Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: The Power of Expectations.

Welcome to Authentic Living Coaching
I’m Linda Codlin, Transformational Life Coach.

Welcome, My Friends.

It has been a month since I last posted a blog. Hubby and I have been living day by day, managing the ups and downs of chemotherapy, the emotional swings that come with an unknown future.
Which brings me to my topic for today.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Power of Expectation.

Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you try, you keep running into the same roadblocks? Or that success seems just out of reach, like something is working against you?

Often, it’s not external circumstances—but our own expectations and beliefs—that shape our outcomes. This is the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. The good news? You can shift them to work for you instead of against you.

We all have self-fulfilling prophecies at work in our lives.
A self-fulfilling prophecy happens when a belief or an expectation, positive or negative, causes a person to behave in ways that make the expectation or belief come true.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is linked to the Pygmalian Effect; which is a psychological phenomenon where higher expectations lead to improved performance.
The Pygmalian Effect is named after a Greek sculptor who fell in love with a statue he created, which as the story goes, was brought to life.
In the study by Rosenthal and Jacobsen in 1968, where they showed that students perform better when their teachers were told the students were ‘high achievers’ even though initially their previous results showed the opposite.
The students out performed their previous results because the teachers expected a higher degree of achievement and the students rose to meet those expectations.

The Pygmalian Effect’s concept is where expectations from yourself or others influence your actual outcomes.

Expectations can be both negative or positive.

The Negative Side: Limitation and Failure.

Negative beliefs can lead to failure by reinforcing behaviours that confirm the belief.
In our situation, we are placing our trust and belief in the medical system, while doing what we are able to support and encourage health and wellbeing.
If we didn’t believe that the medical system could help us, we would set ourselves up to fail, by not following directions, by not taking the necessary care steps to create health.
We would not be engaged or willing to take the needed actions to improve our health and wellbeing. Which then creates more suffering, reinforcing a belief that the medical system couldn’t help us.

The negative beliefs we hold around how we perceive people impact the way we respond to people.
For instance if we have a belief that people are untrustworthy, we would act distant, stand-offish, or defensive.
We wouldn’t be friendly or open because we’d be waiting for the other person to push us away, reject us or hurt our feelings.
In this way we set up the dynamics for the very outcome we are expecting to happen, to actually happen.
Self-sabotage in action, we do it to others before they can do it to us.

When we feel or perceive that someone views us as incompetent we stop trying to prove them wrong, we withdraw from trying new things, and sometimes we make more mistakes, which confirms in the mind of ourselves and the mind of the one that viewed us as incompetent, that we are.
People who micromanage, discourage innovation, and expect that those working with them or under them are less than capable, actually lead their team to fail and underperform.
Their attitude comes through in the way they interact with their teams.

The Positive Side: Growth and Success.

When we have positive expectations, we tend to act in ways that bring about positive results.

When we believe we are capable of learning new skills, we are more likely to engage in activities that develop those skills, and in developing those skills we tend to push through challenges, our self-talk is more encouraging, which ultimately leads to success.
In our health situation, because we believe in the information and research we have done, it is easier for us to take the recommendations of the medical professionals, along with the previous results of others who have walked the path we are on, this gives us confidence that what we are doing will be of benefit to us. And as the test results come back confirming this, it strengthens our resolve to continue.
Success breeds success.

What is your world view of people in general?
If we expect people to be kind and trustworthy, we will interact with warmth and openness, which reinforces the likelihood of positive social connection.
When we view people as being supportive and caring, we treat people with kindness, respect and caring, which can create a cycle of caring, repect and kindness.

When we feel someone believes in us, that they believe we have potential, that we are able to get the job done, we rise to the challenge, we thrive with the encouragement, and the high expectation, the greater the belief we have in ourselves, and the knowledge that others also believe in us, the more effort we will expend to achieve the desired results, overcoming setbacks, and failures to find a way to succeed.

Shifting from Negative to Positive Self-Fulfilling Prophecies.

1. Investigate your beliefs:
   Become aware of the negative thoughts you have and question their truth. Ask, “Is this belief or thought absolutely true?”
   How can you know it is absolutely true?
2. Reframe your expectations:
   This is where affirmations come in, instead of saying to yourself, “I can’t do this,” shift it to “I can learn to do this,” or my favourite, ” I can do hard things.”
   Whatever the negative dialogue is, investigate it, and flip it over. If my reframe is, “I can do hard things,” what would my negative self-talk have been?
   If you guessed, “This is too hard.” you would be spot on right.
3. Act as if the Positive were True:
   Work out what you want to believe, and how you think you will feel when you are living with the positive belief being constant in your life.
   To tap into this feeling, you will be required to imagine you already have the belief you want, then act like you would if you had it today.
   Let’s say you want to wear a certain dress, what is the belief you need to be living, maybe it’s that you have the ability to exercise to firm your figure.
   As a woman with a firmer figure what will you being doing? I’d say you’d be exercising, stretching and moving easily.
   If this is not part of your life now, this would be an action you could begin to fulfil the belief that you are a woman who wears this certain style dress.
   Then purchase the dress to fit your current body and love it, wear it and show up with the attitude of a confident woman.
4. Surround Yourself with Positive Influences:
   Surround yourself with people who believe in you, set up your home, your office, your bedroom to reinforce your empowering expectations.
   Make it easy for you to succeed at the belief you want to endorse.
   If everywhere you look, there are reminders of the belief that you can’t be, let’s say fit and healthy with a balanced way of eating, you are reinforcing your past programming. Set your environment up to remind you of the person you are becoming, lay out your exercise clothes and shoes ready to go in the morning, prepare healthy food to have on hand in the fridge.
   Make your new belief easy to live into.
5. Use Affirmations and Visualizations:
   Regularly affirm your potential, words have power, use your words to empower yourself.
   Using your imagination to see the best things in life for yourself, will enable you to ‘see’ where you want to be.
   Give your brain a really positive and achievable belief to live forward into. Your brain loves a challenge, challenge it to create the life you want, one belief at a time.

Remember self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful forces shaping our lives.

Whether they work for us or against us depends on our expectations, we get to choose what expectations we embrace and bring to life.
When we consciously cultivate positive beliefs, we can create a reality we will love to thrive in.

Until Next Time: Write out a prophecy you’d love to see happen for you, in say 6 months time. Remember to make it believable, then expect yourself to move towards that state of being a little every day.

I’m offering a coaching session focused on uncovering hidden self-sabotaging patterns and transforming them into self-fulfilling success habits. If this resonates with you, let’s talk!

Click here to book a session:

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As a certified Life Coach, I help you to help yourself, so you can create a well lived life your way. 

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