We are an intensely social species. From the moment we are born to the moment we die we rely on other people for our survival and well-being. Our survival instincts are closely connected to our social needs and behaviours and one of our deepest needs is to belong: to someone, to a family, a group, a society, a country, … Our sense of safety and well-being is so strongly tied to the groups we identify with that being thrown out of any of those groups is traumatic and painful, mentally comparable to the amputation of a limb or other physical injury. Our hearts break when a loved one dies or breaks up with us; we get sick with loneliness and homesickness when we are separated from our families and homes for too long; our immune systems fail us when we feel isolated, alienated and unwanted. We need to belong to something to survive.

Human beings, being both smart and adaptable, have developed many different ways of building social structures and keeping them together. We have stories, rules and rituals; physical markers such as tattoos, scarring, paint and clothes; physical barriers such as walls, moats and boundaries; all ways to strengthen the bonds between the people inside the group and set them off against and protect them from everybody else.

Social bonds – even those fortified and propped up by cultural means – may be strong but they are not unbreakable. In fact, because of the complexity of human interaction, with our many layers of feelings, emotions, motivators and believes, coupled with a deep-seated tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective, the bonds we form are never completely certain, are tested often, and can break quite dramatically and suddenly. This volatility of our social bonds puts a constant pressure on us. We cannot afford to ignore it, lest we miss some subtle change in the attitude of those around us and find ourself suddenly on the wrong side of a social shift. So we are constantly on edge, socially speaking, gathering intelligence from our own social interactions and those we observe around us to gauge how secure we sit in the groups we identify with. This is why we gossip and love talking about other people behind their backs, this is why we love comparing notes with our friends about what’s hot and what’s not. This underlies the addictive nature of getting likes on Facebook and posting selfies and pictures of our breakfast on Instagram. We are constantly testing if we are still part of our ‘in’ crowd, if we are still safely within the bounds of what our own groups find acceptable.

But we don’t just need to know whether we are still acceptable and accepted, we actually need to anticipate the shifting moods and favours of the crowds we hang with and the people we depend on. To make sure we remain part of our social safety network we need to know what is expected of us. We need to know how other people see us and expect us to behave. We need to understand the subtle signals our peers use to show they are part of the same group. We need to know this in enough detail and depth to enable us to live up to other peoples’ perception of us, so we don’t surprise them or disappoint them, which could cause them to reject us and leave us isolated and alone.

This need to live up to how other people perceive us is the power of expectation.

Because being accepted by others is so intimately interwoven with our deepest survival instincts we all constantly monitor other people – especially those that are important to us – to work out what they expect us to be like and then model ourselves to those expectations, so as not to disappoint them. We all don the masks others like us to wear to avoid exposing sides of us that could cause them to turn against us.

This is not a conscious process, at least for the vast majority of people. Almost all of us constantly and seamlessly adapt our public personae to the expectations of the people we interact with without thinking about it; without even being aware of doing it. It is an almost completely automatic process that is always on, subtly (or not so subtly) modifying our behaviours to closely match the model other people have constructed in their minds of who we are.

We should not mistake this for a deliberate deceit. The personae we adopt in our social interactions are not roles we consciously play to fool those around us. It is almost the other way round: those personae – the versions of us other people expect to see when they interact with us – play us in a very real sense of the word. They do not just regulate our behaviours, they also influence our thoughts and perceptions. Our social personae influence our emotional responses and mental models. They cause us to think like the character we’re inhabiting, notice what that character would notice and ignore what that character would prefer not to see. Experiments have shown that under peer pressure people will subconsciously change what they believe to be true in order not to fall out of sync with those around them. In other words: we tend to become what other people expect us to be.

Does that mean we are powerless in the presence of others? Does it mean we are simply doomed to play variations of ourselves dictated by other people’s perception of us? Are we really, then, just actors on other peoples’ stages, doomed to play the parts others hand to us, helplessly repeating the lines they want us to utter?

Not necessarily! There is a way we can use the power of expectations to our advantage, and must do so if we want to take control of our mission in life. That way starts by realising that other people’s expectations of us are not a given but arise and evolve over the time we are in contact with them. The are not static but fluid, subject to change and influenced by many factors, some of which we can actually control or at least strongly direct to our own purpose and intentions. From the very first impression people have of us – which is often shaped before they actually meet us, based on hearsay, gossip, and other publicly available information about us – to the much more detailed and more firmly embedded mental models they construct about us as they see us more often and observe us in much more detail: what other people expect from us is partially of their own making, and partially shaped by how we present ourselves to them.

If we are not aware of this expectation mechanism it can easily become a self-reinforcing forward-feeding loop: people’s expectations of us cause us to behave in accordance with those expectations, which confirms what they expected, strengthening their mental model of us, making it even harder for us not to live up to it. If we are not careful we can get caught up in this dance of expectations and expected responses that we end up portraying and bringing to life a fictional version of who we are, rather than expressing our true nature and authentic behaviour. If we do this all the time, we have become ‘domesticated’: we forget we even have an authentic self, and would feel lost and incapable of action if the expectations that guide us would all of a sudden disappear.

If we are aware, however, and we understand the pressure those expectations exert on us, we can harness their power and use them to our advantage.

To do this we must first of all have our own expectations about ourselves clearly defined and very clear in our minds in every interaction we have with the people around us. Instead of accepting other people’s version of us, we need to work on our authentic version: the fiction closest to who we want to be, and how we want to be seen. We must imagine every encounter with other people as an opportunity to show them that authentic version and prepare ourselves to act, speak, and embody that version of ourself so consistently and convincingly that the people we interact with have no choice but to adjust their expectations and mental model of you to what you portray. Paradoxically, to counteract the forces of expectations pushing us away from being our authentic self, we have to practice and rehearse being authentic until it becomes spontaneous again. This is the ultimate form of method acting: playing the role of who you want to be until you are no longer playing it.

Getting the role right of being ourself is especially important for that first face to face meeting with people. People will have some expectations about our behaviour before they actually meet us, based on publicly available information, but that initial mental model will be rather sketchy and tentative. By providing them with clear, convincing and consistent behaviours in those first crucial moments of that first meeting we have a reasonable chance to shape their expectations of us to closely match how we want them to see us. And once those expectations are in place, to be our authentic self, instead of having to fight against unwanted expectations, all we have to do is meet what is expected of us, which works to everyone’s benefit: we don’t have to fight unwelcome expectations, and they feel much more comfortable because we keep behaving the way they expect us to.

That, in a nutshell, is the power of expectations: setting them right at the start of our interactions with people and carefully maintaining them to ensure that what people expect of us is what we want them to expect will make those expectations a powerful force to help us along on our journey and live more closely the narrative we desire to live; letting those expectations build up by themselves and ignoring them in how we behave around people that matter to us can easily turn that same force into an opposing one that will try to push us back into those other people’s narratives rather than allowing us to live our own story.