The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
People don’t wish for the worst to happen to them. However, as time and history have shown us, bad things can sometimes happen to the people who anticipate the worst.
As noted in the psychological research, a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false social belief that leads people to behave in ways that end up confirming that belief.
There are many such examples of the self-fulling prophecy. For example, under self-imposed prophecies, where you make a silly prediction about your future that somehow ends up true. Similarly, you might wake up one day, convinced that your day will turn bad, and then it does.
Other times, you might predict that you will do badly in a play, and then you actually stuttered for two minutes. Others may not care, but you certainly cared because you were under the spotlight.
There is the placebo effect, where your brain convinces you that a treatment worked, even though it did nothing. There is also the ill-fated stereotype threat, where you view someone’s culture in a certain way, and your brain only looks for the things that correspond to the stereotype.
Finally, there are some great benefits to self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, if you believe that you are the best in your craft, perhaps hiring managers were more likely to hire you because of the confidence associated with it. Alternatively, if you see good reviews on your professor, you’re more likely to think that they are amazing.
Clearly, the self-fulfilling prophecy isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, we carry small elements of self-fulfilment from time to time.
There are three things in our life: the things we can control, the things that we cannot control, and those things that we can influence.
When bad things happen, we often let those bad things take control of us. However, we can always build our reserves with coping mechanisms so that our responses against adversity do not affect us as strongly.
For example, let’s say that you believe that you’re not worthy of a relationship or that you’re too ugly somehow. This type of thinking may cause you to act on those behaviours, pushing others away.
However, this line of thinking is faulty: you’re in a relationship with someone. This wonderful person saw something so amazing about you, that they are dating you now. You have found each other attractive.
Months later, you are now single. After pushing the partner away, the partner’s emotional reserves were at an all-time low. They eventually broke up with you because they couldn’t handle you being so emotionally distant. You’ve accidentally enabled the self-fulfilling prophecy, by colouring your perception of the world based on this thought of being allegedly ugly.
Even in the aftermath of such a terrible situation, you can use this circumstance to take a long breather, reflect on the situation, and hope that the person is willing to come back someday. Coping mechanisms help with rebuilding ourselves, as our brains need a breather every now and then to problem solve the situation.
Building a list of things that you can do in the face of both physical and mental danger is a noble pursuit indeed, and often takes a long time to figure out. It would have been better if you did this ahead of time, but that’s life, where we live and we learn.
The mental stress of the world can be pretty confusing to navigate but with a little practice, especially with the written word, cost-benefit analyses, and a goal-orientated work ethic, you can eventually disrupt your self-fulfilling prophecies, one step at a time.
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