Someone on your team isn't executing. A customer stalls halfway through your funnel. An investor goes quiet after the pitch. The instinct, almost automatic, is to start a story about why: they don't get it, they're not trying hard enough, people are lazy.1 Krisang names that spiral exactly — "we start blaming other people for not progressing" — and then makes a claim that reframes the entire feeling underneath it: that blame spiral isn't a sign your people are deficient. It's a sign you expected something that was never realistic to begin with.1
His argument runs in a specific order. First: obstacles, doubt, and self-sabotage aren't a malfunction in the people you're leading — they're the default, guaranteed condition of anyone taking real action, full stop.1 "It is the law of human nature," he says, "and you have to expect that when you ask people to do something, they will not do it."1 Second, and this is the actual technique, not just an observation: deliberately expecting this in advance changes what the failure means emotionally when it happens. If you expected it, a stalled customer isn't evidence you misjudged them or they misjudged you — it's simply the terrain doing what terrain does. "Expecting that people are going to fail is such an amazing relief," he says. "You have no idea how free you will become."1
It would be easy to mistake this for generic "manage your expectations" advice, but Krisang's version is more specific and more mechanical than that. He's not saying hope for the best but prepare for setbacks in the vague sense — he's saying build the expectation of failure into your planning at the same level of certainty as the plan itself, before you ever approach the investor, the customer, or the team member.1 "I'm telling my investor to give money, what are all the doubts he's going to have? I'm going to tell my customer to create content and publish content, what is every obstacle they are going to face?"1 The technique isn't a mood. It's a planning step that happens to also produce relief as a side effect — expect the specific failure, name it in advance, and the emotional charge of blame has nowhere left to attach when it actually happens.
The mechanism worth naming clearly: frustration, in Krisang's account, comes specifically from the gap between what you expected and what happened. If you expected smooth execution and got resistance, the gap itself generates the emotional charge that turns into blame. If you expected resistance and got resistance, there's no gap — the event confirms the model instead of violating it, and confirmation doesn't produce the same emotional charge that violated expectation does.1 This is why he frames the technique as relief rather than as toughness or stoicism — it's not that the leader is enduring the obstacle better, it's that the obstacle has stopped registering as a surprise that needs an explanation.
Before you launch anything that depends on someone else's action — a pitch, a program cohort, a product launch — sit down and write out, in advance, every form of resistance you expect to meet. Not vaguely ("some people won't follow through") but specifically: this investor will hesitate here, this customer type will stall at this exact step, this team member will need to be told twice before the instruction lands.
Then notice your own emotional state while you write the list. If writing it produces dread, you're still treating these as failures of the people involved. Rewrite the list as weather instead — obstacles that exist because obstacles exist, not because anyone involved is deficient. When the first instance of resistance actually shows up, check it against your list rather than reacting to it fresh. If it's on the list, you already know what to say, and you already know it isn't personal.
Evidence: This is Krisang's own self-reported leadership practice, offered without external citation as a technique he applies to his own team, investors, and customers.1 No outside verification is available for whether this materially reduces leadership burnout or improves outcomes; the claim is phenomenological (it feels like relief) rather than measured.
Tensions: There's a real risk this technique curdles into learned helplessness or lowered standards dressed up as wisdom — if every failure is pre-expected, a leader could use that framing to stop diagnosing genuinely fixable problems (a broken onboarding flow, a badly worded pitch) by filing them under "expected obstacles" rather than "things I should fix." Krisang doesn't address how to tell the difference between an obstacle that's simply part of the terrain and one that's actually a correctable flaw in the leader's own design.
Open question: Does expecting failure in advance risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy — communicating, even unintentionally, a lowered expectation to the team or customer that itself reduces their effort? The technique is framed entirely from the leader's internal experience; its effect on the people being led isn't addressed in the source material.
This page's leadership-relief technique is the emotional-management counterpart to the more tactical obstacle-prediction practice documented on its sibling page, drawn from the same talk. The two aren't identical: predicting failure points is about solving obstacles in advance so the audience doesn't hit them; expecting failure is about managing the leader's own emotional relationship to obstacles that will happen regardless of how well they're anticipated. Krisang treats them as two halves of the same discipline — map what you can pre-solve, and expect, without blame, whatever remains unsolvable — but they're functionally distinct enough to warrant separate pages rather than folding one into the other.
Psychology — Cognitive Dissonance: The Fox and the Grapes He Never Wanted. This page documents Festinger's finding that the discomfort of a violated expectation is what drives belief and story revision — the mind will change almost anything to make the tension between belief and fact stop. Krisang's leadership-relief technique is, read through this lens, a pre-emptive dissonance-avoidance strategy: by lowering the expectation before the event, he prevents the belief-fact gap from forming in the first place, so there's no dissonance left to resolve through blame, rationalization, or story-bending. The cognitive-dissonance page explains what happens after a leader's high expectations are violated (the mind reaches for a story — usually one that blames the other party, since blaming yourself is more painful); Krisang's technique explains a prevention strategy the dissonance literature doesn't typically frame as an option, since most dissonance research studies the resolution phase rather than the expectation-setting phase that precedes it. Read together, the two pages show: leadership blame-spirals may be a specific, high-stakes case of ordinary dissonance-resolution, which means the fix isn't better emotional discipline in the moment of frustration — it's intervening earlier, at the level of the expectation itself, before any dissonance has a chance to form.
Business — Onion of Blame: Circumstances, Others, Self. This business-domain page documents a diagnostic for where blame typically lands when something goes wrong — circumstances, other people, or the self, in that order of psychological comfort. Krisang's technique intervenes directly on the "others" layer of that onion: by expecting resistance in advance, he's attempting to prevent blame from settling on the team, customer, or investor at all, short-circuiting the onion before a layer gets peeled. Neither page alone supplies the complete diagnostic-plus-intervention pair: the onion-of-blame page describes where blame naturally migrates once something goes wrong, without offering much on how to prevent the migration from starting; Krisang's technique offers a prevention method without situating it inside the fuller three-layer map of where else blame could land if this particular intervention fails. What the two accounts produce side by side: expecting-failure-in-advance is really a targeted strike on the middle layer of the onion (blaming others) — which suggests the same trick, applied deliberately to the circumstances layer and the self layer, might produce a more complete blame-prevention practice than either page offers alone.
Sharpest implication: If frustration really is just the emotional signature of a violated expectation, then a leader's felt burnout may be less about the objective difficulty of the obstacles they're facing and more about a mismatch between their planning process and reality — which would make this technique a genuine intervention rather than just a coping reframe.
Generative questions: