When Reality Breaks Your Roadmap

Why Letting Go of Expectations is the Key to Achieving Your Goals

When we set goals or have a vision for ourselves, our minds—the meaning making machines they are—typically make predictions about how it can or will come to fruition.

Your mind crafts a roadmap, a series of "logical" scenarios about how everything will unfold. It attempts to foresee how things will go.

Sometimes it doesn’t foresee any potential pathways, and so it thinks the goal is not possible. Other times it drafts up a rigid pathway that’s contingent on a series of particular happenings.

Those “logical” scenarios, or imagined possibilities, are based on your past—your personal experiences, the things you’ve witnessed, and the stories you’ve been told about how life works.

Our predictions are often little more than past projections.

Our past shapes what the brain can conceive of. For what is logic but something that makes sense to the mind, And what makes sense to the mind must be familiar in some way. And what is familiar is rooted in the past.

So we have a vision for ourselves—we have something we want for our lives—and then the mind determines if and how it is possible.

But what happens when reality veers off the path your mind mapped out?

Uncertainty. Fear. Doubt. The belief that your goal is slipping away. It’s not happening. It was never going to happen. I knew it. It’s gone. I lost it.

Once the mental model breaks, it’s easy to feel like like your goal is not coming to fruition.

But here’s the truth: just because reality doesn’t match your mental expectations doesn’t mean your goal isn’t being realized. It might simply be taking a different route—one you couldn’t have imagined—one that doesn’t fit your little predictions.

One that transcends your understanding of what’s possible.

When You Don’t Trust the Process

This mismatch between expectation and reality can be a sneaky saboteur.

It can lead us to abandon our dreams. Sometimes we give up on our goals—not because they aren’t happening, but because they aren’t happening the way we thought they would.

This is where faith comes in.

Faith is the antidote to the over-reliance on our expectations—how we thought things should and would play out.

It invites the belief that there’s a higher intelligence at work, orchestrating events in ways far beyond what our limited human perspective can comprehend.

Why Faith Matters in the Creative Process

Faith does two crucial things:

1. It keeps you anchored. When life presents ups and downs, when self-doubt arises, when our emotions ebb and flow, faith holds us steady. It is not contingent on circumstance. When we foster faith within ourselves, it persists despite external conditions. It invites us to step beyond our limited perspective by reminding us that just because we can’t see the evidence of our desired outcome, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

2. It opens the door to trust. Trust is the MVP of the creative process. Trust says, “I know this is happening for me, even if I can’t yet see how.” Trust says, “I know I’m receiving it.” Trust allows us to tap into beliefs and stories that cultivate the frequency we want to live in. You can feel that, can’t you? That stunning feeling of living with unwavering trust. Try it. You’re way more likely to act in ways that align with your desires when you’re living from the feeling of them already being delivered. Trust diminishes hope and doubt, both of which are rooted in uncertainty. Trust is conviction.

Relax, It’s All Unfolding

The truth is, no one—no one—knows how things are supposed to play out. We’re all just guessing. The current events in your life? They might look like chaos, but they could be the perfect setup for your goal to materialize in a way that’s even better than you imagined.

You have evidence of this, don’t you? There have been times where things seemed like they were falling apart, only to give rise to a better outcome than you ever could have imagined. There have been times where you felt like life was happening to you and, in hindsight, understand it was happening for you. There have been times where unfavorable events turned out to be the most favorable of all.

In other words, there have been times where your limited perception of an occurrence and the stories you told yourself about it were entirely inaccurate.

I’ve been there too. Several times.

I like to think that the universe, God, divine intelligence is able to chart a much more elegant, efficient, and abundant path than what my ego can drum up.

If that’s true (or your willing to entertain that’s true and experiment with a way of living that elevates everything in your life), you might ask, what am I to do?

Nothing!? Heaven forbid.

So, what should you do in the meantime? I don’t know. That’s up to you. But here’s what I often recommend:

1. Hold steady the frequency of your desired outcome. Keep your vision clear and regularly cultivate the feeling of your goals already being realized. Bring things into your daily life that help you tap into this state.

2. Relax. Seriously. Loosen the death grip on the “how.” Let go of needing to control every step of the process. Just allow yourself to trust that your world is taking care of you.

3. Take inspired action. This isn’t about hustling or forcing things to happen. It’s about tuning into your intuition and acting on what feels aligned and exciting. It’s about acting from the frequency of step 1 and trusting (there’s that word again) what unfolds from there.

Trust the Bigger Picture

The invitation here is to move from prediction to possibility.

From limitation to expansiveness.

Think of it this way: your mind is like a flashlight, only illuminating a tiny part of what’s possible. Faith, on the other hand, is the floodlight. It knows that the whole room exists, even if you can’t see all of it yet. It illuminates a whole world of unknown possibilities, ones that the mind never could have predicted.

In doing so, it opens our eyes to the opportunities that may be right under our nose—the opportunities we were previously ignoring because it didn’t fit our expectations of how things would or should happen.

Your job isn’t to micromanage God’s plan. It’s to stay aligned with your vision, take inspired action, and trust that forces far greater than your imagination are working behind the scenes, conspiring in your favor.

Hold steady. Relax. Believe.

And don’t take your expectations too seriously.