Things happen and I often hear that things happen to us. What if we somehow influence most of them? What if when a car breaks down and we blame the universe, it’s actually our fault for not doing its checks more often? What if when we get sick it’s because we haven’t paid enough attention to our health along the way?
Things happen for a reason and sometimes that reason is us. Here is the post I wrote a while ago about the self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is a term used in psychology for events happening because we’re expecting them.
“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.” – Wikipedia
In simpler words: your predictions will come true because unconsciously you’ll behave in such a way to make those predictions true. The question is: why and when is this happening? It happens because making predictions creates expectations that will create thoughts, feelings and behaviors according to those expectations. So we’ll behave as the things we’re expecting to be real, already are. For example, if you’re thinking that someday your relationship with a close friend of yours will go cold, you’ll act according to that fear doing and saying things that will not upset that person. By starting to do this, you’ll act different than normal and your friend will notice this and he/she’ll probably think that you have a problem with him/her. This will cause that person’s behavior to be adjusted accordingly by reducing the interactions with you so you won’t get upset anymore. You’ll notice this and you’re starting to think that the relationship went cold and you’ll reduce the interactions even more which it will cause the relationship to go cold or even to end. This happened because of you thinking about it and because your thoughts are linked to your behavior, you made it real.
This can happen when you can directly influence the outcome of your prediction and also when you’re truly believing that it can happen. Obviously, not everything we’re thinking will become real because not everything is on our control and also because we don’t care that much about everything that goes through our minds (Thank God!).
Can we control it? Yes, we can control it by controlling our thoughts. If we can understand how big of an impact can our thoughts have on our behavior, we can start monitoring and shaping our mind the way we want.
Think Big to be Big!