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Anchor Point Films

Chad Kreuzer

The Pygmalion Effect and How to Transform Lives

I'm going to share with you a message on respect and self-respect, something that we don't think about a lot, but before we do, I just ask that you bow your heads with me for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to study science and scripture, the 2 books that you've been given to us.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would open our minds and hearts that you would convict, challenge, and propel us closer to Jesus.

1 of our presidents, not a very popular 1, at least not to us anyway, I'm sure he was in his day, but James A.

We read about, he was elected to the United States.

He was actually first a senator from Ohio in 1880.

And just before he was nominated for the presidency, in an address to the legislature, accepting the election, he said, these are his words, I have represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I greatly desired.

But though it may seem perhaps a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of 1 person." Interesting.

He is the only man I am compelled to sleep with, to eat with, to live with, and die with.

And if I could not have his approbation, I should have had bad companionship." So here this man said, listen, yes, we kind of would like approbation from other people, respect from other people, but he said the person I most wanted to be able to have this from was even myself.

Because when we look down on ourselves, when we feel ashamed of ourselves and live in shame of who we are, well, we have to live with ourself.

I know what it's like to, I went through 10 years of depression.

And it was a horrible, horrible experience.

I'm actually glad that I went through it.

Because on the other side, well, partly I'm glad because I found out how to learn to live with it.

And once I learned to change the lifestyle in a way that my body would work in harmony with itself, I lived in Iceland for 2, no, a year.

And while in Iceland, we ended up coming, all of us, well, working together from America, we were working over there, each of us got stomach trouble.

And if you're not very big, 30 pounds is a lot of weight.

My friend Nathaniel was with us, and when he went there with us, he was overweight.

Well, when we came back to the United States, he looked great.

I was gone, you know, body and myself, we were just gone.

We were just super thin at the time and had stomach trouble and went through depression, like I said, for 10 years.

Some of that was seasonal depression, some of it was just full-blown depression.

And Once, you know, within that time, I felt guilty all the time.

Not every day, but there were years where nonstop guilt, the very first thought I would wake up was just oppressive guilt.

And I'm so glad to be freed by not only Jesus, the whole time I trusted in Jesus, the whole time I would read my Bible, I read my Bible every day, I was seeking God and I felt condemned every single day.

I felt totally lost, but yet I was seeking Jesus.

I messed up many, many times, but I was seeking to get to know Jesus, yet feeling totally guilty.

Spent thousands of dollars to try to make my life right with people I'd wronged in the past.

And it was just living with yourself and the guilt of your past was such a difficult thing.

And being set free from that has been 1 of the greatest experiences of my life.

And I'm actually thankful I went through it because I don't think if I would have gone through that I would have had such compassion for other people who've gone through a similar experience.

It literally changed my life so I'm actually thankful that I went through that.

Now being able to even respect yourself, this sounds strange because this might sound like heresy, but you're going to see that it's not heresy, what I'm talking about here.

Now, first I'm going to share with you some research, a scientific study that was conducted and actually this study in and of itself I think was a little bit immoral, but there's still some interesting information to glean from it.

A team of researchers led by Robert Rosenthal went into an elementary school and administered intelligence tests to the students to see how intelligent the kids were.

The researchers then told the teachers in the classrooms which students, say Sam, Sally, and Sarah, they said these 3 are the most intelligent students and have the most likelihood of excelling and going on to success in life.

So they asked teachers not to mention the results of the study to the students, and not to spend any time more or less with them, and they were actually told, listen, you, we're gonna actually be watching you to make sure that you don't spend more time or treat them differently.

And in the end of the year, the students were tested again, and indeed, it turned out, Sam, Sally, and Sarah posted off the chart intellectual ability.

The most intelligent kids would be probably the most intelligent kids.

This would have been very predictable except for what they really had done.

When Sam, Sally, and Sarah, rather, had been tested at the beginning of the experiment, they were found to be absolutely wonderfully ordinary.

The researchers had randomly picked their names and then lied to the teachers about their ability.

That's where it's the immoral part, lying to them.

I wouldn't personally be willing to do that, but they did it, and it's interesting what we find.

So they lied to them and said, oh, these kids are off-the-chart intelligent.

But after the experiment, they had in fact turned into academic superstars.

So what caused these ordinary students to become extraordinary?

Although the teachers had said nothing directly to these children and had spent equal amounts of time with everyone, 2 crucial things happened.

The belief the teachers had in the students' potential had been unwittingly and non-verbally communicated.

More important, these non-verbal messages were then digested by the students and transformed into reality.

This phenomenon is called the Pygmalion effect.

When our belief in another person's potential brings that potential to life, Whether we are trying to uncover the talent of a class of second graders or in the workers sitting around us in a morning meeting, the Pygmalion effect can happen anywhere.

The expectations that we have about our children, coworkers, our spouses, whether or not they are voiced, can actually make the expectation a reality.

This is all a quote from a book called The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.

What we think about another person can actually create that in the other individual.

So if we believe in somebody else, it can actually make what we believe about them a reality.

I'm a documentary filmmaker and I read about science almost on a daily basis.

And so I love to look at actually go right to the scientific studies themselves and read what they have to say.

And 1 of the things I have discovered is that almost every good thing in psychology or nutrition, we were told long before it was ever put down in the scientific studies.

Over and over and over and over I see research and I'm like we were told that already.

Now 1 of the things I normally say, okay there's this thing the Pygmalion effect.

What I believe about you might actually create in you what I believe.

So if you believe that I believe in you, you may actually try to live out what you perceive that I believe in you.

I think about the young man that, or the young lady that was being witnessed to.

And as we're witnessing to someone, someone actually might think he actually believes in me.

Have you ever heard of the Rhodes Scholars?

The Rhodes Scholars, basically there was a very wealthy man, You've probably heard of the country called Rhodesia.

I think he owned probably much if not the country.

And maybe, was he in the diamond business maybe?

But nevertheless, he was extremely wealthy.

And Cecil Rhodes was 1 day met by the man who started the Salvation Army.

This is off the subject, but William Booth was, he was asked at his death, as he was dying, to sign some paperwork for, you know, business or financial reasons And he was literally coming out in and out of consciousness And so he would just he was scribbled something out, and they're like wow that doesn't look like his normal You know his normal signature, but he's dying and he said had to sign it on multiple pages.

The Pygmalion Effect and How to Transform Lives

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