Positive - not limiting - expectations
In George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” [and the musical “My Fair Lady”] Professor Henry Higgins claims he can transform Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a duchess.
Eliza realizes “the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated.” [From article The Pygmalion Effect by Eric Garner.]
Dr. Robert Rosenthal [formerly of Harvard University] conducted formal studies on self-fulfilling prophecies, and what became known as the Pygmalion Effect: how teachers’ expectations affect student performance.
In an experimental situation, some teachers are told they are the best in their school, and “as a special reward” will be teaching a group of the brightest students.
As summarized in the article Positive Expectancy, “At the end of the school year, these students led not only the school, but the entire school district in academic accomplishment.”
But actually, both teachers and their students had been selected at random, not chosen for high ability. Their achievement was an outcome of positive expectation for success.
This powerful influence of a self-fulfilling prophecy may not only impact how others flourish, but ourselves.
Personal development leader Brian Tracy includes the Pygmalion Effect research in his program The Psychology of Achievement.
Maybe a variation on this is the “law of attraction” and the power of belief as presented in “The Secret.”
In his article Notes on The Secret DVD, Bob Proctor declares that “all the great leaders all down through history, as far back as you want to go, have complete and unanimous agreement on one point, that we become what we think about. We have the freedom to think anything we want, we can originate thoughts or we can pick thoughts just out of the ether, and we can internalise those thoughts; we can bring them together and build beautiful ideas, or we can build terrible ideas.”
Expectation is also a matter of attitude, and our emotional stance toward life.
In her article Are You Settling?, Valerie Young quotes noted playwright, poet and former Czech president Vaclac Havel: “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
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