Someone tells you they want to speak to you. You’re quite positive it’s ‘bound to be bad’. When you think about the future, you see an inexorable and inevitable decline. You feel things won’t work out for you, that bad things are fixed and permanent but good things are fragile and likely to be very temporary. Our attitude affects outcomes - as witnessed by the huge power of the placebo response. But aren’t you just being ‘realistic’?
Expecting the best vs naivety
Many people try very hard to be realistic and objective about life, and given the number of scams out there waiting to catch you, this can be a very sensible approach. If you get an email telling you you’ve just won a lottery in Mexico, and you’ve never been to Mexico, far less bought a lottery ticket there, it’s probably safe to assume you can delete that email without even opening it.
But the problem is that being realistic and objective isn’t always so straightforward. Many people who think they are ‘realists’ can actually behave like pessimists. Which means they end up distrusting other people, being cynical about relationships, and ultimately letting opportunities pass them by. Or they manufacture negative self-fulfilling prophesies with the small compensation that they can tell themselves or others: ‘Well, what did I tell you!’
But it seems that teaching yourself to expect the best, or at least to expect the best for more of the time, can actually make you more open to ‘luck’ (and therefore more likely to expect the best, of course). How so?
Getting richer through learning to look
Professor Richard Wiseman carried out an experiment which shows just how much your attitude (expecting the best or worst) can affect your life. Wiseman took two groups of people, one who believed they were lucky - and expected the best - and another group who believed they were unlucky - people who expected the worst. He gave everyone a newspaper, and asked them to count how many pictures appeared in the paper. However, unknown to them, in every paper there was a big message printed on one of the pages saying “Stop counting and tell the experimenter you have seen this, and win £250.” Of the two groups, significantly more of the people who believed they were lucky saw this message.
What?
Luck and positive expectancy
Wiseman suggests that people who expect the best are both more relaxed and more open to opportunities. People who expect the worst tend to be more anxious and tense, which actually interferes with their ability to notice new information, and therefore new possibilities. And sometimes, allowing yourself to dream about utterly unrealistic possibilities, like what you would do if you had unlimited wealth, can produce very creative ideas that you can realistically put to use.
After all, when you think about it, so much of the last one hundred years would have seemed impossible to the skeptics along the way. People scoffed at the idea of television, ridiculed the notion of flying machines, and called the plan to travel to the moon pure science fiction. They were sure such crazy schemes would never work. But the people behind these innovations dared to believe. Thank goodness!
OK, so we are not all visionaries or inventors! However, by learning to expect the best more often we will enjoy life more, keep going, not give up and – as Wiseman demonstrated – literally see more opportunities.
The new hypnosis session for hypnosisdownloads.com seeks to build the capacity for positive expectation.
Here’s to a good future for one and all!
All the best
Mark
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