It began when I read this on the wall of a doctor’s office:

“When you expect things to happen, Strangely enough, they will happen. Your expectations energize your goals And give them momentum. Your life will always respond to your Outlook.  So, set your goals high. You must first expect to succeed if You want to succeed.  And you can’t Expect to succeed beyond your wildest Expectations unless you begin with Some pretty wild expectations. When you believe something good Can happen, it does.  The dreams You choose to believe in will come To be. Expect success and it is yours!”

Had I read this homily earlier in my life I would have said, with some cynicism, “yeah, right.” But things have happened to change my mind.

Soon after reading this statement of philosophy I discovered a piece of paper in my files I have absolutely no recollection of ever writing.  It was a typewritten (typewriters came before word processors) list of goals I had written ten years before.  Imagine my surprise when I realized that in those intervening years I had achieved almost all of my goals (some of those goals were not small). This event made me face the fact that all my fretting and worrying had been a pointless drain on time and energy.  Despite many setbacks I had succeeded anyway.

Writing out my goals must have established some kind of unconscious expectation.  And while I was crawling along under the weight of my conscious imagination, my unconscious mind was slowly making progress I never gave myself credit for.

What you expect is a habit more than it is a thought process.  That’s why I like to refer to myself as “recovering.”  My natural disposition is to think the worst.  So, I have consciously trained myself to recognize when my thinking starts stinking and to stop it every time it rears its head.   At first I had to be very deliberate and conscious about it.  But as time wore on I have gotten used to it and I find that remembering past victories helps a lot.

What often keeps me going is the fact that I have discovered a corollary principle to the statement: “Expect Success and it is yours.”… “Expect Failure and it is yours as well.”

So, what does this have to do with deathcare?  As a group, our thinking stinks.  We have been through a rough decade.  We have been the subject of media criticism for more than 50 years.  We have come to collectively expect that things will only get worse…and as long as we expect that outcome then we will get it.

As for me?  I think this decade and the next have every potential to be the best in the history of deathcare.  If you have been following my lectures and writing you know that I am backing that opinion up with facts and examples.

Tune in next week for: “The Case For Optimism in DeathCare”