When Experience Becomes Expectation

My husband and I were heading out on one of our adventures, driving along a road close to home, when I noticed a man standing at the side of the road with a black dog beside him. Nothing particularly unusual about that. Except the dog appeared to be standing upright on its hind legs. Now, dogs occasionally stand on their hind legs, obviously, however this one was simply standing there beside the man, apparently quite comfortable with its newly acquired ability to behave like a human.

I was in the passenger seat and the whole thing caught my attention precisely because it looked so odd. As we drove closer and then past, I turned to get a proper look. It wasn't a black dog. It was a child wearing a black raincoat. I know, right? How on earth did I manage to see a black dog standing on its hind legs instead of a child dressed in a black raincoat? I was completely flummoxed.

And I should probably point out that this entire experience happened within seconds. My husband was driving, I glanced towards the side of the road, saw the man and the mysterious upright dog, looked again and realised I was actually looking at a child. There was no lengthy period during which I seriously believed we'd encountered some remarkably talented local canine. And yet it fascinated me.

My immediate question was: Why did I see a dog? And almost as quickly came another thought: Children don't wear black. They wear bright colours. Well, clearly children do wear black because one had just been standing beside the road wearing a black raincoat. Yet somewhere amongst my expectations was apparently an idea of what children looked like, and black clothing didn't fit particularly neatly into it. Which left me with the rather amusing possibility that, for those few seconds at least, my mind found a black dog casually standing on two legs easier to make sense of than a child wearing black.

I have no idea whether that expectation was actually why I mistook the child for a dog. There are plenty of other possibilities. We were moving. I saw the scene briefly and from a distance. There was a dark shape beside an adult and I didn't initially have much visual information to work with. Movement, angle, distance, expectation or some combination of all of them could have contributed to what I thought I saw.

What interested me, though, wasn't really why I saw the dog. It was how quickly I decided that I had seen one. For those few seconds, I wasn't thinking, There is an ambiguous black shape beside that man and I shall reserve judgement until further visual information becomes available. I saw a dog. Then I looked again. And suddenly the same scene meant something completely different.

That tiny, ridiculous moment made me think about how often we do something similar in less obvious ways. Our minds don't approach every situation completely free of context. We bring previous experiences with us. We have expectations, habits, associations and things we've learned over many years, some of which we may barely notice until something challenges them.

Usually, of course, this is far less entertaining than turning a child into a dog. Sometimes it's an assumption about ourselves. I'm not good enough to apply for that. I'll embarrass myself if I speak up. People like me don't do things like that. I always get this wrong. If I already believe I'm going to embarrass myself, perhaps I stay quiet. If I assume I'm not good enough for an opportunity, perhaps I don't apply. If I've come to expect criticism, perhaps a fairly neutral comment feels more loaded to me than somebody intended it to be.

The belief hasn't magically created external reality. Yet, it may influence what I notice, how I interpret what happens and what I decide to do next. And sometimes the really interesting part is that I may not immediately recognise the assumption as an assumption. It can simply feel true.

Where Did I Get That Idea?

We often hear phrases such as ‘limiting beliefs’, ‘learned beliefs’, ‘subconscious beliefs’ or ‘unconscious patterns’, and those terms can be useful as long as we don't turn them into an explanation for everything. Some ideas may have been around for so long that we genuinely don't remember where they came from. Perhaps something was repeatedly said within our family when we were young. Perhaps school taught us something about what we were or were not good at. Perhaps a relationship affected what we came to expect from other people.

However, beliefs and expectations don't only develop during childhood. Workplaces can influence them. Adult relationships can influence them. A single significant experience might stay with us, while repeated experiences can gradually create an expectation we begin carrying into situations that haven't actually happened yet. Culture, family, friendships and the things we repeatedly see and hear may all contribute.

And sometimes we simply make assumptions. Apparently children never wearing black is one of mine. What becomes useful, I believe, is noticing when one of those assumptions starts influencing us strongly enough that we want to look at it more closely. Where did I get that idea? Not necessarily because we need to find an origin story for every belief we hold, rather because the question creates a little space around something that previously felt unquestionable. Is it actually true? Is it always true? Am I responding entirely to what's happening now, or is something I've experienced before influencing how I'm seeing this? Does this still fit who I am and the life I'm living today? We may decide the belief is perfectly reasonable. Or we may realise we've been treating an old conclusion as though it were a current fact.

