Telling the Future

I was talking with a friend the other day about a project she was working on. In her opinion, it was not going well and she thought it would probably be a failure in the end. I told her that if that’s how she approached the rest of the project, it probably would turn out to be a failure.

Telling the future is a tricky business. We all know about the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start thinking of a situation as having a particularly bad outcome, that outcome is more likely to occur. You are convinced a love interest will leave you, and they do. You are convinced you won’t get the promotion at work, and you don’t.

The flipside to this is having an optimistic or positive prediction for the future. Oddly, having an optimistic view can make you unpopular. People will tell you to “get real”, or that “that’s never going to happen” or “you’re fooling yourself”. It’s much easier for people to head towards the negative scenario than towards the positive one.

Your view of what will happen determines how you move forward. If you think that things will turn out well, you do the things you need to do to get that outcome. If you think that no matter what you do you will not be able to fix things, then you don’t do the things that may make a difference and you get the outcome you expected.

The bottom line is: if you try to predict the future, predict the one you want! Tell yourself things will work out positively. Tell others things will work out for the best. Expect it, and act on those expectations. At the very worst, even if other circumstances arise that you can’t control, YOU will feel better and act better along the way. Other people may even “catch” your expectation and adopt it themselves.

What do you think about this? Are your predictions for the future positive, or negative? Have you achieved an outcome that other people thought you never could? Leave a comment!

Until next time, remember… We are all magnificent.