Be Kind to Yourself: The Expectation Nobody Asked You to Meet

Something didn’t get done last week.

Nobody chased it. Nobody mentioned it. And somehow that made it sit heavier rather than lighter, because now you’re carrying it on your own.

Four Tuesdays went by recently where I didn’t post. I was ill for two of them. The other two were already half written and ready to go, and they still didn’t go out. I spent every one of those Tuesdays certain that everyone had noticed.

Nobody else was bothered.

Why do we feel certain that everyone noticed?

Because we’re anchored on our own experience and we can’t fully adjust out of it.

The effect has a name. Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky called it the spotlight effect, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000.

Their method was simple enough to be a bit funny. They asked participants to put on a t-shirt with an embarrassing image on the front, walk into a room of other people, and then guess how many of them would be able to say afterwards what was on the shirt. The wearers guessed roughly double the real number.

They ran it again with a flattering shirt, and again with a group discussion where people rated how prominent their own good and bad contributions had been. The pattern held each time.

The later studies explain why. You experience your own lapse in high definition. You know what you meant to do, when you decided you couldn’t, and how it sat with you afterwards. Everyone else gets a fraction of that, and you can’t turn your own version down far enough to work out how small theirs is.

Does anyone actually mind when you miss something?

Less than you’d expect, and not because they’re being generous about it.

Noticing and minding are two different things, and the same research group went on to test the second one. When people were made to fail publicly, or were put in an embarrassing position and asked how harshly they’d be judged for it, they consistently overshot. Observers gave them more room than they gave themselves, partly because observers can see everything else going on and the person in the middle of it cannot.

The Tuesday you spent lying still was, for everybody else, a Tuesday.

That’s worth a minute if you run a business, because the fear is rarely about being seen. It’s about what being seen would cost. Reputation, trust, the sense that you’re someone who does what they said they’d do. The evidence says the audience for that is a good deal smaller, and a good deal kinder, than the one you’re imagining.

Where did your bare minimum come from?

You set it.

Mine has never once been the actual bare minimum. There’s who I am on a bad day and who I’ve decided I should be, and the two come apart more often than I’d like.

Seven in the morning every Tuesday was my rule. No client asked for it. No platform requires it. I set it on a day when it made good sense, and then I was the only one checking it on days when it didn’t.

Most of the owners I work with have one of these somewhere. A rule set years ago, in a business half the size, that hasn’t been looked at since.

How do you tell a real expectation from one you invented?

Four questions, and they take about a minute.

Who set it. If the answer is you, keep going.

When. An expectation set in a version of the business that no longer exists is describing a company you don’t run any more.

Who checks it. The honest answer is usually no one, though it doesn’t feel that way from the inside.

What happened the last time you missed it. Not what you were afraid of. What happened.

The last question is the one that does the work, and it’s the one that gets skipped, because missing the mark feels bad enough that we don’t go back and look at the result.

What do you do while it’s still in your head?

Breathe out for longer than you breathe in.

A long, audible exhale is one of the few things you can do on purpose that your body responds to without being talked into it. A controlled trial out of Stanford put daily exhale-focused breathing up against mindfulness meditation over a month, and the breathing came out ahead on both mood and measured physiological arousal. Five minutes a day.

Mine is one breath in, one out, and a sigh loud enough to hear. Then I say the thing out loud. It doesn’t fix the expectation. It interrupts the loop for long enough that I can go and look at it.

Why does this turn up as a ceiling?

Because a rule you can’t put down will eventually decide what the business is allowed to do.

By the time it reaches me it almost never presents as an expectations problem. It presents as an owner who can’t delegate, or a business that stalls at the same revenue three years running, or a founder who’s tired in a way that a holiday doesn’t fix. The numbers describe a capacity problem. Underneath it there’s often a rule somebody set in 2019 and has been quietly meeting ever since.

Financials are good at pointing at that without ever naming it. Reading what they’re pointing at is the part most owners have never been shown.

Quick answers

What is the spotlight effect?

The tendency to overestimate how much other people notice our appearance, our actions and our mistakes. Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky documented it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000, and found people anchor on their own vivid experience of an event and then adjust insufficiently for the fact that nobody else shared it.

Do people judge you as harshly as you think when you miss something?

No. Across several studies people overestimated both how much others noticed a lapse and how badly they’d be judged for it. Observers take in the wider situation, while the person who dropped the ball is looking only at the ball.

Does sighing calm you down?

Yes, and faster than talking yourself round. A Stanford controlled trial found five minutes a day of exhale-focused breathing improved mood and lowered physiological arousal more than an equivalent period of mindfulness meditation over a month.

How do I know whether an expectation I hold myself to is reasonable?

Ask who set it, when it was set, who checks it, and what happened the last time it was missed. An expectation you set yourself, in an older version of the business, that no one checks and whose consequences you’ve never tested, is worth revisiting.

Worth going back and checking what actually happened the last time you missed it. Usually nothing happened, and you’ve been paying for it anyway.

If there’s a rule in your business you’ve never put down, and you’re starting to wonder whether it’s holding something up, I’d love to be the person you think it through with. #GetGroundedWithGrace