The Expectation Effect: How Belief Shapes Your Reality

If your next experience went exactly how you expected it to go, would that be good news? Belief isn't fluff. It's an expectation that scales. Welcome to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. My name is Josh Negron, and this show is all about sharing lessons and ideas and strategies that sharpen your thinking, strengthen your habits, and push you to grow beyond your comfort level. Let's dive in. So today I'd like to explore the idea of belief and the power of expectation. Some of the books that we're gonna be pulling from today are The Expectation Effect, which is a really interesting book, uh, Psycho-Cybernetics, which is another popular one, Atomic Habits by James Clear, which is a fantastic book, The Four Agreements, Winning by Tim Grover, And Good Leaders Ask Great Questions. Now, all of these books have some of the ideas of the power of expectation and beliefs and how you can change your present and your future based on your beliefs and expectations, which consequently are affected by your past and your perception of your past. So a quote I want to read to you is, we don't rise to the level of our goals, we rise to the level of our systems. And belief Is the deepest system of all. So the expectation effect talks about how expectation is a part of the brain's prediction machine. It says the brain is actually a prediction machine, and that's all it does. It's— a lot of its processing power is focused on guessing what will happen next based on what has happened historically. So You probably have heard of the placebo effect, right? And so that's the idea that they'll put two people—they'll have groups of people that have an ailment of some sort and a drug they want to test—and half the people get the real drug and half the people get a sugar pill. And by that, they kind of gauge the effectiveness of the drug. But always included in that is are people that are getting better because of the placebo effect, which, as you know, is when people improve when there is no. Physical legitimate reason why they should improve. It's a sugar pill; it's not anything real. But their expectation is, I'm on this drug; it's to cure or help whatever I'm ailing ailed by, and thereby I should be better. There's also a more sinister version of this called the nocebo effect. Common example that's given in the book is that there is a gentleman who was diagnosed with a particular type of cancer. And when they diagnosed him, they said, hey, you have this type of cancer, you only have 6 months to live. So sorry. And crazy thing is, he died 6 months later. And when they did the autopsy, it turned out he didn't have cancer. That's crazy, right? So why is that so crazy, though? If it's possible for you to get better from a sugar pill that literally does nothing because of your expectation that it should do something, then couldn't the inverse naturally be true? That if you have the expectation that bad things are going to happen, they are going to happen. Now I get it. Like, I read those kinds of books and I immediately think of, you know, this manifest, name it and claim it, name it kind of scenario. And it seems just— Pretty hookey, pretty out there, right? But you can't deny those cases, right? So while it may not be as extreme as you're willing to accept right now, the truth is there is at least some middle ground in here. And that's what I wanna explore today. So the key takeaway about belief is that expectation is a preloaded experience. In other words, it's something that you have an expectation of, Based on, again, historical evidence of what the future will look like. And there's a certain degree of truth to that in how things play out in your future. Now, if there's a way for us to use this to our advantage to have good things happen, again, I feel like that's positive, right? Some quotes you may have heard before around this is, your brain doesn't wait for proof, it creates it. I thought that was also very interesting. And the ceiling on your performance is Rarely talent, it's the story you believe. So this is an interesting thing. Like, I, I'm an avid weightlifter. I do love, uh, Olympic lifts are some of my favorites. And I remember in my 8 years now of doing it, I was reading this kind of content and I decided to kind of do an experiment. And so I remember when we would used to do, you know, one rep maxes of whatever, that I would say things like, this is the first time I've ever tried this weight. Or I would say things like, last time I did this, I failed. Or this is the first time I've gone this heavy since insert something, since I was hurt or since I was whatever. I haven't lifted this in 3 years. All of those statements, and a lot of times, not always, I wouldn't be able to lift the weight. And I thought that was interesting. So immediately after some repetitions of this, I decided to test the inverse. So I was like, I'm not allowed to say those things anymore. What I'm going to do instead is I'm going to visualize doing the lift successfully. I'm also only going to say positive things if I say anything at all. And so if I look at my friend nearby who's encouraging me and be like, I'm going to get it, it's going to