It's all about perspective

I've been on a little bit of a health kick of late, I've been working out and one of the things that I do after exercising is I have a protein shake.

Why is this important? Because it taught me a little lesson in perspective this morning.

See, I always have the strawberry Muscle Milk. But I decided to change it up a little. The thing about the strawberry is that the package is generally pink, and shows a pinkish shake in the image at the bottom. So I got a chocolate one, which was evidenced by the brown liquid in the image. That's like the universal standard right? We have vanilla is white, strawberry is pink and chocolate is brown. I think we learned this from the Nesquik people at an early age.

First off this shows that I'm way more visually aware than I am by reading. I basically saw chocolate, and assumed that it was a chocolate protein shake.

I'm walking my dog and drinking my chocolate protein shake and thinking that this thing tastes terrible. It's just not good chocolate flavor. Something is a little off. That was when I looked at the label and I read that it's chocolate peanut butter. Why is this important? Because once I realized it was chocolate peanut butter it actually tastes pretty good as chocolate peanut butter, it's the same taste as 2 minutes ago but now that I expect it to taste like chocolate peanut butter it's actually pretty good.

That got me to thinking, how many things do I not enjoy because I expect them to be something different than they really are? How many times have I kept a very rigid definition of something and that has caused me to become frustrated with it?

Once I reframed my expectations of my protein shake, suddenly it was very good at being what it truly was. It was not good at being what I thought it should be.

So for my own enjoyment, I need to make sure my expectations match the reality of the situation, and as a leader I can't expect people to be what they aren't. I need to work more I'd appreciating them for what they are.