Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Psychology is one my favorite subjects and 'Self-fulfilling prophecy' is one of my favorite psychological concepts. Let's see what do we mean by it.

The word to look for is 'Prophecy' it reminds of a prophet like below.

In old times, people used to ask a Prophet for many forecast be it related to weather, an epidemic, result of a war etc. So, the prophet used to make predictions related to number of things. It was supposed that these messages were the God's own words conveyed through prophet. Most of the times, these predictions used to become realities. So we understand that a 'prophecy' is basically a message from the God.

There are many things that distinguish human beings from animals and among those one thing is "Self-Awareness". This self-awareness is like a perpetual post delivering messages every now and then.

These messages are our thoughts. Thoughts related to everything like how we are feeling today, whether it is possible to crack upcoming exam, whether we are capable of discharging our responsibilities that we get in our lives etc etc. These messages never end. We start reading these messages and act accordingly. Our actions in turn reinforce what kind of messages we will get. And if we start getting messages of same kind we start behaving accordingly. It is like we are being hypnotized by these messages. 

These messages are like a computer program, a set of instructions which make us do a particular thing. For example, if I repeatedly say and think that I am feeling bad today (prophecy) ultimately I will start getting similar messages from my self-awareness. I will start seeing things which in turn would reinforce bad mood. At last, my prophecy of feeling bad will come out to be true.

This process is called Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The cure is to break the process in between. Engage in activities so that you receive positive and motivating messages. In fact, this phenomenon can be used to give you a kick in a positive direction. So start seeing things in constructive light.

                                

Ref.: Internet for images.

Why we shouldn't be always optimistic.

We all have faced difficult times in our lives. Except the person who hasn't faced any difficult time, everyone must have heard the advice "be optimistic, everything will turn out to be good". Also, we ourselves have given this advice to our dear ones whenever they face difficult times because most of us share the view that being optimistic always helps during tough periods. But by the end of this article we will see that being optimistic doesn't always help.

Optimism represents a mental attitude that the everything will turn out to be good. Being optimistic gives us a hope for the future and hence helps in battling any hostile condition. It is a belief that things will turn good after a tough period, but what if that tough period is a long one, or what if it is really tough to engage ourselves in it.

Vice Admiral James Stockdale (US Air-force)  was held as a PoW among many others after Vietnam War. He survived being tortured by Vietcong for 8 long years. When Stockdale was asked who dint make out of the camps?, "the optimists" came the reply. They were the ones who said we are going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we'd be out by Easter and then out by Thanksgiving and then it was Christmas again. At last they died being heart broken. On the contrary, one thing that helped Stockdale endure the hardship was the belief that he could be held for a long time.

What happened with many of PoWs of Vietnam War is the perfect example why being optimistic doesn't always help. At times, we start neglecting some vital details of the realities by covering it with optimism. In that case, at last when our expectations are not met, we simply just feel being heart broken. Optimism just gives a false hope when we just count on luck which can prove to be fatal in some cases.

So next time when we will face a tough time what we should do? Or what advice should we give to our dear ones when they face any difficult time? The answer is being resilient i.e. to cope with the adverse situation. They are three things that helps in being resilient:

i) Face the Reality: We should always make sure that our optimism doesn't distort the sense of reality. In any adverse situation always attend to each and every detail of the reality.

ii) Search for Purpose: In hostile conditions, often people throw up their hands and cry, "why always me?". This attitude makes them feel like victims and living through hardship carries no lesson for them. On the contrary, if we seek for a purpose in hard times, it will help us in navigating through the labyrinth of hard times.

iii) Be Resourceful: Not always, we are equipped with the tools we may require to solve a problem. In that situations, we should make use of everything whatever at hand. We need to change our perspective to see how a thing can help us in an unconventional way.

Ref.: Diane L. Coutu, "How Resilience Works," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 80, No. 5, May 2002.

Personal goals are better to be private.

Why am I writing this article?
Since my childhood, I have observed that whenever I share my goals like waking up early in the morning, buying a new toy, studying daily etc with others, I always get this feeling of uneasiness as if my mind is reminding me not to expose my personal goals to others. Whenever someone asked me about my personal goals, I always feel confused whether to share my goals or not.

