OnePhatMan

“Hey, Bessie,” I said, shaking my wife gently awake this morning. “I’m going.”

This is one of our weekday rituals, when I leave for work.

“I’m 211 today. Down another 2.5.” I considered for a moment. “I should write an entry today and say I guess I’ve still got it, but karma…”

“It’s like a boomerang,” she said.

“I know. Like when I wrote about my shoulder hurting, and then that night I slept with my pillows arranged differently and the pain went away, or when I wrote about my knee and it almost completely stopped hurting the next day.”

“Karma.”

“Yep. So I’m not going to write that today, because as sure as I do, I’ll pick up 50 pounds of water next week when I start lifting weights again.”

But I do still got it.

In the tenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of the sculptor Pygmalion, who created a statue so beautiful he fell in love with it. When the feast of Venus came, Pygmalion prayed for a woman as beautiful as his statue. Venus heard his prayers, and instead of giving him a woman who looked like the statue, she granted his real wish: she brought his statue to life.

More recently, this same idea was explored in 1913 in a play by George Bernard Shaw titled Pygmalion, later turned into a movie (My Fair Lady) in 1964 starring Audrey Hepburn. In that story, Professor Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can transform the lower class Eliza Doolittle into a lady. He wins the bet by doing just what he said, though in Shaw’s play there are repercussions (I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t speak of it) to his actions and he finds that Eliza is much more than just an experiment.

See Mom, that college did pay off!

Finally, in the late 1960’s two sociologists, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, conducted an experiment to test a theory they had. Their belief was that teachers’ expectations for lower-class and minority students were contributing to high rates of failure among the students.

In their experiment, the two posed as researchers and gave students a test with a high-falutin’ name. They then picked names of students at random and told the teachers before the next school year that those particular students’ scores on the test indicated that they would have above-average intellectual progress during the year, even though the students weren’t already classified as good students.

Take note: the only difference between the randomly chosen students and all the other students was completely in the minds of their teachers.

And yet a second test, administered at the end of the school year, showed that the students who were randomly selected had an average IQ increase of 12 points, as opposed to 8 points for the other students. Because they believed the students were special, the teachers unconsciously encouraged them to perform at a higher level, and the students did. Rosenthal and Jacobson’s report on this experiment is titled Pygmalion in the Classroom, should you want to read more about it.

So what do these three examples have in common, other than the name Pygmalion (which, by the way, is awfully fun to say out loud) ?

They’re examples of self-fulfilling prophecies. In essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that makes itself true simply by being made. Or, to put it another way, when someone with knowledge of future events modifies their behavior to make those events come true.

See where I’m going with this?

If you want to create your own self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s not hard. Make a crystal-clear image of the person you want to be, and raise your expectations of what you’re capable of doing. Live like the person you’ve predicted you’ll be, and watch what happens.

What does that entail? For each person, it’s different. For me, living like the man I envisioned entailed a few things. I changed what I was putting into my mouth, from a stream of nutritionally empty junk to wholesome and healthful natural foods most of the time. Physically, I started to work out, moving my body every day, even if I didn’t feel like it some days. Most importantly I held that image in my head, that new guy I wanted to be, and I let my every action filter through that image. It took time, but gradually I became him.

Create your own self-fulfilling prophecy by deciding who you want to be and modifying your life at your own pace to make the prophecy a reality. If you’re interested in more information, you might read up on self-perception theory, because that’s the basis of a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy information.

What’s one thing you can do right now to better your life?