Do you have expectations?  I know I do.  I am pretty certain it is safe too say that most people have them at some point in time for various reasons.  Ever find yourself to be let down and disappointed by the expectations we not only place on ourselves but those we inadvertently place on other people?  Hello, my name is Jessica and I am embarrassed to say I am the expectation queen.  This my friends is something I am consistently working on.  We create these unspoken rules and standards we expect people to live up too, and when they don’t, enter disappointment.  But have we ever even shared what these so called “expectations” are with the other party?  Probably not.  And how about those expectations we place on ourselves?  Are they even realistic? Mostly likely that is a big fat NO. 

I know for myself, the expectation sometimes extends past what I put on myself but becomes this disillusioned expectation of life itself.  Remember when you were little and you told yourself by this age I will be married, have two kids, a house on a hill, a Mercedes in the garage and …….  Maybe you weren’t that little girl, but I sure was.  And every time a milestone age, or so I thought passed, and I had yet to reach that expectation I placed on myself, let the inner mean girl set in.

Let me share a little recent story about expectation.  When the Cow Boss and I decided to jump in with both feet on this cattle raising journey, we had unspoken grand illusions of how “We were going to do things different”.  Perhaps it was an over abundance of excitement, sprinkled with some naivety, and a will to set the world on fire.  Whatever it was it came slapping us in the face, real hard.  Be firm about your goals, but flexible about the path to reaching them.  I’m gunna just leave that right there for a moment.  Having spent an inordinate amount of time working for other people, it makes it pretty simple to be the Monday morning quarter back.  We have all done it.  “Well if these were mine, I’d do it this way”. 

Well the day came, and the “well if these were mine” were ours.  And so we did it our way.  The best way we could with the resources we had.  Insert the overwhelming disappointment.  Never did it ever occur that the vision in our head would most definitely NOT match the reality of the situation.  The leases we ran had less than desirable facilities, in fact most were nonexistent.  We had boughten cattle, and at the end of the day, whenever you are buying ANYTHING, a house, car, animal, someone else has had before, you are essentially buying what someone else didn’t want.  Plain and simple.  So we had a wild bunch of snuffy, fence jumping, pack your lunch and eat it for you too, ole girls.  To say they were easy to gather or sort or process would be, well it just was what it was.  But hey, we were first generation the heck out of this cattle thing.  The reason I share this is not for the sympathy.  We at some level knew what we were getting ourselves into when we bought them.  And nothing is as hard as the first year.  And believe you me, whenever we slightly begin to forget any and all of it, we are gently reminded by the good man upstairs.  But in his sometimes uncomfortable ways of reminding also lies the blessing.  There is always a bigger more important lesson.  A compassion for sharing and others.

 The other thing is I hope that saying this doesn’t bring judgement either.  The comments of “huh what did you expect” or the classic “newbies”.  I think if anything this whole experience taught me to really embrace kindness and grace.  Sometimes the attitude of “well I would have done it this way” is the poorest attitude of all.  And I am sad to say, I had it more than I ever care to admit.  What we didn’t realize at the time was those other people were doing the BEST they could with what they HAD.  And yes, maybe some of that “well my Daddy’s Daddy did it this way” is ever present too.  But you know what, it’s their cattle and the expectation of how I wanted it done, should have never been part of the equations.  In fact I should have entered the situation with humbleness that I was even invited to be a part of it.  No judgement, just thankfulness.  And as hard as that lesson was to learn, it has overwhelmingly changed my heart for the better.  And that my friends, is where I am today.  Year one of ranching taught me to leave the judgement and expectation behind.  It taught me to be firm in my convictions, but flexible in my methods.  And as hard as the expectation I had put on myself was, the feeling of the expectation and judgement I thought I felt from others was even worse.  Whether it was really there or not, I put that feeling and emotion in my head.  And let me say this loud and clear, because this is what I have learned from it all, it is NONE of your business what other people think.  You my dear are doing the absolute best you can do!  And that applies to cattle, momming or just plain life.

So the moral of my EXPECTATIONS story is this.  We all have them, good, bad or different, they are there.  But at the end of the day, they sort of set us up for failure.  Standards, yes, keep them babies set high, but let the process of the journey to reach them, be a little less rigid.  This next statement is a hard one for me to write, in fact it puts a frog in my throat just thinking about writing it.  But once I let the expectations of what I though “cattle ranching” needed to look like for us, and embraced what it really was, life got seemingly more beautiful.  What I mean by that is, once I quit hating on myself for the lack of facilities, and the sometimes spoiled cattle, and the inability to really have one season locked down to the next.  Once I embraced the crazy hot mess of it all.  The volatility of the markets, and leases, and the disappointments, and the lessons being learned, and the whispers being said behind our back. I began to realize, heck we are actually doing this thing.  We, two people with a fiery passion and dream are actually doing it.  We have risked it all, jumped off the deep end with both feet, and are chasing this wild ass (pardon my French) dream, because we can.  And the reason we can, is because the good Lord allowed it.  If he didn’t want it for us, as messy as it has been, it would have never happened.  And maybe that is the silver lining.  Maybe the opportunity we have been given, is to share this story, our story, the real one.  Not the one everyone else is telling.  Not the one we think we need to tell.  Not the one the movies or magazines highlight.  Our story.  And if I can encourage just one person to jump off the ledge and follow that little burning passion in their heart, then hallelujah.  Mission accomplished.  Successful people don’t go through life success from success.  They go through life failure to failure.  But they use those failures as lessons and tools to keep learning, growing, and striving.  Winston Churchill said it best, “Success consist of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”.  If it was easy everyone would do it.  The key, I think, is to just keep showing up.  It’s easy to quit.  Successful people just keep showing up.  So as for expectations, throw them out the window.  Or at least that is what I am planning to do with mine.  Embrace the here and now and the what if…….  But what I can tell you, those convictions and goals, they my friend are firm.  But my methods and paths, they will definitely be far more flexible.  Stay in the middle my friends, and at the very least keep believing in YOU, because I do.