be good. That didn't mean, again, 100% of the time I lifted it. Nope. But I felt like the success percentage was greater. Now, was that because of the expectation? That's a good question. What this leads into is that A lot of times your beliefs, if you don't guide them, they're automatic. And so the words you use, your past failures, what people have told you before, in other words, the voices you allow in, and the labels that you accept on yourself are the ones that create the story. So if you're not in the driver's seat, they're automatically happening. In other words, That's going to become the narrative of your expectations. So in a kind of way, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. And so there was a time for most of my life where I allowed negative self-talk, and even things as simple as, ah, you're an idiot, or you're so stupid, or anytime there was a mistake, there was a high degree of criticism associated with that. But that That negative talk, that negative gossip, the things that I would never say to another human being, but allowed myself to say to me, they became an automatic narrative. And so I realized that that affected how I carried myself, it eroded my confidence, and really just affected me in a negative way. What I want you to think about is which expectation is renting space in your head without paying? Is there a belief that you have? I'm not enough. I have to get approval, or what I do is never appreciated. Those kinds of things. Are there any scripts that you believe that could be not trustworthy? Maybe they're what we could categorize later as a lie. All right, so here we're going to do the belief framework. And this is a 6-step system with the letters of belief that are going to allow you to explore potentially, let's say, what your number one false belief might be, and then rewriting it. So the first letter is B, baseline the assumption. So what you're going to do here is find out what negative assumption comes to your head, that negative expectation that you carry, and name it and write it down right now. What is that? I'm not enough. My efforts aren't good enough. Nobody wants me. Whatever that might be, write it down. And then we're gonna go to step 2, E, examine the evidence. You're going to separate story from fact. Does actual evidence support this statement? A lot of times it doesn't. So what disproves it? You can't take something away without replacing it. So what, what is, what are the things that prove it wrong? Do you have any evidences of the inverse being true? And most expectations are half-truths. So maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe that was 10 years ago. Are you the same person you were 10 years ago? Of course not. So let's have some grace for ourselves and look at that. Step 3 is L, language rewrite. You're going to be changing the script here. Words shape beliefs, beliefs shape behaviors. So replace something like, I will always fail, With, I will grow stronger with each rep. The next step is identity anchor. Identity anchor. Habits stick best when they align with who we believe we are. So we're going to write identity-based statements. I'm the type of person that blank, even when blank. So I'm the type of person that follows through even when I get really busy, or I don't get enough sleep, whatever those things are that might make you not follow through. Step 5 is evidence stacking, and that is taking small repeatable actions that bulletproof your success. Success is rarely one big moment. It's stacked when wins rewrite your expectation. And the last one is F, feedback loop. Review progress weekly. Beliefs are like software, they need updating. And keep the ones producing results, write new ones that are holding you back, and repeat the process. So this is not a one-time thing. The key, the key idea here is look at what those false beliefs are, those things that you might be carrying with you, and identify the lack of truths associated with them, and then push them through And out and rewrite a truth that replaces it, and then repeat that over and over. So next, we're going to do 2 practical 7-day experiments you can try. And the first one is a sleep reset. So this example is every night before you go to bed, say something like, my body knows how to rest. Whatever sleep I get, I will operate well tomorrow. There's this funny thing my trainer would tell me. I wear a Whoop strap and it tells you what your daily score is, what your recovery score is. And sometimes you're in the green, sometimes you're in the yellow, and sometimes you're in the red. And red is usually affected when you have a lot of high strain, you don't get very good sleep, and your recovery is just poor. Now, usually that correlates with how you're feeling. You wake up feeling smashed and that's exactly what your Whoop will say. But other times you wake up, you feel fine, you see it and you go, oh wow, I guess I'm in bad shape. And he would always be really irritated by that concept because he's like, I don't want you looking at that and then going, well, I'm supposed to feel bad, so I guess I need to. And so that's the idea. So this is using the inverse of that, right? You're saying that no matter if you miss out on sleep