Years ago I had a partner named John Thomas. He was a man of many talents, but one the most impressive was that he frequently drove into a crowded parking lot and found really good parking place. I usually ended walking long distances to get to the same place.

I asked him how he did that. “Just lucky I guess.”

Finally I figured it out. Luck really didn’t have anything to do with it. John just expected to find a good parking place so he drove all the way down the row. On the other hand, thinking there was nothing any closer, I would grab the first empty space I found. And walk. It was all a matter of expectations.

I’d like to say that I learned a valuable lesson from John, but I still grab empty parking places a long way from my destination. Sometimes low expectations are just part of our DNA, and they cause problems way beyond hiking to the mall entrance.

The whole parking place scenario is a relatively trivial example of what I think is an important point: our expectations impact our lives and the lives of others. We think that what we see in the world around us is real, not considering that it is colored, sometimes violently, by our own expectations. It follows that if we change our expectations, we can affect that reality.

There are a multitude of studies showing that when teachers have low expectations of students, the students perform at a lower level. If the teacher has higher expectations, performance improves. Although I don’t know of any scholarly research on the subject, I suspect the same thing is true of employers and employees. If we don’t expect much, we generally get what we expect.

And it’s true in personal relationships. Thousands, maybe millions of “discussions” between spouses have ended with at least one of them having a confused look on his or her face, wondering “What did I say?”

Or you get the following early morning dialog:

“Good morning.”

“What do you mean by that?”

It’s like the story of the man driving down the dark road late one night. His tire blows out, and when he looks in the trunk, he discovers he has no jack. His options are to go find a jack or to spend the night in the car and then go find a jack. He chooses the first option and begins trudging down the road. After a while he sees the silhouette of a farm house.

“Maybe they have a jack,” he thinks.

He notices that there were no lights on in the house. He figures that no lights means the people living there are asleep.  He wonders how they’ll feel if he wakes them up.

“Ticked off if I bet,” he thinks. ““I don’t think I’d lend somebody something if they woke me up at this time of night.  There’s no way they’re going to want to help me. In fact, I’ll probably be lucky if they don’t shoot me or worse. It’s not my fault that it’s midnight. But will they think about that. No, they won’t. All they’ll think about is that I interrupted their precious sleep.”

By then he’s at the house. He knocks on the door.

The farmer comes to the door, opens it.

“Can I help you?” the farmer says.

“Just keep your damn jack,” the man says and stomps off.

When we go into a conversation expecting anger, almost anything said confirms it. If we expect criticism, almost anything said sounds like criticism. If we predetermine that someone is going to disappoint us, they probably will. Everything is loaded with our preconceptions. And our preconceptions impact us and all the people around us. Although I can’t prove it from personal experience, I believe that can be changed. I believe that we can shed the chip that we carry on our shoulder and be a lot happier for it.

However, doing that will require at least two things.

The first is not fearing disappointment. There is an old saying (which means I didn’t just make it up) that says we should hope for the best, expect the worst, and we’ll never be disappointed. I’ve subscribed to that for years, but now it occurs to me that it presents an impossible dichotomy: it is difficult, if not impossible to really hope for the best if you walk around expecting the worst. Yet, realistically, I know that I won’t always live up to my high expectations, and neither will anyone else. I have to accept that I will occasionally be disappointed, but that, in my opinion, is better than being chronically pessimistic.

The second thing is that I have to take action to make change. Wishing—or even expecting—won’t make it so. This year I made a resolution to raise my expectations for myself and others. The year’s still early and I haven’t made a lot of progress, but I’m taking it a day at the time. These are the things I’m trying to do:

I expect good outcomes and not simply accept the first reasonably decent alternative, whether it’s a parking place or something actually important. I expect the people around me to treat me well, to tell me the truth, and to show me love and respect. I try to make sure that they can expect the same from me.

I try to listen to what’s actually said, rather than what my mood tells me is being said. This means that if I expect the person I’m talking with to be courteous and if I perceive something as rude, I need to reexamine it rather than respond to it. (I’m making a blanket exception to this for anyone who begins, “I’m going to be brutally honest.” Generally this is a prelude to genuine rudeness. I may also make an exception to those who introduce personal attacks into disagreements. This happens a lot on Facebook where it takes the place of actual knowledge.)

And, finally, when I am disappointed in the outcomes, I’ll start step one again, knowing that I shouldn’t ask anyone to be better than I am. And I know I have disappointed a lot of people in my time.