ANSWERS: 3
  • Expectations are good. I'd be reluctant to tell someone to give them up. The more important thing, it seems to me, is to strive to be happy in the here and now. If plans work out, then great, but if they don't, he needs to try to count the blessings he has, rather than focussing on what he doesn't have. Plan for tomorrow, but live for today.
  • Don't tell him to not have expectations. But what you could do is help him devise a plan of action to make things happen - step-by-step. What is preventing him from making things happen?
  • One thing that you learn in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is of a "warped" type of thought called "Fortune Telling." When you tell fortunes about the future or about what people thinking, you're drawing unsupported conclusions about the future based upon something that probably isn't true. It's good to think about the future, consider the future, but trying to predict the future is damaging because it sets us up to be hurt or paralyzes us and keeps us from making a decision. The best thing to do is to try to focus mostly on the immediate future or the present, instead of trying to confine the future into your expectations.

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