Expectations Strangle Creativity - In Order To Be Freer, Remove All Expectations

Hey guys,

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boomshakha and I welcome you to my channel,

To my podcast,

To wherever you guys are listening to me from.

I hope that you guys are enjoying my content and that you're learning from it.

In this specific video,

I want to speak to you guys about expectations and how expectations strangle people's creativity,

Strangle people's lives,

Strangle everything that is available to them.

I think doubt goes really hand in hand with expectations but I'm going to focus specifically on expectations in this video because I've been thinking a lot about this in regards to my own creativity and the books that I write,

The fiction that I write.

When I start a particular story,

No matter what it is,

No matter where the idea comes to me from,

I'll start writing something and it'll start off being something specific.

Maybe it's a science fiction novel about a robot or perhaps it's a dystopian novel.

However it starts off,

As time goes on,

It kind of permeates,

It kind of changes into something completely different.

It becomes its own organic entity.

It becomes a living entity that kind of takes on its own shape and molds itself depending on what I give it and also what life experiences I have and what's going on in the world right now.

I'm taking things from everywhere in order to create the story.

But in my mind,

When I first started writing the story,

I always have a kind of fantasy about the novel that I'm going to write.

I have this kind of really distorted fantasy that says that it's going to look in a certain way.

I have this expectation about how it's going to look.

I have this idea in my mind that when I start writing the novel,

It's going to show up in a certain manner on the page.

So it's in my head.

I might have a dream about it and I might have this whole story in my head and I think wow this sounds really cool.

I want to write it out.

In my head,

It is a certain entity.

When I actually put it down on paper or on the computer,

It looks completely different.

It's a completely different entity.

It has its own organic shape.

It has its own organic personality.

And so it's the same thing kind of I guess the idea behind the parents trying to shape their kids to be a certain way but then you realize when you have children that they are born with their own personalities and there's really nothing you can do about it.

Maybe you can teach them a little bit but every single parent that I've met has told me and dog parents,

Animal parents or just like human parents,

Everyone always tells me the same thing that their pups or their kittens or their cats,

Dogs,

Hamsters,

Whatever it might be or their babies,

Male,

Female,

They always are born with a certain personality.

They're already born with it.

They already have certain inclinations.

Yes,

You can kind of direct them in a certain way but they have their own ways of doing things and you can kind of either let them be independent and do their own thing except that they don't get hurt doing something.

You just can't direct them in the right direction or you kind of try to force them into a box and tell them,

No,

This is the way you are but I want you to fit into this specific box.

Coming back to my story idea,

When I do write these novels or these stories,

I kind of go through two phases as well.

As a parent always does,

I kind of have this phase where I'm thinking to myself,

I have this beautiful idea in my head and it never actually of course comes out right when I write it on paper.

When I start writing for some reason,

Different thoughts come in and different ideas and all of this stuff comes out and when I actually put it on paper,

It looks completely different.

Now I can go through two phases in that regard.

First of all,

I can be like,

Okay cool,

This is its personality.

This is how it wants to show up on the page so I'm going to let it show up on the page as it is.

I'm going to be a little bit organic about it.

I'm going to let go.

I'm going to surrender to the idea and allow it to become what it wants to become.

That's the role of the writer I believe.

You kind of have to just allow it to happen.

You're not the writer,

You're not the person who's actually coming up with the story obviously.

It's your muse and your muse is sitting there trying to encourage you to let the story form in its own way.

It's happening organically.

Or you could be stubborn about it and sometimes I do go through phases where I think to myself,

No,

I want the story to look exactly how it was as it was in my head.

I have these expectations for it.

I wanted to grow up and be a doctor.

I wanted to grow up and be an engineer.

I don't want to be an artist.

I don't want it to be a dystopian novel.

I don't want it to be this.

I want it to be that.

So we have all of these expectations that I put on my stories,

On my dystopian novels or whatever novel I'm writing and then parents put on their children and everyone puts on everyone else around them.

I've noticed for me specifically with regards to my creativity if I just focus on that particularly,

It really does strangle my creativity.

Every single time I do that to my novel,

When I try to make it into something that it's not,

When I try to push it into a box,

When I try to strangle it and make it or kind of manipulate it into something that it doesn't want to be,

My story starts fading.

