Copyright © 2005 Melissa Jean Quiter
Do you ever look around your life and think, “This isn’t the
life I wanted. How did I get here? This is not what I
envisioned!”
Well, you certainly aren’t alone in that thought. In fact, my
clients so often share this thought with me that I have given it
its own name. I call this “Being Caught in the Expectation Gap.”
The “expectation gap” is the gap between living the life you
think you are creating and living the life you are actually
creating. Dissatisfaction, frustration and disillusionment are
experienced most prevalently when you expect one thing to happen
and something else entirely shows up.
The truth is that you are always creating. You are the sole
creator and attractor of all experiences in your life. Now,
don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe you fall into the
“expectation gap” when you are creating using all your tools and
resources. Quite the contrary. You fall into the “expectation
gap” when you are only aware of what your conscious mind is
desiring and you are ignoring the other 88% of your mind – your
subconscious mind, where all the other amazing parts of you live
with a multitude of desires.
Every person, you included, has multiple parts that make up the
whole of who you are. These parts of you live in your
subconscious mind. They are the various aspects of your
personality that make you the rich and complex human being that
you are. Each part of you has one primary function -- an
intention as it were – something it wishes to provide you or
ensure for you. And every intention, at its core, is always good
and chosen with your best interest at heart. Now, the way these
various parts ensure their intentions are being met is through
the use of behaviors. The behaviors that you display are
actually driven by these various parts of you happily fulfilling
their intentions for you.
The hiccup to this system comes when a part of you chooses a
behavior that is limited or contradictory to another part of
you. This is when you experience what is called a conflicting
intention. Every part does have your best interest at heart, but
it cannot always see the full picture (or the picture changes
after an initial behavior is chosen). Thus, if you are not
consciously seeking to know all the aspects of yourself and how
all the various environments that make up your life interact,
like relationships, finances, career, health, etc., you will
find yourself experiencing conflicting intentions that block you
from creating and manifesting what you believe you are creating.
You cannot focus your pure energy on two completely opposite
intentions. Thus, you end up creating the one that gets the most
energy, if you are aware of it or not. And, ultimately, you end
up in the “expectation gap” frustrated, confused and back to the
original thought of this article – not living the life you
envisioned.
For example, if a part of you wants to get a raise at work
because you have a baby on the way, that part knows you must
work longer hours to prove you deserve more money. The behavior
chosen is to go into work earlier and stay later. The more you
work, the more people rely on this behavior continuing. When the
baby comes, another part of you -- the part of you that loves
your new baby -- emerges. You desire to spend time with your new
child and show it love, affection and protection. However, the
behavior that you are still “choosing” is working many long
hours at the office. It appears, though, that it is not really
“your choice” as there is just so much on your plate and people
expect you to be there as you have been. You may look at your
life at this moment and not really understand. You may ask, “Why
me? Why am I always the one that gets stuck with all the extra
work? All I really want is to be at home with my baby. Isn’t
that what is really important in life?” In reality, you have
simply created two intentions and, in this situation, they
actually are based on the same overall intention – to provide
for your baby. However, by not acknowledging your own assessment
that in order to provide for your baby, you need more money and
that means longer hours, you feel that you are not creating the
life you want now. You think your life is being controlled by
the requirements of your job and to the detriment of your family
life. In truth, you have two beliefs that are butting heads
because they are not being integrated.
Creating is something that you do naturally. You either create
deliberately, by knowing what is happening in all the areas of
your life and how they fit together, or you do it by default, by
being only consciously aware of what you are creating and
ignoring all those other aspects of yourself that are also
playing a very active and influential role in the creation of
your reality.
When you don’t take into account the whole you and your
responsibility for what is happening in your life, you become a
person living at effect (instead of at cause). The universal Law
of Cause and Effect says – for every cause there is a
reciprocating effect and for every effect there is a preceding
cause. When you are creating by default – without full awareness
of all the desires, intentions and aspects of the whole you --
you cease to be in the power space of cause. You are not
deliberately causing the events of your life, you are responding
to them. This is when you end up in the “expectation gap.”
Understanding the powerful creator inside of you is the first
step in deliberately manifesting the desires most important to
you. By breaking down your life into the segments that create
it, what I call the Nine Environments of Holistic Living, you
give yourself the opportunity to see what you truly desire and
where your energy is being distributed. This is how you discover
that you may have one intention (as displayed by one behavior or
desire) in one part of your life and have another intention
(displayed by another behavior or desire) in another part of
your life that is opposite. Without taking the time to
articulate each desire, what it means to you and why, you often
are not aware of what the whole you is truly up to.
Once you do get the full picture, you then must seek out the
possible conflicts. These conflicts are at the core of the
“expectation gap.” When you have two competing desires, you end
up sabotaging either one or both of the desires. No matter how
much you positively focus your energy, you negate it with the
other desire. In my program, “Being Spiritual Doesn’t’ Mean
Being Poor! How to remove what blocks you from making money &
creating happiness,” I offer 17 questions for each desire to get
at its core. I then offer a comparison exercise for each of
those questions to ferret out the competing forces. You can do
this on your own, though, by simply comparing desires from one
environment to the other. When you do find the conflicts, you
have found the saboteur keeping you from manifesting.
The next step is clearing up your space so you can create what
you truly want. There are many programs and exercises available
to assist in this process. You cannot skip this step. You cannot
focus pure energy with cluttered space. My preference, for
meeting the aspects of yourself holding competing intentions, is
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, also known as NLP. NLP is an
advanced form of communication that can be used with others, but
more importantly, with yourself. You can go beyond the conscious
mind into the subconscious mind where your intentions, beliefs
and behaviors are structured to make the changes needed for
clearing. However you choose to achieve this step, it is
imperative to deliberately creating the life you desire.
In the end, when you are aware of the whole you and what you are
creating, my favorite method for bringing it all together is the
Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction is based on Quantum
Physics and the idea that everything is energy. It says: That
which you focus your attention on is what you create more of in
your life – wanted or unwanted. Learning to raise your
vibrations to attract more of what you want and less of what you
don’t want allows you to take direct and indirect action toward
the creation of your life. A tool that I created to offer a
daily structure for engaging my creator is the Process of
Deliberate Creation. This process gives me what I need on a
daily basis to practice and master being the creator of the life
I want to be living.
Simply becoming aware of the whole you and uncovering those
conflicting intentions will have a huge impact on the
manifestation of your desires. When you have a clean slate from
which to create from, the tools for creating come much easier
and provide amazing success. I encourage you to begin the
journey. The rewards are nothing short of living your dream
life!
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