#072 What Happens When Great Expectations are Unfulfilled
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When other people dream big for us — or when we dream big for them — what happens when the dream isn't fulfilled? Amanda explores the quiet cost of living inside someone else's expectations, and how to come home to your own vision.
Read the full Show Notes below!
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““Trust yourself enough to know that your vision is enough, and you trust yourself enough to tell others, or to just simply not listen when someone else tries to dream on your behalf.””
Today's Guest
Amanda Parker
Amanda Parker is the host of the Don't Step on the Bluebells podcast and an intuitive guide that helps people to deeply trust their inner wisdom, quiet the external noise, and intentionally create a life fully aligned with their true self. She is a Certified Professional Coach (ICF PCC, CPCC) and spiritual guide using a unique blend of shamanic and energy healing practices to support you on your journey towards inner knowing and deep self-trust.
Amanda is a Reiki Master Healer and a member of the UK Reiki Federation, and has trained in psychic mediumship with the College of Psychic Studies and shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
Amanda has worked in the field of leadership and personal development since 2017 - supporting clients from organizations such as World Bank Group, World Economic Forum, UNICEF, Zalando, Nestle, and LinkedIn. She previously worked in wildlife conservation with the World Wildlife Fund - supporting projects in forest and wetland protection across South America.
Amanda is a native New Yorker who has been living in London for the last 4.5 years, after over a decade in Berlin, Germany. She now lives in North London with her husband and their two cats, Zaki & Oreo.
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Show Notes
Someone I admired once told me I was going to win a lot of awards. She meant it as a gift. And for years afterward, every award season that passed without my name in it, some part of me quietly registered it as a shortfall. Even though winning awards had never been my dream to begin with. It was hers, transposed onto me.
This is what happens when other people dream big things for us. On the surface it feels like love. Underneath, it can start to shape a life we never actually chose.
In this solo episode, I draw on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (by way of an Eddie Izzard one-man show in London) to look at what it does to us when we live inside someone else's vision of who we're supposed to become. I share the story behind that award prediction, and another moment years later when a coach told me to triple my prices and left me paralyzed for six months. Well-meant advice. Real cost.
I also turn the mirror the other way. How easily we do this to the people we love. Projecting our own unfulfilled dreams onto our children, our partners, our clients, our friends. Meaning well, and creating a weight they never asked to carry.
The invitation is to come back to your own center. To trust that you are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. And that the dreams you actually have today, right now, are already enough.
Key Takeaways
Being believed in isn't neutral — when someone tells you what you'll become, their belief becomes a standard you can quietly fall short of every day.
You are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole, and you don't need someone else's vision to point you in the right direction.
The dream someone hands you often says more about their own unfulfilled desires than about who you actually are.
You can want something for someone, but you can't want it more than they do — the sovereignty to choose has to stay with the person living the life.
The vision you have today is already enough to guide you somewhere beautiful; you don't need a grander one to be worth showing up for.
What We Talked About
The Dickens frame: living an entire life in a state of "great expectation" of who you're supposed to become
How being told you'll accomplish great things can feel supportive on the surface and paralyzing underneath
Amanda's story of a WWF colleague telling her she'd win many awards — and the shadow that cast for years
Why unmet expectations often lead to shame and self-doubt, rather than inspiration
How coaches, mentors, and parents can unconsciously hand off their own unfulfilled dreams
The trap of business mentoring — when someone else's strategy becomes the yardstick for your worth
The core coaching principle: we are all naturally creative, resourceful, and whole
How to honor someone else's vision without absorbing it as your own
The invitation to come back to center — to your own inner wisdom — as the primary compass
Trusting that the vision you have today is already enough
Guest Quotes
"As long as you're not there, you're not fulfilling those expectations. You're not fulfilling that dream that someone else had for you. And that can actually, instead of inspiring you to grow into greatness, it can actually have the opposite effect of leading you down a path of shame and worry because you're not quite where you're supposed to be yet."
"It's very often about what they think I could do. And I have to admit, that can be quite paralyzing."
"I cannot want the thing for them more than they want it."
"When engaging with other people, to make sure that we're not overriding what they're actually saying and dreaming of and thinking about by putting our own spin of our own unfulfilled desires on top of their dream."
"We as human beings are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole."
"When we allow someone else's vision for our life to override our own sense of what we want or what matters to us, or when we do that to someone else, we're essentially taking away their sovereignty and decision-making power to lead their own life in the way that feels best for them."
"If someone's dreaming on our behalf, it's not to keep us down, it is genuinely to help us rise up. But I think what I'm arguing here is that it might not actually have anything to do with us. It might say more about their own dreams or desires or wishes that are unfulfilled."