If you can't sleep, if your sleep quality is poor, whatever that may be, that you will still operate well tomorrow. And so when you do that, when you wake up in the morning, rate your energy before checking the clock, before reflecting on how bad or how good the sleep was, and then track that number for seven days. The idea is that over time of telling yourself that. Regardless of if you get poor sleep, you will function better the next day. The next one is performance priming. Now, this one is before a workout or doing something tough at work, like say sitting down and smashing some sales calls or doing a focused work block. You're going to say things like, I am the person who finishes strong. My last 2 reps are going to be my best. Obviously that one's in the fitness space. If you're doing sales calls, you can say something like, regardless of who picks up, I'm going to give them my best, or I'm going to ask for the sale, whatever that may be. And then do the task. At that point, measure what you do. So keep track. Were the reps— reflect back on that workout. Were those last reps, were they all quality? A lot of times that'll take care of itself as you say that. They're going to be better as you go through, right? So, and then when you make your sales calls, track your numbers. So the main premise here is that your performance will follow your expectation. So if you have positive expectations, then your performance is going to increase. So again, it won't always work in the same way a placebo doesn't always work. But our idea is, if that is a proven leverage that you can make, why wouldn't you want that on your side? So instead of risking the nocebo effect, we want to continuously pursue the placebo effect, right? So let's, let's zoom this out in leadership. We actually experienced this at our dealership. And, and I'll run you through how that went down. So if you're thinking about As a leader, your team will always perform to a certain degree around your expectations. And so if you have a leader that says, man, Q4 is always going to be crappy, a lot of times, guess what? Q4 is going to be crappy. So there was a year at the dealership where we were going into the winter months, the heavy, deep winter months. And we, we had this language around those months. We called them the embers. And, and we always talked about them in a negative way of like, well, the embers are coming, we better, you know, batten down the hatches and be careful with how much inventory we take in, because we know we're not going to sell very many cars and those kinds of things. Well, we always had a horrible Q4, and sometimes even a horrible Q1 when we talked like that. So that next year we decided, hey, from the top down, no conversation, especially negative conversation around the embers. Don't even talk about that. That word wasn't allowed anymore. And the entire leadership team was told, hey, you don't— we're not talking about it. No negativity around it. Don't even talk about— don't even say the word embers because it carries all that weight from previous years. And we had a much more successful Q4 that year. And I don't think that was an accident. And so you have to understand that, again, your team will live up to your expectations, good or bad. So the idea is, as a leader, how do you apply this? And so again, the same way you're gamifying the things that we talked about personally, either in, you know, whether it's in the gym, a sleep habit, or some of your work habits. How, as a leader, think about ways that you can leverage this with your team. Words have a ton of power. That's a lot of what this is talking about, words and thoughts. And so speaking out loud to your team what you think the team is capable of, whatever that ceiling is, keep raising it. Raise those expectations, raise what you think they're capable of, and telling them that you believe in them. Is step 1. Step 2 is define evidence tasks. Now, your team's going to see right through hype. So if you're just a rah-rah guy and you're not explaining to them specifically why you think that they can achieve those things, um, it's going to be a little empty. So it's up to you, knowing your team, knowing what they're capable of, seeing their potential. A lot of leaders have that gift. Use that. Tell them why you think they're capable of achieving those things. And you'll see them, even when they don't believe in themselves, you'll see that your belief in them becomes their belief, which is extremely powerful. Number 3 is praise process, not just the results. So John Maxwell always says fail forward. And as a leader, you have to allow for failure. You have to allow for poor reps because James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, That reps count. Like, yeah, doing things frequently is good. Doing them daily is awesome. But some things you can do multiple times a day. And as long as the rep count is high, then the skill set continues to improve. So praise the process, allow your people to run hard. And sometimes it's going to be running a little sloppy and be willing to give them that grace, especially as they're starting out. Number 4 is protect the culture's language. In other words, the idea of a sports team that