Chapter 6. "How to Motivate with Just Your Mind: Beliefs, Butterflies, and an Elementary School."

The pleasant California sunshine beams down on a sharply dressed man striding up to the broad double doors of a perfectly ordinary elementary school just south of San Francisco. The man's name is Dr. Robert Rosenthal, and he knows that today is going to be anything but ordinary. He knows this because he is about to begin an experiment that will change the face of psychology forever.

The year is 1963, and the school year is just beginning. With no time to lose, Rosenthal, along with his partner, Lenore Jacobson-- with no time to lose, Rosenthal, along with his partner, Lenore Jacobson, give aptitude and IQ tests to every student in the school. As expected, some students do well, while others do very poorly.

However, Rosenthal has no idea which is which. He's careful not to look at any of the test scores. When all the testing has concluded, all the teachers and faculty are called into a meeting. They wait with curious anticipation as the scientists present the results.

In the field of scientific research, there's a long tradition of lying and deception. Oftentimes, it's important that the participants involved in a study do not have all the information. Someone who is given full knowledge could inadvertently be influenced by that information, which would skew the results. So like a good scientist, Rosenthal lies.

Having no idea what any of the actual test scores are, he's picked some of the students' names at random, and he tells the teachers that these students are very intelligent and capable. He calls them Spurters. Then, after receiving some appreciative handshakes, they pack up their gear and go home.

About nine months later, as the school year is coming to a close, the researchers return to conclude the second and final phase of their experiment. Rosenthal tests all the students once again and compares their latest scores to those from the beginning of the year. As he finishes reviewing the data, a wry smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. The hypothesis he had set out to prove was correct.

The randomly selected Spurter students all had significant increases in their scores compared to the rest of their peers. Since they were blindly chosen, it's highly unlikely that all of these children were just naturally special and gifted. The only significant difference between the Spurters and the rest of the school was that Rosenthal made sure the teachers believed the Spurters were special. And that belief made it so.

Nowadays, this phenomenon is called the Pygmalion Effect, and it crops up everywhere in schools, businesses, sports teams, and of course, the home. As a parent, your beliefs and expectations for your children have a very real and measurable effect on their future performance and achievement. If you believe your child is highly intelligent and capable, you will unconsciously demonstrate that belief in your words and actions. Your child will get the message loud and clear, and they will be far more likely to rise to the occasion.

Alternatively, if you believe your child is lazy, stupid, unmotivated, helpless, or insert other negative adjective here, then chances are excellent that you will be right. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Cautionary Tale: The Parable of the Boy and the Butterfly.

Once upon a time, there was a young boy skipping along the sidewalk near his home. While passing one of the many trees lining his quiet street, something caught his eye. Being an exceptionally curious young lad, he quickly turned to investigate. There, dangling from the slender branch, he saw a small green chrysalis. In the center, there was a tiny but gradually widening hole through which a new butterfly was struggling to emerge at that very moment.

Fascinated, the boy sat and watched the butterfly for a time, but quickly became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to fit through that tiny hole. It seemed to be in pain and not making much progress. The more he thought about the butterfly's plight, the more anxious he became. What if the butterfly wasn't strong enough? What if it was stuck in there forever?

Finally, the boy stood up and ran home, determined to help. He borrowed a pair of scissors and returned to cut the hole in the chrysalis, making it wider. The new butterfly slid out with a swollen body and fragile wings. Beaming, the boy watched and waited for the misshapen butterfly to stretch its wings and take flight. The butterfly hobbled around and stretched its wings, but remained firmly on the ground. As the minutes dragged on, the boy's smile faded, replaced with a feeling of dread.

Distraught, he went home to tell his mother what had happened. She explained to him that by trying to help the butterfly, he had crippled it. The butterfly needed those hours of slowly fighting its way out of the chrysalis in order for it to gain the strength to fly. Because he had rescued the butterfly from its struggle, it would spend the rest of its life on the ground, never knowing the exhilarating joy of flight.

As a life coach, I speak to parents almost every day who remind me of the boy in the story. They love their children dearly and don't want to see them fail or experience pain. They see them contending with school, work, relationships, you name it. As they witness this struggle, inevitably feelings of doubt and the boy's same question crosses their mind. What if they can't handle this?

As a parent, this is a very important issue to diagnose, because there are undoubtedly situations and challenges that are beyond your child's current capacity, especially if they're very young or have physical or mental limitations. However, that kind of question in particular, can they handle this or not, can be extremely dangerous.

Here's why. Asking a binary question like that puts you into a narrow frame of mind. The answer becomes limited to two options. Yes, they can, or no, they can't. If you conclude that the second answer might be applicable, then the next logical jump most parents will make is, therefore, someone else needs to handle this for them. As their parent, that someone should probably be me.