"It's much more helpful when you are reaching towards a vision to think about what is it I actually want to do."
"That sounds like a beautiful vision. Maybe you should consider taking that forward. Here's what matters to me."
"Come back to center to your own true voice, your own inner wisdom, trusting yourself to be able to think of a vision and an idea of the future that excites you."
"Meet yourself where you are with the dreams and the visions that you have today, because those are already spectacular and they're already gonna guide you into a beautiful place in the future."
"Trust yourself enough to know that your vision is enough, and you trust yourself enough to tell others, or to just simply not listen when someone else tries to dream on your behalf."
Resources to Learn More
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens — the novel that gives the episode its frame
Eddie Izzard's one-man performance of Great Expectations — the London stage adaptation Amanda saw
Terms & Tools to Dig Deeper
Come back to center — Amanda's ongoing invitation to return to your own inner voice, wisdom, and knowing as your primary source of guidance, rather than defaulting to external opinions or expectations.
Naturally creative, resourceful, and whole — A foundational coaching principle Amanda learned in her training. It holds that every person already contains what they need to lead their own life, and that the coach's role is not to fix or complete them but to support them in accessing what's already there.
Sovereignty — In this episode, used to mean the right and capacity to lead your own life, make your own decisions, and hold your own vision — without surrendering that authority to someone else, however well-meaning.
Thanks for listening!
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Episode Transcript
Amanda Parker 0:00
It's beautiful that people believe in us, but it's really important that we don't feel that we have to fulfill someone else's dream or vision because we are here to fulfill our own in the way that feels right and aligned and best for us, not what feels aligned and best and right for someone else. Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation take center stage. I'm your host, Amanda Parker, and I'm a fellow seeker on the journey of personal growth. Join me as I delve into the stories of gifted healers, guides, and everyday people who have experienced remarkable transformations. Listen in as they share their practical wisdom to enrich your everyday life. And don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode. Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. Today we are going to be talking about the idea of great expectations. Now, this is a topic that has come up so many times in my life and my coaching. Things that have come up because people have had great expectations of me, or I have had them of others. Now, anyone who is familiar with Charles Dickens' work, you will understand and recognize that phrase, great expectations. Admittedly, I have not read the book, but I did watch a spectacular one-man show with Eddie Izzard, I believe it was last year or the year before, that he put on here in London with Great Expectations, where he was playing 19 characters. And that really gave the story of a man who, from a very young age, had a benefactor who was supporting him. He never knew who that benefactor was, but he had always assumed it was this really wealthy, elite person who wanted him to succeed in life. And he lived his whole life living within these great expectations until he found out who the benefactor actually was. And the story, I won't give away too much of the detail, but was what happens when we live our life in expectation of something, in the expectation that something magical or amazing or beautiful or wonderful or even horrible is going to happen and the impact that that can have on who we are and how we show up and how we live our life. So go read Dickens if you would like to. If not, take as much of that story as feels resonant. And let's dive into the topic for today. So the reason that this topic is so relevant to me, but I believe for so many is because I'm a person who has many different talents. Yes, I'm gonna toot my own horn with that, but I'm not saying it in a way to brag. There's so many different things that I do that I love. I love to speak, I love to write, I love to create, I love leading my business, I love being on stages, I love so many, so many, so many different things that I do in my life. And the thing is that throughout my life, I've always had mentors or cheerleaders or people who have deeply believed in me. And that is an amazing, amazing thing. And as long as they are cheering me on and believing in me and helping to lift me up to my highest and greatest, it's perfect. But the moment that someone switches from being that cheerleader to telling me the great things that I will accomplish or be able to achieve in my life, it sets an expectation for me of what I am supposed to do or what I am supposed to achieve. It sounds so subtle, I know. So bear with me. Because the thing is, I remember once upon a time when I worked at WWF and I was working with a colleague who I absolutely adore, even still to this day. So no shade thrown to her. But she's a woman who won many awards for the conservation work that she was doing. She was continually recognized by local governments, international governments, by people within the WWF community, within the conservation community. She was talked about like a hero. And she really was. And I remember I was quite young and impressionable at that time, always watching this in amazement for all these incredible awards and things that she was achieving. And she told me, you know, Amanda, you're gonna win so many awards throughout your career. I know it. And her intention was good, and she meant it in the most positive and beautiful light. But the truth is that I suddenly was sitting there going, yeah, but win awards for what? How? What am I supposed to do? How do I get those awards? Do I have to change something? And it started this line of questioning within me because winning awards wasn't something that was on my radar. Now, that's not to say that it's not something that could be on my radar. Like, sure, I'd like to win an award or two for the