In this form of jumping to conclusions, we assume what is going to happen in the future before it happens. "Oh, I know I'm going to bomb this test." "My essay is going to be too short." "I know the teacher is going to hate my report." (This last one combines mind reading with fortune telling: you're predicting what someone else is going to think about something you haven't done yet-- a double jump.) Fortune telling can be an especially dangerous cognitive distortion because my negative automatic thought about a future event can easily become a self- fulfilling prophecy: Because I expect to do poorly, I don't try very hard--what's the point?--and so, sure enough, I do a lousy job, "proving" that I was right all along. Looked at one way, fortune telling is a process of setting negative goals for yourself and then living down to them.
A woman came into my office about two-thirds of the way through the semester and said she wanted to drop the class. I asked her why. "Oh," she said, "I took this class before and flunked it, and I think I'm just going to flunk it again."
"Well," I answered, "if you've firmly decided to flunk, of course, that's your right. But I don't see any reason why you shouldn't pass. To do that, though, you'd have to try to pass."
"Oh?" she responded, genuinely interested in this novel idea, "how could I do that?" (Honest. I'm not making this up.)
We talked for a while about what her problems were in the class and what might be done about them. Her basic problem was that she had fallen seriously behind in her journal and other work. The reason she had let herself get so far behind, it turned out, was that she had, sometime around the second week in the semester, accepted the automatic thought that she was going to fail the course this time because she had failed it the last time. From that point on, she was setting negative goals for herself and living down to them: Don't do your homework because it's a waste of time; you already know you're going to flunk.
In spite of her fortune telling, however, this woman had written some fairly good essays. There was no good reason why she shouldn't do well in the class. We worked out a schedule for her to catch up by the end of the semester; she did; and she passed. She had to work very hard that last month to do it, but once she started setting positive goals for herself instead of negative ones, the impossible became possible.
I think that most students who fail courses do so because, to some extent, they are fortune telling. It is an all-purpose excuse for giving up. And most people who fail do so because they give up.
© 1996 John Tagg
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