By: Jonathan Massey
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the book Legacy by James Kerr. The book uses the most successful rugby team in the world, the New Zealand All Blacks, to teach us lessons on leadership. In one of the chapters, it talks about the self-fulfilling prophecy and how it shapes us.
“A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.”
We all know people like this. They believe that the day or outcome is going to be bad, so inevitably when the day or outcome does turn out bad, they’re quick to say, “I told you so.” I like to refer to these people as the ‘Eeyore’s of the world’.
Eeyore constantly believed bad things were going to happen to him, and as it goes, bad things typically did happen to him.
But if bad things happen to us because we believe they’re going to, can’t the opposite be true? Can good things happen to us because we believe they’re going to happen?
In the book, it talks about how a member of the All Blacks used to tell himself every night when he was growing up that he was going to be an All Black. And guess what, it turned out to be true.
When I read that, I thought to myself, “Wow that’s powerful.” Because we don’t even realize we give ourselves a little bit of poison every day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked a client who is about to undergo a radar session, how many records they’re going to break. And their response is, “I’m going to try to break them all.”
I never noticed it before but the word ‘try’ in their response is a little bit of poison. It tells their mind that, “Oh I shouldn’t really expect to break all of my records.” It tells their mind that trying is good enough.
Now, I’m not saying if you tell yourself, “I’m going to break every record,” every time you radar that it’ll happen, or that if you tell yourself, “I’ll be a Major League baseball player,” every day that that will happen.
All I am saying is that you may be more apt to becoming a Major League baseball player if you tell yourself every day that you will become one.
So, what is your self-fulfilling prophecy?
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