoiding you at parties.
(Oh, and that’s the other thing. The Christmas parties. If you are an introvert, this is a special kind of hell, devised by demons.)
How do you make any of that better? We have found an absolutely brilliant way is to reset your expectations. This comes from one of the principles adored by the Stoics, those wonderfully consoling Greek philosophers. This is: you cannot change what happens in life, but you can change your perception of it. You can’t, in other words, shift reality and wave a magic wand and create the dream Christmas from your shrivelled soul, but you absolutely can change the way you think about it.
We learned this from working with our horses: false or unrealistic or unhelpful expectations are the quickest way to get into trouble with a horse. So we are experts at the expectation reset.
The first part of this is ruthless honesty. If you are dreading Christmas, look that fact straight in the whites of its eyes. You might even like to write it down. (We love writing things down.) Turn your expectation dial down to zero. Your sister will give you a pair of gloves that don’t fit and your Uncle Bernie will get drunk and bore for Britain and the turkey will not fit in the oven so everyone will panic and blame each other. It will not, in other words, be like the John Lewis ad. Get this good and straight in your head.
Then, you can start deciding how to change your thought processes. If you’ve always thought of Christmas as a family time, but you have no family this year – because of death or estrangement or even simple logistics – you can start to see it as something quite different. You let the family fantasy go, gently, and decide it might be the most marvellous time to do things on your own. You might make a list of all the things you don’t usually have time for which you can do over the quiet days of Christmas. You could volunteer, maybe on a helpline for other people who don’t have family too. If you help to salve other people’s loneliness, your own will vanish.
Christmas is a very dangerous time for perfectionists, so if you dream of the perfect Christmas, now is the time to change that old thought habit. Again, you need to turn your expectation dial down nice and low. If people have a laugh and drink a glass of wine, you are doing well. It doesn’t matter that the turkey was tough and the Brussels sprouts were hard as bullets and the dog ate the entire saucepan of bread sauce. You are not going to lie on your deathbed and fret about one non-perfect turkey. You are going to remember the people who were there that year and how you all laughed and laughed.
And here is a final pernicious expectation: that somehow, magically, at Christmas, everyone will behave well. All the people in your life will do exactly what you would most love them to do, react as you would have them react, think as you would like them to think. This is always a dangerous human desire, but it’s especially tricky at this time of year. It’s worth starting to practise believing that they really, really won’t. Let go of that luring expectation. Let people be themselves, in all their flaws. (And if you can do that for them, you can do it for yourself too, so you get two for the price of one.) Let what will be, be.
At HorseBack, we are great believers in hope. We write about it all the time. We always hope for better days, for brighter dawns, for new beginnings. We’ve seen so many veterans turn their lives around that we have had our hopes fulfilled, over and over. We know that hope can be a sturdy thing.
But hope and expectation are two very different perspectives, and it’s important to know the difference. Hope is big, and open – it contains in it a determination not to give up. If the thing hoped for does not happen, then we go right back to the beginning and start again. (In horsing, we call this checking our groundwork.) Expectation can be closed and even entitled: this thing must happen, otherwise everything is ruined. We like to hope for everything, but we expect nothing. That way, all the good things that come our way feel like a bonus.
That way, all it may take is the smile of a stranger on a crowded street to make you realise what Christmas really is about. It’s not about perfect turkeys and perfect presents and perfect families. It’s about connection with other human beings, and that can sometimes come in ways that you least expect.