welcome to today's video today I'm going to teach you how your thoughts create a self-fulfilling prophecy whether it's good or whether it's bad and the ones that are bad how to change them into a positive self-fulfilling prophecy for your future let's dive in your mind is this complex web of all of these thoughts of all of these beliefs of all of these things that you see and the way that you think about the world on top of that you've got everything that's ever happened to you in your entire life influencing the way that you C
oriz things in the way that you see something and then Place some sort of label or uh importance on top of it and all of your thoughts and your beliefs and everything influence how you see the world but also how you interact with the world and your internal narratives shape your reality it doesn't shape actual true reality like objective reality it shapes your own subjective reality so if you don't realize how you think and how you feel and how you believe you're going to get these self-fulfilling prophecies where your expectations and your beliefs about yourself
about other people will directly impact your outcomes in your life for positive or for a lot of people negative and it actually changes what you see in your reality and the importance that you give of things and so when you look at a self-fulfilling prophecy the the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy basically is this when your expectations or your beliefs about a situation cause that situation or outcome that you were expecting to occur and so it's like okay I'm expecting this thing to happen based off of my thoughts based off of my beliefs based off of
my past and because that's what I expect I go into it and it changes my behavior in that situation which basically makes the outcome I was expecting to happen and so this is actually uh sociologist Robert kernin uh so Robert Merton uh coined this term in 1948 and he described it himself as a false definition of the situation evoking a new Behavior which causes the original false conception to come true and so basically a person's perception and expectations make them create a new Behavior based off of what they're filtering in the world which makes their
expectations eventually come true and so if you were listening to an episode I put out a few weeks ago about your reticular activating system there's a a a part of your brain that filters an immense amount of information that we receive from our environment and then what we pay attention to and so the reason why it exists is because according to estimates on all of our sensory organs our sight our hearing our touch our taste our smell our brain takes in approximately 11 million bits of information per second that's what they take in but that's
not what gets through to our brain out of 11 million bits of information only about 50 to 120 bits of information actually come into our mind the reticular activating system is the bouncer at the door you know so the example I gave in the the the episode a couple weeks ago is like if a bouncer at the door is going to get fired if he doesn't let 200 women in then he's going to be looking for women who are in line or he's going to be walking by and every woman that walks by he's be
like you want to come in the door you want to come into the party you want to come into the party right he's not going to notice any of the guys that walk by he's only going to see the girls so that he doesn't get fired from his role right and that's exactly how your reticular activating system works it plays a big role in self-fulfilling prophecies because it filters information according to your thoughts and your beliefs which draws your attention to things to confirm your expectations and basically ignore or downplay information that contradicts them so
essentially the the reticular activating system works behind the scenes to help you selectively notice the things that we already expect to see and so this this selective focus helps explain why self-fulfilling prophecies happen so let me give you a couple of examples of exactly what I mean based off of what your thoughts about the world your your beliefs about the world change the way that you interact the world which then makes you get what you were expecting so let's say a man falls in love he falls in love with this woman he's just he's just
so in love with her right and then she ends up cheating on him and because of that he just has this broken heart and he's so hurt and for a while he can't open himself up he doesn't he doesn't feel like he can open himself up and then eventually he starts to open himself up a little bit more and he wants to start going out and dating again and and he still has this thought because he was so heartbroken before that he can't trust women right cuz the person who he loved broke his heart cheated
on him so he kind of has this belief like he can't trust women and because of that belief when he gets into his next relationship and he starts to like the girl he starts to feel the same feeling starts to feel a little bit of love towards her he might get too overbearing because he thinks like I can't what if she cheats on me I don't know if I can trust her so he might get too overbearing every time that he doesn't hear from her after a couple hours he texts her where are you how's
things going when she goes out with her friends he texts her where are you what's going on you know maybe her phone dies and he freaks out cuz he's in here for her for like four or five hours and because of the fact that he gets so overbearing that's his behavior based off of his oh my gosh I don't know if I could trust women I've been heartbroken before I want to protect myself he gets too overbearing she ends up leaving him breaks his heart as well which then reinforces his thoughts of I can't trust
women I I I'm not worthy of Love whatever is thoughts might be he created the Heartbreak again because of his beliefs based off of past results which then creates the same circumstance again in his life that is what a self-fulfilling prophecy is and it happens in your life way more than you expect it happens all of the time the problem is most of us because we have negativity bias have a negative internal dialogue going on about ourself about the world and so we're constantly creating these things that we don't want let me give you another
