Our images and expectations about the future may well be the most fateful social agreement we create through our dialogue.
My friend Dr. Charles Elliott, when he was dean of Trinity Hall at Cambridge University, was reviewing an application for admission one afternoon. Although he'd left his glasses at home that day, it looked like those who had interviewed the applicant and perused her records had signed off on admitting her. "If she was good enough for them," he thought, "she's good enough for me." And he signed to admit her.
"Four years later," Charles told one of our workshops at the college, "I heard a knock at my door. A young lady had climbed the narrow two flights of stairs to my office to thank me. She said, 'Dean Elliott, when no one else would believe in me, you believed in me. With grades like mine, I didn't belong at Cambridge, but I figured that if you believed in me, I could do the work. Thanks to you, I will be graduated summa cum laude later today.'"
This story always reminds me of the people who have believed in me over the years. I have a hunch everyone has those memories. Perhaps there's been a time when someone saw something in you that you didn't see in yourself. They saw a seed, a potential, and it made a lasting difference in your life. As well, the roles have been reversed when you believed in someone and it made a difference for them (even though you may have never known the influence you had).
These personal experiences bring alive what social scientists have found through decades of research: that the expectations we hold--our images of others--have a profound effect.
In one classic design, researchers told teachers that certain students had unusually high potential for success in school. The children were in fact selected at random, rather than for any innate abilities. Several months later, the chosen few were surpassing their classmates due to the kind of attention, subtle as it may have been, that they had received as a result of their teacher's expectations. The students' self-images had been altered and they had responded with increased effort and focus. Believing themselves to have more talent, they performed better than they would have otherwise.
This well-documented phenomenon has been called the "Pygmalion effect," a reference to George Bernard Shaw's play of the same name (which later became the musical "My Fair Lady"). In the play, Eliza Dolittle, a Cockney flower girl who has been transformed into a duchess, gives us a more colorful explanation.
You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
Whether we prefer to take our cues from personal experience, experimental evidence, or literature, it is apparent that the images we hold of other people have effects that are both genuine and significant.
If our beliefs about people can be that powerful, the implications are intriguing, to say the least. It's an energizing conclusion: Little about human development or behavior is predetermined or unchangeable. Just as the future is open to our influence, so are societies, organizations, and individuals.
"But Jim, 'images' are no more than foggy self-delusions," a friend once said to me. "These studies just show it's hard for people to be objective about reality and take action based on facts."
Is my friend right? Would we be better off if we were more clear-eyed about "the truth" and more "objective" about ourselves and others?
Hardly.
I see in all of this not a human defect, but an extraordinary human gift: The ability to create a picture of a distant reality and to bring that expectation into the present moment, as if it already exists. Doing so in a conscious, intentional manner--based on choosing to see the best--is an act of leadership, a creative act that supports our highest aspirations for ourselves and society.
This is the approach of the artist, and of Churchill.