Instead of coming at a challenge from a place of fear or with a deficit/scarcity mindset, we can truly view it as an opportunity and have the confidence that will help create the future we really want to realize.

In a recent executive coaching session with one of my clients, we discussed on-boarding preparations for a new team member. My client presented a list of half a dozen concerns, lamenting all the negative things that might manifest with their new hire. “They might take too much time to get up to speed and will create a drag on my time… They might not become engaged and would leave after a short tenure…”

I interrupted, “And what if the opposite of each of these concerns were to happen?’

There’s an interesting study (Rosenthal-Jacobson) that explores the Pygmalion effect, known more commonly as the self-fulfilling prophecy. In this study, teachers were told that some of their students (about 20%, chosen at random) were expected to be “intellectual boomers” and perform better than their classmates. Over time, researchers discovered that even though they were chosen at random, the children’s performance was enhanced when teachers expected higher performance from them. Conversely, students’ performance suffered when teachers expected lower performance from them.

This phenomenon plays out all over the place in our day-to-day interactions and relationships. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of heading into a customer-service call frustrated and irritated, expecting the customer service representative to be unhelpful—and found that conversation to fall short as you expected. Or maybe there have been other times where you’ve tried entering into a similar conversation with a deep breath, a positive attitude, and polite and cordial disposition—and found you were met by an equally positive service agent.

There are obviously multiple variables at play in these situations, but I’d wager that, all other variables consistent, the latter approach will almost always yield better outcomes.

The Power of Visualization

There is a related phenomenon that occurs when we leverage positive energy and emotion, visualizing an optimal outcome. When we do so, we are far more likely to achieve it than focusing on the negative possibilities.

A friend shared that when they were golfing, setting up for a drive down the range, their buddy quipped, “Don’t hit it in the woods!” Their mind and their focus went directly to the woods, of course. And subsequently, so did the ball. Had they stayed focused on visualizing the ball headed to the green, their body mechanics were far more likely to follow suit.

Recently, watching the Paris Olympics balance beam competition, one athlete after another began to fall. The announcers observed that it is a challenging trap that can befall athletes when they get into their heads about what they had just observed. They also reiterated the importance of sighting to the beam (instead of the floor, or anywhere else for that matter) with one of the announcers citing a former coach who had always preached “that you are going to land where you are focusing.”)

It’s this same dynamic that had my driver’s education teacher drill into us not to gape at crashes or be distracted by stopped emergency vehicles on the side of the road. If we don’t remain primarily focused on the road ahead of us, our car will take us where our eyes are going.

Elevating Your Vision to Achieve Exceptional Results

So, getting back to my client’s (legitimate) concerns – what could they do to mitigate these?

There’s a practice we take our clients through, leveraging the principles of Appreciative Inquiry (a well-researched, positive, strengths-based methodology) that calls for us to start by visualizing our ideal future, as rooted in the times when we have been at our best. It calls us to consider what conditions made those best experiences possible, and what we can do to cultivate those conditions for future success.

I encouraged my client to start by taking each one of their explicit concerns they had noted and to first “flip it,” restating it as an opposite, positive statement. So, for example, instead of “My new hire will take too much time to get up to speed” became “my new hire will get up to speed quickly and efficiently.”

Next, we elevate this statement to “my new hire will get up to speed quickly and efficiently, assuming key client project leadership responsibilities that will free me up to focus on X and allow us to accelerate the growth of the business.” And so forth down the list.

Now that we’ve established this positive vision for the future we want to create, this helps inform the next questions we need to consider.

Namely, what steps can we take to make that future possible?

This positive visualization is fundamentally important for high performance—whether you’re in driver’s ed, the Olympics, or the corner office. Instead of coming at a challenge from a place of fear or with a deficit/scarcity mindset, we can truly view it as an opportunity and have the confidence that will help create the future we really want to realize.

If you’d like to explore how to create the future you really want to achieve, schedule your free strategy assessment call here.