Maybe you remember the movie “My Fair Lady”. A famous phonetics teacher bets with a friend that she can transform a lower-class girl without education so that she is perceived as belonging to high society. Her subject is Eliza Doolittle, who agrees to take speaking lessons, to undergo the transformational actions of the teacher. The operation succeeds, everyone is happy, even if the journey was not without adventures.
Basically, it is about someone who dared to believe that a person can become the best version of himself, to do something about it, and that ‘prophecy’ happened. Theorists talk about the Pygmalion effect: if we treat someone as their worst version, the chances of them becoming so are high. If we treat a person by emphasizing his bright, valuable part, that part will grow, we will have a Eliza Doolittle of today. But we can do this with a few conditions:
- The person responds to the challenge in a positive way.
- We should not cultivate the person’s ego; the risk, from what I have seen, in reality, is that the person will come to think of himself as special and behave worse, considering that he deserves various things.
- Withdraw when the other responds inappropriately. Otherwise, we encourage skidding, the cult of immeasurable pride, the belief of some that they are the center of the universe, their and only their opinions are valid.
I think it’s good to treat people with confidence, care, empathy, goodwill, to support them, to help them grow their wings. At the same time, let’s take a step to the side when they start throwing mud at us, when they don’t appreciate what they receive.
At least for a while, maybe if they don’t receive anymore, see that the generosity, the trust invested by someone in us are not for free, unconditional, that if we don’t appreciate them, we can lose them completely.