example right so let's say that you know there's a student right who believes that they're bad at math well if you think you're bad at math you will unconsciously focus more on when you failed of the challenges around math the difficulties around math and so let's say that that that student the reticular activating system thinks well I'm bad at math that's what their belief is because they failed a couple tests when they were younger right that means that every mistake that they have or struggle is then going to be highlighted and it's going to reinforce
that belief within them that math is difficult and this constant focus on failures and struggles can cause them to go into math and maybe approach it with hesitation or with anxiety and maybe they don't study math as much because it makes them feel anxious because it makes them feel insecure based off of the fact that they failed math so often or maybe they don't study because they think well what's the point I'm bad at math anyways which ultimately the next math test that comes up they're going to perform poorly because they either didn't study uh
because of their thoughts about what's the point or they didn't study because math makes them feel a little bit anxious and because they perform poorly they fail the test it reinforces the initial belief of see I'm bad at math hey real quick I want to introduce you to something called mindset Mentor plus if you love this podcast you will absolutely love what I'm about to talk about I designed mindset Mentor plus to help you actively integrate every one of these episodes into your life and here's how it works with every episode of this podcast that
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description on the other side of that you could say there's a student who believes that they are good at math and if they do then their reticular activating system is basically tuned to the signs of improvement oh I did well on this math question I'm getting better at this I'm progressing I'm starting to succeed which then reinforces their belief that they can get better and that they are pretty good at and over time this positive feedback loop then helps them perform better which then proves that their initial belief of I'm good at math being correct
you see how this happens it happens over and over and over again it happens in your relationships it happens at work it happens in the way that you think about yourself this happens in your social interactions so like for instance let me give an example of social interactions this happens a lot right a person could be thinking to thems that they're socially awkward and so if you think to yourself oh my gosh I'm socially awkward but I need to get out there I need to start meeting to people I need to start networking for business
right so you think you're socially awkward but you are going to put yourself out there and then you enter a room and you start noticing that when you talk to people their body language and the reactions look like they're a little bit disinterested in you so your reticular activating system will Zero in on every awkward pause that somebody has or every failed joke that you had which in turn reinforces your beliefs about yourself that you're not good in social situations you know let's say someone else thinks that they are good in social situations they say
you know what I'm an outgoing person I'm I'm really outgoing and I uh I'm not I'm not an introvert at all I'm an extrovert well someone who views himself as confident and good in social situations the reticular activating system will focus on the signs of when there were positive reactions and when people laughed and when they were having a good time which this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where they perceive themselves as likable they get you know social validation and that reinforces the belief and so the reticular activating system basically ensures that their attention is consistently
drawn towards evidence that supports the self-image so whether that's good self-image or bad self-image the reticular activating system is focusing in on that what you need to understand about the reticular activating system and about self-fulfilling prophecies is this is you create what you think you are and what you think the world is that's the way that it works out you create what you think you are and what you think that the world is and this is why I talk about it over and over again analyzing your beliefs about yourself about other people about the world
why analyzing your beliefs is so important for you to do because your perception of yourself of everything of the world is your reality it's not reality that everybody else sees it's reality in your own head it's because what you think and what you see creates the reality that you see and that you let into your brain the good thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that self-fulfilling prophecies can be bad but they can also be good so it affects the way that you see the world and it can affect you in a good way it can affect
you in a bad way but it can also affect other people around you in their lives as well uh a few months ago I did an episode on this thing called a pigmon effect and it happens when a person's expectations for another person and their behavior actually bring that behavior into reality so there was a study that was done in 1968 around this and it was really interesting because what they did was they took a group of teachers and they said hey here's all 30 of your students based off of what we're we're seeing with
these 30 students we had them all do IQ tests these five students were thinking that they're going to have something called a growth spurt and their IQ test showed that they're about to get way smarter over this year the only problem with this was that they lied to the teachers those students those five students out of the 30 were just randomly chosen but after a year those students those five for each of the teachers that they did this with those sh students showed more of an increase in their academic performance over the year than all