I realized that the feeling of uneasiness has a source, it is as if my mind is saying to me "Last time you made your goals public and they dint work out, so it is better not to tell this time".

And I am sure, each one of us has felt this feeling of uneasiness. Did you?

Lately, I came across some articles, research work which further solidified my conception that personal goals are better to be private. It prompted me to write an article on the same. So here it is.


We all have few goals which we would like to achieve in a fixed amount of time. Goals like reducing weight, preparing for something important, working out daily, quitting smoking etc. There is a misconception that if we make our goals public, there are higher chances that we will stick to it because others may help us in achieving our goals and because we would like to project our self-consistent image, we will have to show our commitment.

But that's not true practically, we have often realized that every time we made our goals public, they dint work out and in fact, there is a psychological reasoning behind it.

First of all, why do we set goals? The answer is to get satisfaction. And we know that to achieve a goal we need motivation and when we tell our goals to others, we achieve kind of false satisfaction. Because of this false satisfaction our motivation level goes down. By making our goals public our mind creates an Illusion Of Progress. It basically gives us a good feeling and our mind creates a social reality that we are more closer to our goal. But that's simply not the case, physically we are still at the starting point where we were. But because of illusion of progress we feel less motivated which basically takes us away from our commitment i.e. it widens the intention-behavior gap [Gollwitzer (2009)]. 

And finally if we fail our commitment we feel bad and lose some self-esteem with it, or we employ some kind of defense mechanism and start giving excuses for why things dint work out.

On the other side, if we keep our goals to ourselves, we are always in sync with reality. We only get satisfaction when we see ourselves making some actual progress. And finally when we achieve our goal, it adds up to our self-esteem and motivates us further.

So, personal goals are better to be private if we don't want our mind to trick us. Because our mind mistakes the talking for doing, and it's better to control it :)

References: 1. 

 2.  PM, Gollwitzer : When intentions go public: does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap (2010), Psychol. Sci. 2009 May.

Notion of Success.

Remember this dialogue, "Life is a race! If you don't run fast you will be a BROKEN ANDAA!!". Of course you do. Do you agree with this statement? Well, most of us are conditioned to agree with it. Alright, that being said, where is the starting point of this race? Where is the finish line? How will you decide who came first and who came second?

During my childhood, my parents said to me "You should aim for success". My teachers said the same to me. But no one clearly told me what do they mean by success. They said, I should come first in the class. Well, I din't get that rank until the end of my high school. I stood first in 12th standard, scoring 90+ marks. I asked myself, am I successful now? I guess, I wasn't.

I entered the most prestigious institute of the country for my engineering. Again, I asked myself, am I successful now? I wasn't because when I looked around, almost everyone seemed to be ahead of me. During those years, I started thinking, when exactly will I be successful?

Then I realized, I don't have any clue what success is, neither did anyone I had met in my life. I took into account, various theories to define success:

1. Being first in your class.
2. Getting high paying job.
3. Like a race, crossing the finish line first.

Well, none of these satisfied me, first two theories seemed vague to me. You can always find someone somewhere in the world scoring more than you did, getting a job paying more than you got.

Now, let's scrutinize the last theory. Sure, life is a race that's what we were taught. We're always competing with others. But where is the finish line? Well, then it dawned upon me:

"Success is defined by your position. Though it is not absolute, it is relative but with respect to your past position not with respect to others present position."

Let me explain, birth of a human being is a random event i.e. where you will be born is not fixed. We're conditioned to believe two things about success in life:
1. There is a fixed starting line.
2. There is a fixed finishing line.

Both of these are lies. The truth is:
1. Life is a kind of race where everyone is not standing at the same starting line i.e. starting line is different for everyone.
2. Finishing line is also different for everyone.

So, basically your success will be defined by the distance you cover from "your" starting point. If at any moment you would like to know how successful you are, do this: Turn around and see how far you have come.

Let me reinforce what I'm saying with following example:

A well respected teacher, whose father used to work on roads, is more successful than the CEO of a company, who got it in inheritance. Even though, latter has more money and power.


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Cheers!