Enter Pygmalion:

What You See Is What You Get

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You may remember the play Pygmalion, written by George Bernard Shaw, and made into a musical and then a movie called My Fair Lady (Alan Jay Lerner). In the story, a beautiful but coarse young woman, Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, is chosen by Professor Henry Higgins for an experiment. He is a phonetician who makes a bet with a colleague that, in six months, he can teach her to speak so beautifully that she will pass as a lady at a Court ball. The colleague agrees to pay for her lessons. Henry Higgins diligently works to change Eliza, who wants to learn so that she can get a better job. In the process, just as happens in the Greek myth, Pygmalion, Henry Higgins falls in love with his creation.

When I was in college in California in the 1960's, two boys in my psychology class chose the Pygmalion effect (aka Rosenthal effect) for their project. They selected at random a girl, whom they defined as unattractive, and began treating her as though she were very good looking. They talked with her every day, complimented her and, in the way of college boys, flirted a bit. The result was that she changed dramatically—she became more aware of her appearance and hygiene, began using some make-up, styled her hair. Buy the time the class was over, this young woman was, indeed, attractive in the traditional sense of the word.

It matters how we treat people. Words can tear down or build up. Jane Goodall said it this way: “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” As an educator for many years, I experienced first-hand the truth that higher expectations result in increased performance. If you have a trouble-maker in your class, appoint that child your helper, and his/her behavior will change.

Here's a little poem by Hafez that makes the point another way:

“And still, after all this time,

the sun never says to the earth,

'You owe me!'

Look what happens with

a love like that;

it lights the whole sky.”

You can light up someone's life today. I hope you will.

In the Spirit,

Jane