Our mind is our greatest ally, but it can also become our worst enemy. Most people are not aware of the power of their own brain, for good or for bad. When someone hears “if you think you can, you can; if you think you can’t, you won’t”, it may sound like cheap motivational philosophy, but make no mistake: it is pure science.
In psychology we come across terms such as the Pygmalion effect, which is a basic form of mental conditioning, but one so powerful that we can turn a person into whatever we want, as long as that person believes what we are telling them. When we talked about two experiments on conditioning children (and adults) for success or failure, we also looked at the “Monster Study”, an experiment in which researchers managed to induce stuttering in children by making them insecure, and also managed to cure children who stuttered through positive encouragement.
When we are children, a lot depends on our environment, but as adults it depends on how we cultivate our own thoughts, which we will call “internal communication”, that is, communication with ourselves. “I’m good for nothing” or “I’m worth a lot”: whichever of the two thoughts you have, you are right, because your thinking will bring about what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy: a false idea which, through the behaviour our thinking triggers, ends up becoming true.
When you think you’re no good at something, or you’re afraid to try
If you are someone who feels you have never done anything productive, or that everything you have done so far has gone wrong, you may well find it harder to take the initiative, because you are probably already a victim of learned helplessness (see the article where we explained it).
In any case, the problem lies in the focus of our thinking, which creates a state of mind that leads to failure.
One example that illustrates this is the acrobat Karl Wallenda, known for having had a premonition about his death that came true exactly as he predicted.
For many years Wallenda performed dangerous high-wire stunts with no protection of any kind. He was so confident in his abilities that he never even considered the possibility of a mistake causing a fall, let alone his death. It simply wasn’t part of his mindset.
But at a certain point in his career, he began telling his wife that he often dreamed he was falling. For the first time in his life, he began to be afraid of falling. A few months after the fear began, he made the first mistake of his entire career: he fell and died.
He had made a prediction, or so the media reported. And that story is fine for those who believe in predictions. But what happened to Wallenda has a psychological explanation rather than an esoteric one.
Self-confidence makes you take firm, sure steps, perhaps even automatically, because it’s what you have been doing all your life, what you have trained for. If you are not afraid of falling, things will most likely go the way they have gone over the years.
When fear appears, we step more carefully, less surely, and so we are no longer the person who has prepared so thoroughly, the one confident in their abilities. Instead, we have the same fear as a beginner, and beginners are more likely to fall.
Put another way, there was no premonition, but a self-fulfilling prophecy in which his own fears caused the fall.
Apply it to life, to your career, to business…
If you constantly focus on all the bad things in life, that will be your view of life, and so your life may well be crap, not because it is, but because you believe it is.
If you think only about all the difficulties you may encounter along the way, you will bring about your own “Wallenda fall”, because you will put yourself in a state of mind that encourages all those difficulties to appear. It’s not that you were right when you predicted those difficulties would appear; you probably encouraged them yourself.
The jealous husband
Suppose a husband is at home waiting for his wife to get back from work, but she is late. He calls her and she doesn’t answer.
The husband starts wondering what is going on, where she is, who she is with. His mind starts running on its own, imagining that she might be flirting with someone, even sleeping with someone. His mind starts telling him she is cheating on him, and he can’t wait for her to get home so he can demand an explanation.
In that state, when his wife walks through the door, before he even opens his mouth she will see from his body language that he is angry. And if he also speaks to her rudely, the two of them will argue that night.
If the episodes of jealousy keep happening, it is very likely that the woman will decide to meet another man, because she can no longer stand her own. It would be the jealousy itself that brought about the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Now, if the husband doesn’t let his brain imagine the worst, and instead pictures his wife stuck in a huge traffic jam, unable to answer the phone because she is driving, tired from work, eager to get home… then when she walks through the door he would very probably behave in a way that makes her feel loved and protected by him. With a man like that, why would she need anyone else?
Jealousy is a way of focusing on the worst, unless there is a real reason for it, in which case it isn’t jealousy but suspicion. And if the suspicions are well founded, that is another story. As a rule, if you have no solid evidence, the problem lies in the husband’s pathological jealousy, not in his wife’s behaviour.
Early goals: why do we shrink in the face of difficulty instead of growing?
The logical thing would be that when things get tough, we would bring out the best in ourselves and even find extra strength to face the situation. The problem is that the exact opposite happens: when things turn ugly, we fall apart.
When a football team concedes two or three goals right at the start, it is very likely to lose heart. Being behind doesn’t make the players play better or more motivated. Quite the opposite: they start getting frustrated, and so they are likely to end up being beaten even more heavily. We also have to bear in mind the confidence in victory the other team has already gained.
At that moment, the losing team may forget that on other occasions they have won 5-0, which means that if they played the way they did that day, they could still win.
In his book Unlimited Power, Robbins gives the example of Dick Tomey, coach of the University of Hawaii football team.
On one occasion they were playing against Wyoming, and at half-time Tomey’s players were losing 22-0. The discouragement among the players was visible, and it seemed nothing could be done about such a big gap on the scoreboard.
But Dick Tomey was a great believer in the idea that people’s internal representations influence their performance. When he saw those dejected, downcast players, he thought that in that state it would be better not to go back out onto the field at all, because they were going to be completely swept away.
So Tomey brought out a board with a collection of newspaper clippings he had gathered over his years as a coach. All those clippings described teams that, after trailing by the same score or worse than the one his team was suffering, had managed to come back in the second half.
He had his players read them until they believed it was possible to turn the game around. He filled them with enthusiasm, gave them new strength and, above all, gave them a belief: nothing was lost until the game was over.
It wouldn’t be easy, they would have to work even harder, but they weren’t going to do anything others hadn’t already done before. The result? Tomey’s team came out onto the field full of energy and the game ended 27-22. In other words, Wyoming didn’t score a single point more, and Hawaii managed to close the gap and win.
See also: The best motivational speeches in film
They did it because the coach managed to instil in them the belief that it was possible to win. They weren’t even going to make history, since they wouldn’t be the first or the last to pull off something like that. They didn’t win because of their physical preparation, or because of their arms or legs. They already had all that when they were losing. They won because of the work done on their minds and their way of thinking. Motivation can create magnificent results.
So the next time you find yourself surrounded by difficulties, remember that it is not the time to give up, but the time to try harder. The tougher the obstacle, the greater the satisfaction you will feel when you overcome it. And above all, remember that even if you spend much of your time with the score against you, the game isn’t over until the final whistle.
Featured image: Florida Memory, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
