So where do our expectations come from?
In line with these universal laws they come from our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. In other words our expectations are manufactured to the degree to which we believe the source.
If a person told us that we had won a million pounds and that person was someone that we trusted implicitly, to the degree in which we believe that person, our expectations would be manufactured which would generate our attitudes which would affect our results. There is a great story I tell at seminars about a commission based salesman who was many weeks into a sales drought. In fact it was make or break week from him and his family as the bank account was empty. His appointments Monday and Tuesday produced no results and totally dejected he called his wife from his hotel room on the Tuesday evening only to be greeted with a long and strange silence. "We've won £1million pounds on the lottery" she eventually blurted out. After calming down (which took several minutes) and with his wife's positive encouragement he decided to complete the rest of his meetings for that week. Over the next 3 days he won some of the biggest orders of his career and returned home triumphantly only to be told by his wife that she had made up the lottery win to try to lift his spirits!
What had changed about his attitude to those others meetings all be it based on false expectations? You might argue that he no longer cared because he was a now a millionaire, if that was true how did he close the deals on those remaining days? Fundamentally what changed was the fact he was no longer focusing his conscious thoughts on 'what if a I fail', which over time had actually become a self fulfilling belief for him and reflected in his behaviour, our how he came acroos in meetings.
So our beliefs are very important, and we go back one step further. Where do our beliefs come from especially our beliefs about ourselves? Our beliefs are based on our self concept and every single one of us has a self concept which is the controlling factor on our performance.
We always perform in a manner consistent with our self concept. Our self concept proceed and predict our levels of performance and effectiveness in everything that we do, and we can never perform in a manner that is inconsistent or contrary to that basic self concept.
Our self concept is a combination of all the ideas, thoughts, pictures, experiences, things that have happened to us over the course of our lives. It is an average of hundreds of mini self concepts in every area of our lives that we consider important, (our self concept as a father, mother, leader, business owner, sales person, etc.) and is made up of 3 fundamental ingredients that are the key to unlocking and understanding human performance
The Ideal self - Everybody wants to be a winner. Successful people strive for that and beleive it. These people perform at a high level.
The Self image - Inner mirror of ourselves, if we change the picture that we have in our minds we can change our self image.
The Self Esteem - The most critical element in human performance, this is always true how we feel good or bad.
I can sum it up like this, how much you like yourself determines how well you perform in every area of life, relationships, and looks. This is the core of self expectance.
One note of caution..
