Expectation Traps
Stopping The Fight Against Who Your Team Actually Is
The presentation was tomorrow. We had a plan.
We had a solid strategy session, mapped the arc, divided the sections. I’d built materials around a specific sequence. I knew my cues, my transitions, the moment I was supposed to step in. I felt ready in that particular way that only comes from genuine preparation. Not confidence exactly, more like the quiet satisfaction of having done the work.
We walked in. They opened with something we hadn’t discussed.
I didn’t say anything. I sat with it, tracked where they were going, waited for the turn back toward the plan. It didn’t come. The section ended. A new one started. Also unplanned.
In a natural break I leaned over and quietly named what we’d originally mapped. They lit up. “Oh yeah, let me wrap this up and we’ll move there.” And we did. The rest landed close enough to what we’d prepared.
Afterward I told myself it was fine. It mostly was. But underneath that there was something tighter. Not anger. More like the specific frustration of carrying something carefully across a room and watching someone else move the table.
This happened again. Then again after that.
At some point I asked them directly. “Could you let me know in advance if the plan is changing?” They said yes. The pattern continued.
That’s when something shifted. Not dramatically. More like a slow pressure release.
I’d been treating the plan as a contract. They’d been treating it as a general shape of what might happen. Neither of us had said that out loud. I’d assumed we were operating from the same understanding of what a plan was, and that assumption had been generating frustration on a reliable schedule.
When I reflect, I see it’s less that they were being inconsistent and more that I was expecting a kind of consistency they weren’t structured to provide. That’s a different problem. It requires a different response.
The frustration didn’t disappear entirely. Some residue stayed. Part of me still thought: this is a professional context, consistency is a reasonable expectation, the role requires it. That thought had some truth in it. It also wasn’t helping me.
What I had was a co-worker who is genuinely kindhearted, competent in the ways that matter, and constitutionally allergic to the version of preparation I was depending on. I could keep bumping against that wall or I could stop walking into it.
Years ago I heard a recording of Dr. Paul Fleischman speaking about Vipassana meditation. He described his public speaking structure: tell the audience what you’re going to cover, cover it, then close by naming what was just covered. The purpose was retention. Orientation for the listener.
It stayed with me. I didn’t know why at the time.
In the middle of this, I heard something else in it.
If we opened every presentation by stating what would be covered, I’d know immediately whether the plan had changed. Not as an ambush. Not as enforcement. Just as information, delivered naturally, in the first two minutes, before anything had gone sideways.
I proposed it to my co-worker as a presentation technique. Which it is. I implemented it myself and made it easy for them to do the same.
It worked. Not because it fixed their forgetfulness. Because it moved the variable I actually had access to: my own readiness.
The preparation I was doing was good work. None of it was wasted. But I’d attached it to an expectation of how the other person would show up, which meant I’d handed them a variable in my own readiness. Every deviation registered as a disruption because I’d built my preparation around a fixed version of events.
The tell-say-told structure didn’t change them. It changed the architecture. It created a moment at the start where I could see clearly what we were actually doing, rather than what I’d expected we’d be doing. Two different things. The gap between them had been the whole problem.
Adaptability isn’t a backup plan.
It’s the plan.
After one presentation, during a break, I told them how it landed for me when things diverged from what we’d mapped. Not as a complaint. With some lightness, some warmth, because there’s no real tension between us and I wasn’t performing equanimity I didn’t have. They laughed. Said they’d try to communicate better.
They have, a little. The pattern hasn’t disappeared.
I’m not waiting for it to.
What I dropped wasn’t the standard. It was the belief that holding the standard tightly was doing anything useful. They are who they are. The work between us is good. The presentations land. My materials get used, maybe not in the order I’d envisioned, but they get used.
I’d been so focused on the plan that I’d missed what the plan was actually for.
The frustration was never really about them.
I could keep paying the cost of pretending otherwise, or build something that worked with what was true.
That’s it.
~ Seido