says, well, we always choke under pressure, or yep, when quarter 4 happens, we're always, you know, like my example earlier. I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan. I know it's sad news for a lot of people, but that means I'm very familiar with suffering. But one thing that was interesting to me back in the Romo days was that that was like when fantasy football started getting really popular. And Romo was a pretty juicy stat monster. And so there were a lot of people who originally I was used to hearing a lot of negativity around the Dallas Cowboys. They started being really positive about Romo, and that was just unique to hear at the time. And that was because he would help them on their fantasy teams. And it was true, his numbers were awesome most of the time. But the— and I don't know if this was a limiting belief for him. It's just a thought, but it seemed like he always had the hardest times at the most critical pivotal moments in those games that mattered the most. And in those moments, he he you know would would miss the critical pass, or he would fumble, or something bad would happen. And so I I wonder, you know, I can't have a conversation with him, but I wonder: Is there was there a little bit of that false belief? Was the did the coaches have that belief? Because the people certainly did, um, you know, or did the other players, or any combination of those things? And did that affect his game to the point where that would kind of be a repetitive self-fulfilling prophecy for him? It's that idea. So if you're the leader, if you're the coach, if you're the boss, um, these are the kind of things that you want to— you don't want to project. You don't want to set the expectation poorly. So if there's any of that language that you do have, get rid of it and then adjust it and then project the positive version, project the increased ceiling, the increased performance, what you think they're capable of. And remember, belief isn't pretending, it's pairing expectation with honest feedback. Like we said earlier, remember, it has to be specific. It has to make sense to them to know Why you think that they're capable and that this cares for them personally and then challenges them directly because it's specific to them. So finally, here's something that you can take away from today. Expectation is a preloaded experience, so write a better preload. So here's your challenge today. Pick one script in your head right now and run through the belief framework like we talked about earlier. Try one of the 7-day experiments and prove to yourself how powerful this might be. I'll give you one more example for me personally that I think was super powerful that you may want to try. So for me, I said earlier that negative self-talk was a really big deal in my life. And I think honestly was what manifested things like bad luck, And just a general disposition, lack of confidence in myself and the way I carried myself, in the way I was projecting myself to the world, and honestly affected how people perceived me. And so I recognized that that kind of language wasn't constructive. And so, but how do you get rid of negative self-talk? Because initially, yes, negative self-talk is like a degree of it is verbal. But there's a ton of it that's not. There's a ton of it that's in your head. And so it just, it was so overwhelming. I was like, I don't even know how to begin to tackle that. The way that worked for me, strangely enough, was I reverse engineered it. I decided to, I was like, listen, to attack negative self-thoughts is way too overwhelming. There's thousands of them every day, and I don't even know how to attack that. So I decided instead, let's start with the things I say out loud. Now, I recruited my friends to do this, and you know, they always seem very eager to give you crap. So I said, hey, if you hear me say anything negative about myself, you have permission to call me out. And they did. And so over time, I noticed I would catch myself, like anytime I would make a mistake or drop something or do something stupid, would get ready to say one of those token phrases, and I'd catch myself. Nope, not gonna say that. And so it worked. It started really catching— I started really being careful what I would say out loud. And like we said earlier, words do have a tremendous amount of power. But so do thoughts. But what I noticed was curious, as I was attacking the spoken word that I was saying out loud, I noticed that the, the thoughts would be less and less. And because it wasn't tidal waves anymore, I was able to finally start taking those thoughts captive and saying, hey, no, that's not true. This is true. And using one of those replacement phrases and throwing it out, or giving it evidence. This isn't true because— and then giving it a reason Why that wasn't true. So that's something you can try if you want a super practical example. If you struggle with negative self-talk, kind of, kind of see if you can reverse engineer it. Let me know, reach out. I'd love to see, I'd love to see how that turns out. Thanks for listening to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. Remember, growth happens when you take action. 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