DeVon Franklin: Managing Expectations Is Essential To Healthy Relationships
DeVon Franklin Shares Why Managing Expectations Is Essential To Cultivating Healthy Relationships: ‘Marriages Tend Not To Work Because There Are A Lot Of Unspoken Expectations’
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DeVon Franklin‘s Instagram and Twitter feeds are overflowing with an abundance of inspirational content. It’s one of the many reasons that more than one million people follow the film producer’s social media accounts. It makes sense. We all aspire to live happy and fulfilling lives, but before we can do so, Franklin says that we have to get more in tune with our expectations. This is the inspiration behind his new book, Live Free: Exceed Your Highest Expectations. We had the opportunity to speak to DeVon about Live Free and how expectations come into play when cultivating healthy relationships.
MN: Tell us about your book, Live Free: Exceed Your Highest Expectations.
DeVon: This book is all about how to set expectations for yourself. In so many instances, we can find ourselves living for everybody else’s expectations but not what’s in the heart. It’s a book to help you get your power back. It’s a book to help get your life back. By, you saying, ‘Hey, what is it that I want my life to be and how do I start to set expectations in that direction?’ The other part, of it, which is a big part of the book, is all about how to set expectations because even when you have expectations for yourself, sometimes they can be unset, which means unrealistic. How do you know if something is realistic? Well, is it in your control? A lot of times, we have these expectations that are not in our control and I argue that they’re unrealistic. In order to know what’s in our control, we have to decide like, okay, well, can I actually do this? Can I have this and if you can’t I argue that it’s unrealistic to expect. So, this whole book is all about managing expectations. It’s all about setting your life the way you want and in the process, you start to live free. Living free means that you and I are not under the emotional, mental, or physical control of anyone or anything. That’s what it means to live free.
DeVon: The relationship can absolutely be saved and salvaged. The first thing that they should do is to do the work on themselves. It’s like, ‘Oh, wait, my expectations have created this problem. Oh, wait a second. My unspoken expectations created this problem. Oh, wow, so it’s not them, it’s me.’ You can salvage the relationship by taking ownership, by taking accountability. Megan and I did pre-engagement counseling for months and, you know, premarital counseling and all that. There’s no amount of counseling that prepares you for marriage, really. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. I think there’s value in it because it, it can establish a practice of communicating and that communication is always good but when you get in the relationship or in the marriage and you start getting deep into it, one of the things that become hard and harder is to take accountability for the problems that we actually contribute to. It’s so easy to say they’re the problem, but when we get to become more mature we say, ‘You know, I got to be accountable for that. I actually contributed to that. If I hadn’t been so needy at that moment, I wouldn’t have said what was said and upset them the way that I did. That was my fault. So you can salvage the relationship by taking accountability.
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