the rest of the 25 other ones and they did this with teacher after teacher after teacher after teacher and it did not come from the innate abilities of the child it came from the teachers expectations and the teacher's belief in the child and so the teachers were told that the kids were smarter and the teachers treated them as such they put more time into them they challenged them a little bit more and those kids had more significant jumping scores than all of the rest of the children and so what you have to understand is with
this it shows that your thoughts about yourself and your thoughts about the world and other people also affect other people around you what do you think of your children what do you think of your spouse what do you think of your mom of your dad of your family because you're helping them create their reality as as well whether it's good or whether it's bad you're playing a part in it and so if we're looking at this we need to really start to figure out yeah there's some positive sides of there's a positive self-fulfilling prophecy but
there's also negative self-fulfilling prophecies most of them tend to be negative based off of people's negativity bias and so when you understand how the reticular activating system influences self-fulfilling prophecies it kind of gives you a road map for overcoming negative thought patterns which then allows you to kind of foster positive outcomes as well if you want to and so the first thing as almost always when I talk about episodes the first step to all of this is you have to start becoming more self-aware self-awareness is the key to overcoming negative beliefs negative thought patterns negative
self-fulfilling prophecies you cannot change something that you're not aware of and so you've got to start to ask yourself like get a pen and paper and write down like what are the thoughts and beliefs that dominate my mind the more that you start to think about this the more that you'll recognize the beliefs that you have and also the beliefs that your particular activating system is filtering the world for which can then make you consciously decide to change them which goes to step number two step number two is to challenge your negative beliefs about yourself
about the world about other people once you identify negative beliefs that are influencing your world in the way that you want don't want them to you need to challenge them with logic and with evidence because your articular activating system will continue to filter for those things and so if you can come in and say hey this negative thought pattern is actually wrong and here's the reason why your reticular activating system will stop filtering to prove that thing correct and so the way I like to think about is this is if if you go here's my
negative thought pattern I've been thinking for a while imagine that you're at the debate table and you've got to step up from the debate table that you're in and you've got to go to the other side and you know how to debate yourself okay there's this negative thought pattern I'm going to debate the positive side of this what is the positive side of it and you're trying to prove yourself wrong so that your particular activating system doesn't keep filtering in the negativity so that's step number two and step number three is to do this thing
that I've been doing for for a while now and I'm really getting hardcore I'm using with all of my clients I'm teaching them to do it and it's to set your internal GPS every day and what I mean by that by setting your internal GPS is to get clear on how you want to think and how you want to feel and I mean Crystal freaking clear on how you want to think and how you want to feel and wake up every single morning and what I want you to do is I want you to do
breath work and meditate and feel the feelings of how you want to feel and then what I want you to do is I want you to come up with some form of affirmation on how you want to think some sort of affirmation on how you want to think how you want to feel how you want to be how you want your brain to start filtering in and out everything cuz essentially like I'm 38 years years old I have 38 years of brainwashing from childhood until this very moment and when I look at it some of
it's good some of it's bad I don't want some of it and it's not like there's some evil Overlord that brainwashed me it's Society it's my own doing it's growing up in my family it's the people I surrounded myself with I somehow got this like brainwashing well now that I'm an adult I'm going you know what I'm going to brainwash myself for what I want my life to be and so I'm going to meditate on how I want to feel every single day I'm going to meditate on how I want to think every single day
I'm going to give myself affirmations for what I want to believe every single day and I'm going to do it over and over and over and over again because I want to be the one that's in control of my brainwashing nobody else not Instagram not Tik Tok not the news none of that I am in control of this thing and I'm going to be the one that creates this internal narrative that then makes me interact with the world differently so that my self-fulfilling prophecies are the ones that I want not the ones that I get
because I haven't brainwashed myself and so that is how your thoughts create reality and how self-fulfilling prophecies end up happening so that's what I got for you for today's episode if you love this episode the best way that you can say thank you is just go ahead and share it on your Instagram story and tag me in at Rob dial Jr r o d a ljr the only way this podcast grows is from you guys actually sharing it so if you would share it I would greatly greatly appreciate it also if you want more from
me uh go ahead and you can check out mindset Mentor plus mindset Mentor plus is a subscription service where we take every single one of these podcast episodes and go way way deeper into every single topic with worksheets with journaling questions with an entire Community with Q&A sessions that I do every single month so if you want to learn more about it go to mindset mentor.com you can check it out and best part is it's way less than a dollar a day and so with that I'm going to leave you the exact same way I
Leave You single episode make it your mission make somebody else's day better I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day
