Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”
—Henry Ford

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Our mood is a state of being. Our state of being will translate our inputs into emotions and tell us how to feel about them. The emotions we feel about our inputs will change the voices in our heads as they provide direction for our behavior. Our behaviors and our emotions will impact the emotions of others and thus their behaviors will in turn circle back and impact us often stronger than what we initially put out. This is called a feedback loop. Imagine a microphone right next to the speaker. It doesn’t take long before it starts squealing. The feedback loops become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Let’s consider a few examples of how this all works in the real world. Consider a parent-to-child interaction. Let’s assume I am teaching my son how to make eggs. There are many ways this can go. If my son was just refusing to make eggs, then I might already be in an upset mood. I will now be translating my inputs in such a way so as to justify my mood. My mood is a worldview of sorts. My son is defiant and ornery. He is lazy. These are the backbone thoughts that have cultivated my mood through the recent experience with him.

As I instruct my son, given my mood, I will be short. I will be cold. Let's say I tell him to grab the egg, crack it on the counter, and open it over the pan. My son’s mood will also be sour at this point. His thoughts will be centered around being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. He will be looking for any reason to justify why he should not be doing this and why I should not be forcing him to do it. He will grab an egg and crack it too hard on the counter. Half of this will be lack of care and half of it will be subconscious sabotage to prove his point that he should not be doing this.

Seeing my son intentionally thwart the process, I will become even more angry. Why does he have to be like this? Why can’t he just try? Why is he intentionally getting on my nerves? I will shout, “Carefully! You’re just cracking it, not smashing it!” And my son’s voices will now confirm: See, there he goes, acting all mean and impatient. This is exactly why we don’t want to make eggs with him.

This transaction could have been different in a multitude of ways. My son could have had a better attitude at the beginning and simply said, “Sure, dad! I’d love to make eggs with you!” In that case, my mood would have been brighter, his mood would have been brighter, I wouldn’t be preparing myself for anger, and he wouldn’t be sabotaging the process. Eggs are made and we’re both much happier.

For another path, I could have realized that my son’s negative response was going to thwart the process. I could have stepped back and decided it wasn’t worth the battle. I would save my peace and similarly save his. Of course, as a dad, I have to take into account that his bad attitude should not be rewarded and so reinforced, but clearly it wasn’t a better choice to force a conflict.

Yet another path, if I continued the coercion of making eggs, if I were better at maintaining a positive mood myself, I could have responded differently to the egg smash. While it may be true to recognize he is sabotaging, my internal voices could instead say Oh, he’s just frustrated since he didn’t want to be here, but this is good practice for him. Let’s encourage him. Then I’d say, “Ha, that’s okay. A little gentler next time, but you’ll get the hang of it!” Suddenly my son’s internal voice is saying, oh, he didn’t get mad. Let’s see if I can crack it more gently next time.

This is oversimplifying, of course. If I had already had a thousand bad experiences with my son, this one change in tone probably would not have the desired effect. Over time, however, it just might. It is much easier to stay on a positive track than to fix a negative one. This is why first impressions are such a big deal.

Without any past experience, there is no default expectation besides cultural bias. The past told him I would be an angry ogre during the process—an expectation which, combined with his mood, reinforced that exact behavior. So if my son and I had met for the first time as strangers, he may not have rejected making eggs in the first place. If he then cracked the egg too hard, I’d assume it was a simple mistake rather than reinforcing my pre-existing belief that he’s attempting to irritate me.

It is much harder to change direction than it is to start with the right direction. The bigger the change, the more time it will take and the more challenges there are to overcome, but the facts are the same: we will influence the outcomes by our moods which interpret what goes on around us into emotion and which then speak to guide our behavior.

Most such self-fulfilling interactions are not obvious. They occur without any audible thoughts and they are simply engrained expectations that modify our behavior. We develop shortcuts of thought which then continue to reinforce themselves. These shortcuts are referred to as bias and they could develop for any number of attributes. If one has enough bad experiences with dogs, they may develop shortcut emotional responses—or biases—toward dogs and so create the situations they fear.

