Do you have a self-fulfilling prophecy that is causing you to fail?
Your mind is an extremely power influencer in your life, how you think, your self-talk and the conversations you have in your head shape your attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. So when it comes to weight loss, improving your health and fitness, or even your career choices what are you actually saying to yourself. The chances are if you believe you will fail, you will. This is termed a self-fulfilling prophecy. A self-fulfilling prophecy is where you allow your past experiences, successes and failures to predict your future outcomes.
Our experiences shape our beliefs’, unfortunately for a lot of people experiences of failure shape a disbelief in succeeding in the future. An example of this is where a person has failed to lose weight, their past failures will often impact their belief in succeeding in the future. This disbelief leads to self-sabotaging behaviours when placed in a situation where they need to make a choice – Your having a coffee in a café, there is your favourite cake or slice, you say I can’t have that I need to lose weight. Your self-conversation says, you never lose weight anyway, why just not have it, you say no, self-conversation states you have always failed in the past, why not just enjoy the cake its not like you will lose weight anyway, so why not just have the cake……… The conversation continues, and a lot of the time people have the cake, and then feel bad and give up. This can happen with job interviews, acquiring new business and even parenting your kids… Ask and you shall receive, so be careful what you ask for.
Self-fulfilling prophecy has been proven to impact all aspects of our lives, it is how we think. So what can we do to change. Whether it be for your health, your business or other habits in your life. If you wish to change, you need to change your internal dialogue. Use your past successes to motivate and empower your future ambitions, goals and dreams. Make the decision not to engage in negative self-talk- if you are not building yourself up in your internal dialogue then shut up. Finally establish a positive self-affirmation that you can use to overcome the internal dialogue and use it to motive and inspire yourself to move forward.
The most important aspect to any change is to stop beating yourself up and surround yourself with positive people who are your cheer squat and remove anyone who is not helping you move forward from these conversations…… including yourself