Sometimes even behaviours that seem to work against something we consciously want can begin to make more sense when we become curious about the fear, belief or previous experience underneath them. Not because finding the belief automatically changes the behaviour, rather because at least we can see a little more of what might be influencing it.

When Experience Becomes Expectation

Living abroad has given me some uncomfortable opportunities to notice this in myself.

When we live amongst people from different countries and cultures, we inevitably encounter ways of communicating and behaving that may be different from what we're accustomed to. Sometimes those encounters expand our understanding enormously because we discover that something we had previously assumed about another culture simply doesn't survive meeting the actual people within it. Difficult experiences, though, can create expectations too. I noticed this in myself through some of my working relationships. I had experiences with individual Italian and Moroccan colleagues whose communication I interpreted as considerably more aggressive or hot-headed than the style I was accustomed to. The important words there are I interpreted. Those were individual people, in individual situations, and my response to their communication was also being filtered through my own expectations about what communication ‘should’ sound like.

Yet if we aren't paying attention, a handful of experiences can become something much bigger in our minds. Instead of: Those particular people communicated in a way I found difficult. it can quietly become: People from that country communicate like this.

I noticed something similar after a difficult experience with a manager from India. Afterwards, I became aware that I could feel more cautious around some other Indian people before they'd actually done anything to warrant my caution. That was uncomfortable to recognise. It was also important. Because the new person in front of me wasn't my former manager. And if I entered an interaction already expecting something difficult, I was no longer responding only to the person who was actually there. Part of the story had already been supplied by an earlier experience.

So the question became: What is this person actually doing? Not what did somebody from the same country do previously? Not what have I begun expecting? What is happening here?

Living abroad has challenged plenty of my assumptions in the opposite direction too. I've met people who completely contradicted ideas I hadn't even realised I'd absorbed about particular countries, cultures or ways of living. Sometimes the assumption survives experience. Sometimes experience changes it. And sometimes, rather like the child in the black raincoat, reality is standing directly in front of us asking us to look again.

When the Belief is About Ourselves

Perhaps this becomes even harder to notice when the assumption isn't about somebody else. It's about us. If I've spent years thinking, I'm terrible at this, I may not experience that as a belief. It may simply feel like an accurate description of me. Then every mistake becomes evidence. Every success can be dismissed as luck, timing or an exception. Perhaps I avoid opportunities that would allow me to discover whether the belief is still true. And if I never test it, it can remain comfortably unchallenged.

That doesn't mean we can simply replace every uncomfortable belief with a lovely positive one and transform our lives. Sometimes our concerns are realistic. Sometimes we're genuinely inexperienced at something. Sometimes previous experiences have given us good reason to be cautious. And sometimes the belief contains a mixture of truth, fear and assumptions we've never really examined.

That's why I'm increasingly interested in curiosity rather than immediately trying to replace one thought with another. What am I assuming here? What evidence am I actually responding to? Have I decided what is going to happen before it happens? Is this something I know, or something I've come to expect? Those can be surprisingly difficult questions to answer from inside our own thinking because, rather inconveniently, we're using the same mind that formed the assumption to examine it.

Sometimes another perspective helps. Personal Support can offer space to explore recurring beliefs, assumptions or patterns and become curious about where they may be coming from and whether they still fit, without pretending we can simply ‘reprogramme’ ourselves into an entirely different life. Because I don't think the aim is to become suspicious of every thought we have. That just sounds exhausting. Nor do we need to spend our lives excavating ourselves for hidden subconscious beliefs in case one of them is secretly ruining everything. Most of the time, I imagine I'll continue making thousands of perfectly ordinary assumptions without giving them a second thought.

Occasionally, though, one catches my attention. Perhaps because I keep responding to the same situation in the same way. Perhaps because I hear myself saying I always..., I never... or people like me don't... Or perhaps because reality gives me something that doesn't quite fit the picture I've already formed. Like a child wearing a black raincoat.

For a few seconds that day, I was completely convinced I was looking at something that wasn't there. Then I looked again. Nothing mind-blowing happened. I didn't uncover some great hidden truth about myself. I discovered that the strangely talented black dog beside the road was actually a child. And yet I've remembered that moment because it showed me how quickly an interpretation can feel like reality when I haven't yet stopped to question it.

And perhaps that's worth remembering when the interpretation matters considerably more than whether I'm looking at a child or an unusually accomplished dog. We don't need to question everything. However, when a familiar belief, assumption or expectation keeps shaping what we notice, what we avoid or what we believe is possible for us, perhaps we can become curious enough to do what I did from the passenger seat that day. Look again.