I'll be writing and I'll be really into it and suddenly I'll start censoring myself or I'll start saying oh maybe this is not exactly how it's supposed to go or I'll start putting expectations on it and all of a sudden the story dies off and it doesn't feel right anymore.

That's not until I go back to its original way of wanting to be.

It has a certain desire that it wants to be a certain way,

It wants to look a certain way and it wants to behave a certain way and instead of actually putting it into a box,

I let it do that.

I'm just like alright cool,

If you want to go in that direction,

Fine,

Let's do it.

I'm just a conduit.

I'm not the actual writer,

The muse sitting somewhere in this room or wherever I am and she's telling me,

She or he is telling me to do things in a certain way and instead of listening to her who knows better than me,

Do I actually really know where the story needs to go?

I have no idea,

I'm just a conduit.

And the same way I think expectations are strangling relationships,

Expectations strangling children,

All of that stuff I think applies to everything in life.

If you have expectations about anything,

I feel like you have already put yourself into a box.

You've already put yourself into a very specific way or mode of doing things.

Even though there might be new information coming at you and telling you that you should go in a certain other direction because you feel like you have these expectations,

You have these ideas,

You have these really maybe outdated ideas about something but you have these ideas in your head and you think to yourself,

No,

I already know how I want things to go.

I already know where I want things to go.

I'm not going to let these new ideas that are coming in,

New fangled ideas interrupt me or change the way I'm doing things.

I'm going to keep on doing things the way I'm doing.

I have these expectations and I'm going to let my expectations guide me into the future.

Unfortunately,

Especially right now in this world right now where things change so fast,

I think if you are living in a way where you lived four or five years ago even,

I think it's going to be very difficult for you because as I said,

Things change so fast in this world right now that I feel like we always have to be adapting to the way things are happening.

Everything is always changing every single day and more so I think with technology and with this world that we live in right now,

Things are changing on a daily basis sometimes.

You might wake up someday and the government has changed and you can go to sleep and you wake up again and something else is happening.

You think to yourself,

Wow,

How am I supposed to keep track of everything that's going on?

That's alright in the real world or in the physical world but for ourselves,

I feel like we are strangling our creativity,

We are strangling our will to live,

Our hope or the way that we want to live in the world if we have a lot of expectations on ourselves.

I know for myself specifically when I have too many expectations upon myself,

I feel exhausted by it.

It's actually physically and mentally and spiritually exhausting because expectations are just boxes that we're placing ourselves into and the more you squeeze yourself as a round person into a square box,

The harder it's going to be.

It's going to be suffocating.

You're not going to be able to breathe and you're going to want to run away from the situation.

This is what happens to me every single time I try to squeeze myself into one of these expectation boxes.

I just want to run away.

I just want to throw everything away.

I want to run away far away,

Change my name,

Change my identity and just forget about all the different things I did because it's just too suffocating.

It's just too tiresome to live like that.

All in all to say that if you are living in a certain way where you have a lot of expectations for yourself,

Perhaps try to release some of the grip of that expectation.

Expectations might be not the right word for you.

You might have a different word for it.

Whatever word is,

The word doesn't matter.

The idea still remains is that we are as human beings always looking at our older paradigms to run our current life.

We always use our old paradigms,

The way we lived when we were 14 perhaps,

When we lived when we were 10,

When we were born,

When we were 5 years old.

We have all these ideas that we've collected over a long period of time and instead of kind of letting new ideas come in and using those ideas to live our life differently,

We kind of live the way sometimes that we lived when we were 5 years old or 15 years ago or whatever it might be.

The whole thing about this situation or this podcast or this episode is for you guys to kind of start paying attention to it and think about how you can move in a direction where maybe not everything has to be changed of course but certain parts of your life can be changed or tweaked a little bit so that you're not letting those expectations strangle whatever it is that is strangling.

Your creativity,

Your love for life,

Your aliveness,

Your joy,

Whatever it is,

Your play mode,

Making sure that you're always living as fresh in this world as possible.

Again,

I hope this makes sense to you guys.

I hope I've been able to explain myself to you.

If you guys have any questions at all,

Please message me anytime.

All of my contact information is in the description below and I shall see you guys in the next video or in the next podcast episode.

Bye for now.