Richard Hogan: Negative thinking leads to self-fulfilling prophecy

Richard Hogan: We are hard-wired to seek negative confirming bias about ourselves. But if we disrupt that, and change the story we have been conditioned to tell ourselves about who we are and what our capabilities are we have the potential to achieve anything.

As a systems consultant, I get invited to speak with firms about how they can improve wellbeing within their organisation. Last week, I had the privilege of talking with the staff of Moore accountancy. The host of the talk, Brian Hayes, asked me a very interesting question, ‘What would be the one piece of advice you would offer to improve our wellbeing?’ 

This is something I think about a considerable amount. I meet so many clients in my clinic who are really struggling with life. They have become trapped, stuck in a negative pattern of behaviour and they do not know how to get out of it. 

I often think of therapy like a ball of string, clients come in unable to find that first thread to help them unravel it all and the therapist’s job is to help them navigate to that first thread so that they can gain an insight into what has been holding them back and free themselves from feeling stuck. 

So, as I thought about the question a thought occurred to me. There is nothing more significant in our lives than the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. I see it every day in my practice. Clients labouring with a narrative that they hold about themselves that is destructive for their wellbeing.

I started my response by telling them the story of a famous piece of research carried out in 1964 by an American psychologist called Bob Rosenthal. The study was exploring how children learned. Rosenthal went into a school that was considered low achieving and set up a bogus test called the ‘Harvard test for inflected acquisition’. 

The purpose of the real test was to see how teachers respond when they are informed that their students are late ‘bloomers’ and on the verge of achieving something great.

The test is one of the most significant psychological tests carried out in education because it revealed something profound about the nature of positive self-talk. The study illuminated that the teacher’s expectations influenced their behaviour towards the students which in turn influenced the student’s performance. Rosenthal found that the students started acting in ways that confirmed the teacher’s perceptions. The study demonstrated something very important about human behaviour, the self-fulfilling prophecy. This refers to the process by which a perceiver’s expectation about a person eventually leads that person to confirm those expectations. 

Now, why did I start my response to that question about wellbeing with this narrative? Because, in my experience, the self-talk that goes on in most minds is negative and destructive. It has been corrupted by all the feedback it has received over the years. It causes huge distress, because we all want to bloom and succeed. But we are often prisoners to a belief we hold about ourselves that ensures we never achieve our goals or desires and this causes huge problems for our psyche. For example, one of the clients asked me, ‘what do you do if you are finding it hard to study and you don’t know why?’ 

I explained that we often design paradoxical solutions for a negative paradigm we hold about ourselves. What I meant by this is that if we believe we are not that intelligent or we are not bright enough to succeed in a particular exam we will construct an approach to the problem that will inevitably bring it into reality. So, by not studying, we are subconsciously trying to protect ourselves so that when we fall short, which we hold as a belief will happen, we will be able to say ‘well, I didn’t study so how could I have done well?’ 

This type of behaviour causes such pain and distress in our lives, because we all want to achieve. And often we are unaware we are doing this and can’t understand what is happening in our lives. I had a client recently who had cheated on his girlfriend and didn’t understand why he had done something so out of character.

 In the discussion it came to light that he felt she was better looking than him and that maybe he loved her more than she loved him and by cheating he would be able to say ‘well, I cheated so I must not have liked her that much’ when she eventually dumped him, which of course happened when she discovered he had cheated.

When we change how we talk to ourselves we change our reality. We are hard-wired to seek negative confirming bias about ourselves. But if we disrupt that, and change the story we have been conditioned to tell ourselves about who we are and what our capabilities are we have the potential to achieve anything.