work I'm doing. But what it did was set an expectation of this perceived future of all these awards that I'm gonna win. Now, I can tell you, that was when I was in my 20s. I am 41 now. I have not won all of those awards. I've had recognition, I am the number one UK spirituality creator on LinkedIn. That's pretty exciting. And I have no doubt that this podcast will one day be an award-winning podcast, and there will be other awards as well. But my point here is that someone else dreaming on my behalf created an expectation for myself that suddenly there's something I am either fulfilling or not fulfilling. Now I am a self-proclaimed people pleaser. I have spent so much of my career helping people to stop listening to all the voices around them so that they can hear their own inner voice, their own intuition more clearly, so that they learn how to trust themselves above everything else. And the reason that I teach that is because that is something that has often been a challenge for me. The outside world can get really noisy, it can get really loud. And I can tend to let in so much of that outside influence before I've even had a chance to hear myself. That is why I teach what I teach, because it's what I most need to learn continually and what I'm still always working through. Maybe there will be a day where that's not the lesson I'm teaching anymore. But for now, having those great expectations put on me, that was just a simple example of that. But that can happen more subtly within your family, for example, your parents having great dreams for you, that you should become a lawyer or a doctor, or you need to marry a certain type of person, or that the education that you have is going to lead you to do X, Y, Z. Those are all expectations that come from the outside that someone else is putting on you. And the thing is that it's beautiful that people believe in us, but it's really important that we don't feel that we have to fulfill someone else's dream or vision because we are here to fulfill our own, to contribute to society and the world and our business and our lives and our families and everything else in the way that feels right and aligned and best for us, not what feels aligned and best and right for someone else. I know definitely within my family, there are often dreams that come to light of, oh, I could imagine you doing this, or I can see you building XYZ, all done with love and good intention. But the truth is that I'll decide for myself what it is that I'm building, when, where, and how. And I have plenty of ideas. I'm not running out of ideas anytime soon, that I can guarantee. This may sound familiar to you, this feeling, this sense of having other people almost dream on your behalf. Here's the flip side of the coin. We also do that to other people. And just as I said, that it's often done with love and positive intent. We might also be doing that with love and positive intent for other people who are in our lives, whether that's our professional lives or personal lives. You might have a vision for your partner or the business that they're gonna begin or the career they're gonna build, or the way that they might move up in their career. You might be looking at your own children thinking, oh my God, she's, you know, amazing at drawing. She's gonna be a famous painter one day. And what happens is that these dreams kind of create this great expectation of what is supposed to happen or what is to come. And when that's not fulfilled, there can be a sense of disappointment, or there can be a sense of not being good enough, not having reached the goals that you're quote unquote supposed to be reaching. So I am very practiced within my coaching practice to manage myself to not do that for my clients. Now I'm always dreaming with my clients, helping them to see their own vision and possibly sprinkling in some doses of would this interest you or how would it feel if XYZ? But ultimately it's their choice, whether they say, Yes, I want to do that, that's exciting, or like, no, that doesn't sound like me, don't want it, let it go. And that's a very boundaried and healthy relationship that I have with my coaching clients. With the people who are in our lives more intimately, it's usually messier. So I know my role as the coach is to help bring my client's vision to life, to help them bring their vision to life, I should say, but for me to support them along that journey. But in your personal life, you don't always get to choose that. Every time that we are suddenly telling someone, oh, I can see you on a big stage, or I can see you losing 35 pounds, or I can see you XYZ. We're also creating that expectation. And that can be really frustrating. When someone puts that on us, it's really frustrating. And when we're putting it on someone else, it's equally as frustrating and it can actually become paralyzing because you somehow feel that you don't really know how to act because you're supposed to fulfill this thing, this vision that maybe wasn't even yours to begin with. So it can actually lead to a lot of self-doubt and this feeling that, like, you're not there yet, you're not good enough. Why haven't I reached that goal yet? Something that I learned within my coach training that I tried to practice definitely in my professional life, and I always try to remember it in my personal life too, because it is really an amazing philosophy, that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Ultimately, what that means is that people are capable. They have the resources, the tools, the mind, the ideas to be able to create whatever it is that they want in the world. I use that all the time with my clients in remembering. Sometimes they're going to take a path that's different than what I would have thought of, or maybe what I even think is the right path. But at the end of the day, they are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. And they can make that decision for themselves and they can take the path that they see is important and right for them. And that has nothing to do with what I believe. And it's always my role to pull myself back to say, okay, great, try it out. Let's find out what happens. I'm always able to present ideas and they can take them on or not, but it's not for me to say that I'm right and I have the best answer or the right way forward. I