It is often said a dog can sense our fear. They can certainly sense many symptoms of fear and they may interpret those as signs of danger. They, feeling threatened by our fear, may become aggressive. The fear thus brings it about. Intentional changes are thus necessary to alter our expectations in order to rewrite how others respond to us.

The shortcut to most successful interactions is confidence without arrogance. People default to assuming confidence means a person knows what they are talking about. If a person lacks in the topic, they will quite often take a confident person’s word for it. If they sense arrogance, however, people will similarly have bias against that.

Imagine walking into your boss’s office with a brilliant idea. You walk in confidently and say you’ve found a way to improve efficiency. Here is the method, this is the cost, and here’s how it will work. Your boss, being busy, will quite likely take the confidence at face value and tell you to run with it. Unless, of course, past experience has told her otherwise or if you’ve pointed at the failures of others which appears arrogant.

Now imagine you walk in shyly. You avert your eyes. You say you think maybe there’s a way to improve and you think this could help. Your boss, being busy, feels like you’re giving them homework. You’re not sure and now she has to do extra leg work to verify your beliefs. She doesn’t have time for this, so she brushes you off. Confidence is key. It has a significant impact on the reality you experience—either a boss who trusts you or a boss who dismisses you. Confidence, of course, is an emotional state of being—a mood.

The first eggsample revolves around moods of anger versus patience while the second revolves around confidence. Let us also consider a general sense of anxiety or peace. If you have an anxious mood, you will interpret things with fear. This person might have misunderstood you, that person may be trying to take advantage of you, and your statement last month could have made everyone mad at you. Living in such a way will cause many wildly incorrect interpretations of reality. Someone didn’t respond in a few seconds so they must be mad at you. They said yes with a period and therefore they’re angry—you knew it!

With a belief that people are upset or angry with you, you’ll be prone to apologizing for things when you don’t need to. You will over-explain things, provide excuses no one asked for, make assurances no one needed, and altogether become a nuisance. What will happen when you become a nuisance? Well, people will start to dislike being around you. They will get frustrated and begin to exhibit the very behaviors you feared to begin with. It will prove your expectations and increase your anxiety.

As the famous Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda once stated, “One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it.” Our fears all too often create our realities as we attempt to prevent them. But our hopes and expectations work in a similar fashion and can work in our favor instead. Perpetual confidence and belief in one’s ability—even if wrong—will provide us with actions that increase our chance of success and decrease our chance of self-sabotage.

Not everything works out so predictably, of course. Some things are beyond our subtle influence, and past patterns may have deeply entrenched someone into a perspective. A small splash of a smile isn’t going to carry a drowning person out of the pool, but a lot of things build over time. And if someone is intent on creating their mood, they will intentionally swim to remain there. The power is mostly in those who remain on auto-pilot, while slowly etching at those with intention over time.

We don’t get to know what will have the influence we want, and we don’t get to know when it will work. So even if something doesn’t go our way in one interaction, that doesn’t mean we just give up as if it doesn’t work. Our realities are built over time with patterns of behavior, and negative interactions will often destroy things much quicker than positive interactions will build. If we’re not on top of what we’re putting out there with our beliefs and feelings, we are almost guaranteed to thwart ourselves.

In conclusion, we should want to ensure that anything and everything that can be affected by us will be affected by us in a positive way. This can be altogether daunting if we are constantly fighting the voices in our own minds, however. It is hard to be confident when a voice in our mind is continually worrying us, telling us how hard this sounds, or how we could never pull it off. How much nicer if the voices were simply in alignment to begin with?

If we learn to cultivate our mood, and so align our voices, we can shape our reality more passively as we flow effortlessly along a very strong current. Our behavior becomes default rather than forced. Practice can make our positive beliefs and actions a default rather than a challenge. Intentional moods make it much easier as we can go with the flow rather than paddling upstream trying to think positively as a current of suffering drags us down.

I will continue to reiterate and emphasize both the power of our beliefs, thoughts, and expectations and the need to curate our mood to better harness that power. The examples above were designed for a quick intuitive look at how we create our own feedback loops, but the effect is far more profound than we might initially realize.

Recap