In some instances, that response is absolutely appropriate. However, most of the time, I've found it has similar results to the boy and the butterfly. A binary question tends to unconsciously force one's train of thought to the extremes with nothing in between. At that point, if the parent already has doubts and assumptions about their child's capability, they'll likely make an extreme decision. They then step in, take over, and solve the problem. Crisis averted.

Through their actions, however, the parent has just communicated to the child, I don't trust you to be able to handle this. You can't do it. Whether or not that's true, if the child believes them, then they will be less likely to try to tackle a challenge like that in the future. Pygmalion Effect strikes again. And eventually, it creates learned helplessness.

However, what happens if we let the Pygmalion effect work for us instead of against us? What if we always begin with the assumption that they absolutely can? Well, then we're able to change the question. What do they need so that they're able to handle this? How can I support them?

That question opens a world of possibilities, and it allows you to first take a hard look at the middle ground of the support role before you jump to the extreme of the savior role. Most of the time, your child doesn't need you to take over. In fact, much of the time, they may not even need any help at all. Like the butterfly, they need to struggle and reason through this on their own.

When intervention is required, often they just need a coach, a friend, a support, a guide. They need someone to believe in them and perhaps show them the important piece they were missing. They may need to be provided with the missing knowledge and resources required to do XYZ. In other words, as we covered in chapter 3, your child may need a crutch, but not an electric wheelchair. Then, having empowered your child, you can step back and comfortably say, I always knew they could do it. And now they have what they need, their time has arrived.

Those successful Spurter kids at the elementary school weren't smarter than any of the other kids. They had just been shown initially through the actions of their teachers, and eventually through their own actions and choices, that they could handle more, that they can learn new things, harder things, that they could solve problems and make a real difference in their own lives.

Think Your Way to a Better World.

In his 1912 classic, As a Man Thinketh, James Allen beautifully illustrates that our lives have invariably originated from our thoughts. Your thoughts become your actions, and your actions shape your destiny. Is it any wonder, then, that thoughts like, my son is lazy, or my daughter can't do math, will eventually have an effect on how you behave towards them, and eventually on reality itself?

Whenever you find yourself having doubts about your child's capabilities, what do you do? How do you make the Pygmalion Effect work for you instead of against you? Step one, realize that you're awesome. Stop berating yourself. Seriously, stop right now. You're an awesome parent. Do you want to know how I know that? I'll tell you.

At this very moment, you're reading a book, trying to learn how you can better help your child. Bad parents don't do that. In fact, bad parents are often the ones that think they already know everything there is to know about parenting. Having occasional doubts about your child's capability doesn't make you a terrible mother or father. It only makes you human, and an intelligently questioning and realistic one at that.

Sadly, not all of us have had someone in our lives that has shown us loving, unconditional support, so you may need to be that person for yourself. Be kind to that smiling, beautiful human being you see in the mirror every morning. Since children learn best through observing others, your child will be more likely to start believing in their own strength and worth as they see you trusting in yours.

So please believe me when I say, you've got this. Really, you do. It's not fair to judge past actions on present knowledge. Maybe you've just realized that in the past, you haven't handled things quite the right way. So what? Now, you know better. Make amends. Make new habits. Keep making mistakes. Keep learning and move on.

Step two, become eight years old again. Children are wonderfully adept at viewing the world in new and different ways. As they play, they use their imagination to conjure up all sorts of new and exciting realities. I'm fairly certain you were eight years old once, so that innate ability is still buried inside you somewhere. The time has come to dust it off and put it to good use.

Think of someone you know for whom you have great respect, someone who is incredibly capable, someone who you think is just the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, imagine that it's that person who isn't doing their homework or picking up their LEGOs instead of your child. If you were going to talk to them about it and try to solve the problem, would you handle that conversation differently? I'll bet you would.

As you shift into the mindset that you're interacting with an intelligent, capable person, that causes an immediate change in how you behave towards them. Do this often enough, and these sorts of thoughts will become second nature to you. That's all there is to it.

Further reading. For more on overcoming and recognizing self-limiting beliefs, I highly recommend you check out The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown, a renowned shame researcher. It'll change your life.

Review. Section two, Belief, bullet point recap.

A belief in one's capability, self-efficacy, and a belief in the results is essential for motivation to exist. Assumptions born out of past experience are the biggest roadblocks to those positive beliefs. Deeply ingrained assumptions usually can't be uprooted by words alone. They were born out of an emotional experience, so only another contradictory emotional experience has a chance of undoing them.

To prove or disprove an assumption, conduct a small experiment with clear parameters. Be sure that the potential worst-case scenario is something you can live with. Having a first-hand witness of something else doing something that contradicts your assumption is the next best thing to actually having that experience yourself.

Because of the Pygmalion Effect, the beliefs and expectations you have for your child have a real effect on what they actually achieve, for better or worse. If you have doubts about your child's capability, then before interacting with them, think about how you would handle the same conversation if it was with someone you deeply respected and admired. Then, do it that way.