think what happens here when other people are dreaming on our behalf, or when we start to dream on behalf of someone else, creating those expectations, is that we somewhere don't really believe that they are capable of deciding or creating or resourcing themselves enough to bring to life their own vision. And what that usually is reflecting are the dreams or desires that we actually have for ourselves that we might not be fulfilling. So to go back to an example of a parent and child, we are hoping that every generation has a better life than the one that came before. And many parents aspire to give their kids a better life and better experiences than what they had. You will see, of course, that there's many parents who did make sacrifices in their life and their well-being to be able to give better opportunities to their children. So it does make sense that they might dream of this grand future for their kid because of everything that they had to sacrifice or let go of to support them to bring that to life. But the truth is that all of those dreams that they have for their child are most likely their own dreams unfulfilled. So they end up trying to create a version of the world that they really wanted that they either weren't able or couldn't or chose not to live through that next generation. And I think the same is true for the people in our life. Maybe it's your siblings, it's your partner, it's your close friends, that you're actually putting your own dreams onto someone else. So whenever you find yourself trying to dream or create expectation for someone else of what they're supposed to achieve, take a step back and look at what that thing is and get really honest with yourself in asking, is this something that I actually want for myself? And if it is, then you have a choice to make. You don't have to make a choice. That would be a choice on its own, but you can decide, actually, I want to do that. Let me figure out how. Or you can decide, okay, that was something that I actually really wanted or I used to want, but I'm not going to take that forward. And that's also okay. Just be mindful whenever you're bringing those ideas to life of the person that you're giving them to. Is it really something for them, or is it actually something for you? And the same would be if you're on the receiving end of that. Perhaps you're creating that expectation that you have to fulfill, you know, some grand goal or vision. But you could also just ask, does this feel like a dream that matters to me? Like something I want to bring forward, or does this sound like it's more about them? Depending on your relationship, you can voice that. Otherwise, you can just say, you know what, this sounds like their dream. I'm just gonna let it go. And you give yourself permission to drop it completely. So what we're really talking about is just always coming back to your own center, your own wisdom, your own understanding. You get to make choices in your own life. You don't need to listen to whatever dreams or visions someone else has for you. If it inspires and motivates you and feels exciting, by all means, listen. But if it feels like paralyzing, like you can no longer act, I'll give one more short example of that. There was a coach that I was working with a few years ago. And I remember I wanted to grow my coaching practice, I wanted to increase my prices, and I had a very specific idea of what coaches charged because I worked in the leadership development space. And so I had seen a lot of proposals. I had seen what companies were willing to pay and what the companies I represented were charging for the work. And I remember going into this coaching space, and the coach, with all the best of intentions, told me I needed to be charging at least double, but probably triple what I was actually charging. And in that moment, it was so widely out of my scope of possible and my own imagination that I froze. It took me a good like six months after that point to even make another proposal for a coaching client. So the intention had been to help me expand and grow and also grow my income. The impact of that was that I was totally paralyzed to act. If in that moment I had had all the wisdom and knowledge that I have today as my wonderful self, I would have hit pause and said, does that feel aligned for me? Is that something that feels true that I actually want to take action on? And hopefully I would have sat in this moment in my present awareness and said, you know, that actually doesn't feel right for me now. Let me try this other thing out instead and find out. But at that time, I wasn't able to make those choices for many reasons and ended up just feeling really stuck as a result of it. If I were to coach or counsel my younger self in that moment, I would tell them to look back at that coach and say, you know, that sounds like a beautiful vision. But here's what actually matters to me right now. Here's what I'm gonna do. So you have full permission to just meet yourself where you are, to trust the dreams and visions that you have for yourself, and to trust that just because someone, even if you admire or respect them, tells you that you can or should do something different, you don't always have to listen. You always have sovereignty and the ability to come back to center and decide for yourself and trust that your your dreams are already enough. And get honest with yourself if you're doing this to other people as well, because it can create a paralyzing effect, even if that's not your intention. So I would love to hear from you if you have ever felt the weight of great expectations from others and what impact that had on you, and what you did to finally get out of it. So definitely take a moment to reflect on this. It might not be something that you're actually thinking about every day. And I invite you to share that experience with me. You're welcome to write me over on Instagram at amandaparker.co. And I can't wait to hear what kind of experiences you've had and how this episode resonates for you. Thank you so much for tuning in to Don't Step on the Bluebells, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. If you enjoyed this conversation, please give the podcast a five star rating wherever you listen. And don't forget to hit subscribe and follow along so you never miss a new episode.