Has anyone ever spoken into your life? To have someone declare something positive or even negative over your life can sometimes have amazing effects in relation to what you do and what attitude you put up. A Self-fulfilling prophecy is defined as any expectation, positive or negative, about a situation or event that affects an individual behavior in such a manner that it causes that expectation to be fulfilled. But let us duel on the positive because that is usually more instructive to what we wish to achieve.
Denzel Washington, Hollywood actor and rights activist, once shared with an audience how a woman who had come to his mother’s salon to dress her hair prophesied over his life. After school, young Denzel would stay in his mother’s hairdressing salon and help out with a couple of chores. One day a lady who was sitting in a chair waiting to be attended to spotted him in a mirror. “She kept staring at me in the mirror”, he said. Then all of sudden, she turned around and beckoned to the young Denzel. “Bring a piece a paper, sit down”. And she begun to prophecy to him, telling him he would go places in life, he would speak to millions of people and be known all around the world!” The actor said that was one of the turning points in his life. The encounter gave him faith for what was about to come. What came was not something anyone could prepare for. Denzel flunked at almost anything he did. Tried pre medical to become a doctor at a point he even thought he could be a lawyer, but it seemed he wasn’t good at any of those things. But he wasn’t one to give up easily. Then he decided that he would try his hands at acting. He got the training and attended numerous auditions including a trial for a Broadway play where he discovered; “I can’t sing!” Bur that didn’t stop him. He kept auditioning until he got someone to say yes. And the rest is history… Today, like the prophecy said, he speaks to millions of people through his movies and his rights efforts Suppose he gave up? Just imagine Denzel settling for being a dishwasher or flipping hamburgers at Mc Donald’s for life? He would have denied the world his exceptional skills and talent.
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Teachers often have that effect on people at a younger age. There are teachers who would tell their students horrible things: “You will never amount to anything!” Is the response that some slothful people hear from their teachers. On the other hand some teachers will tell us: “You can do anything you want with your life if you only focus!”
Sometimes at an individual level we find ourselves saying things like: “I’ll have a bad day today”. And unknowingly we begin to act in ways that will ensure that we would have a bad day. Of course the obvious would take place. The term self fulfilling prophecy was coined by Robert Merton in 1948. He described it as: A false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. So suppose our teacher or our mentor is fooling us. Suppose the inclinations towards our talents for a brighter future are false and just suppose even though they are false they help bring out the best in us? It all becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because we begin to see in ourselves what was not seen earlier and we begin to work towards achieving something that we never felt possible.
Another example is order here. Alexander III the Great, the King of Macedonia and conqueror of the Persian Empire is considered one of the greatest military geniuses of all times. He was inspiration for later conquerors such as Hannibal the Carthaginian, the Roman’s Pompey and Caesar, and Napoleon. By the time Alexander was 35 he had conquered most of the world. Tribute to his military genius is found in two major cities in Africa that are named after him: Alexandria in Egypt and in South Africa. Many scholars say the secret of Alexander’s military triumphs is in the teachers that he had when he was young. But beyond teachers was his mother who kept telling him he is a descendant of Achilles and that one day he would rule the world!
We have to be careful whom we listen to. John Begin warns: “Not everyone has a right to speak into your life, you are certain to get the wrong end of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person.”
So if you are a parent, guardian or teacher, make sure you are speaking the right things into a person’s life. Even if you do not see the complete picture of that person’s future, you can be a motivator and inspirer whose words would change that person’s history and indeed the world would be better for it!
