As a former Senior Secondary English teacher, I witnessed students with a poor aptitude for study succeed while others who should excel, failed.
I used to tell my class at the beginning of the year that I had chosen them to be in my year 12 class because they were the brightest students and therefore would do extremely well... that it was just my job to refine their work so they could get there.
It is amazing how many excelled when, according to their previous results, they should not have. This is called the Pygmalion Effect and means that if you expect or believe that someone, in this case a student, will do well he generally did. This belief is reinforced by your tone of voice too. Because you believe they will succeed your tone of voice will indicate this belief and so reinforce this to the subconscious mind of the student. Then they must succeed because whatever the subconscious mind believes will come true. And, of course, the opposite can be true too.
When I was thinking of having surgery for cancer, something one of the doctors said to me stood out: “There are some people who should live and don’t, and there are some people who live, despite all the cards being stacked against them”.This is the power of our subconscious mind...if you believe it, it will come true and I totally believed that i would recover from the cancer and so I have.
This really reinforced for me that there is much more to us than we realise ... that if we believe something in our subconscious mind then it will come true.
I first became aware that I had a great ability to tune in to the subconscious mind or what a person is thinking below their level of conscious thought when parents rang me to coach their sons. I had a knack of giving exactly the right message to their older boys that not only improved their English results but also improved their lives.
I didn’t realise before this that I would automatically tune in to a student and then would choose the exact essay topic a student needed to release hidden emotions. So, the boy who was afraid of being alone had to write about Huck Finn travelling on his own down the river! By writing the essay he would deal with his hidden fears - getting them all out of his subconscious mind onto paper and thereby releasing them.
I developed my own techniques that made permanent change and now have put all my techniques into my books so that everyone can read them, do the exercises, use the techniques to release the negative subconscious thoughts, beliefs and emotions that are getting in their way and so improve every aspect of their life.
I constantly teach the pygmalion effect - that if you believe it, it will come true!!
