Why Your Unspoken Expectations Are Stealing Your Time

A kind friend recently sent me a lovely gift of a book from Audible and I chose to download "The Let Them Theory" by Mel Robbins. I've started listening to this on my walks this week and it reminds me very much of something in life coaching that we call The Manual. Today I wanted to talk to you about The Manual and how understanding this concept and applying its principles can help you free up time in your life.

The Manual

The Manual, in essence, is an unspoken set of rules that we have about other people's behaviours. It consists of expectations we hold for our spouses, our colleagues, other drivers on the motorway, and anyone else we encounter in our lives. We expect them to behave this way in order for us to feel good and be happy. We don't express these views. We just expect people to follow the rules that we have set without actually telling them how we expect them to behave. There are two problems with this approach.

The Expectation Gap

The first problem is that unless you tell somebody what you expect of them, how are they to know how you expect them to behave? For example I always think that when I've come in from a long dog walk, it's quite nice if my partner offers to make me a cup of tea, but I haven’t actually told him that I’d like him to do that. If I made this request and he agreed to do it then that’s great. But it’s entirely possible that he’ll refuse.

That’s the problem with having manuals for other people, even when we share our ‘rules’ with them, we cannot control how they behave. Now, this is slightly different when it comes to your children or your employees if you're a manager, but for everybody else, you have no control over how they behave unless you're prepared to physically coerce them to do something, and basically, you're going to be locked up if you try to do that.

The Time Drain of Uncontrolled Expectations

When we consider other people we meet in our day-to-day lives, such as people in the queue at the supermarket or our work colleagues, it can be very difficult if you go around telling everybody how you expect them to behave. You’re like to make yourself unpopular and that’s not going to achieve anything. In fact, everyone will probably ignore everything that you request. Perhaps you can make reasonable requests of your colleagues, such as asking them to wash their cup in the kitchen after they've had a cup of coffee. But again, they're probably not going to do it if they don't want to do so.

So how does time management come into this? Well, we all waste a lot of time getting very stressed about this. You get stressed about the bloke who cuts you up on the motorway. You get stressed about the woman who is taking ages to pack her shopping at the checkout. And it’s not only at the time of the annoying incident do you feel stressed, but it often spills over into the rest of your day. We've all gone home after work and complained about our colleagues or the person who pulled out in front of us on the motorway. That takes up time in your evening when you could be doing something enjoyable. You could be winding down from your day, but instead you are in a negative mood because you are complaining about something that you can do nothing about.

The Solution: The "Let Them" Theory

Mel Robbins recommends just saying "Let them", when other people's behaviours upset you and there is nothing you can do about it, you simply tell yourself: "Let them". You can, of course, choose in the moment to make a reasonable request of them. She gives an example of seeing somebody allow their dog to poo on a footpath, then walk away without picking it up. She suggests that you could offer a poo bag and ask the person to pick it up. But at the end of the day, they still may not do it.

I know that when I was a social worker, one of the things we used to say about children was that it's good to "pick your battles." So it may be that in some situations you want to communicate to the other person how you feel about their behaviour and how you'd like them to change it. But doing this all of the time is probably just as exhausting as saying nothing and feeling frustrated. Therefore, choose the things that are important to you. And then as Mel Robbins says “Let me” i.e. decide what your response is going to be. It's not that you have to be happy about how other people behave; it's just that getting frustrated about it is a waste of emotional energy. I am sure you don't want to be spending a lot of your time frustrated with other people.

Increase Your Awareness

So as you go about your week I want you to notice how often you feel stressed about the behaviour of other people. What are you thinking in the moment about that person and their behaviour? How much time do you spend telling yourself how stupid, irritating, boring or selfish they are? And how much time do you spend sharing this with other people. People who you love, your friends and family, whereas your time with them should be spent focusing on yourselves, on enjoying your time together and not the idiot in the coffee shop who was talking loudly on his phone this afternoon.

Discover more about managing your time by signing up for my free workbook ‘Your Future Self Toolkit’. It will take you through the steps to creating a clear and motivating vision for a life that you love and help you to make sure that as you go about your day you are moving closer and closer to that vision.