Fem Freestyle Wrestler: Higher Expectations? The Greater Achieved

When someone has high expectations regarding you, how does that make you feel?

I suppose we should qualify it a little. It could be your boss as work focusing on your sales quota or impossible to meet project deadline.

Dreadful.[adToAppearHere]

Maybe it’s the person you are in a relationship with or are married to who sees your potential but wonders if you are ever going to be capable of attaining it.

Horrible.

Maybe you’ve been in a situation where someone you are attracted to is treating you far better than most others and you are a little puzzled as to why but you decide to ride the joy train for as long as it lasts, making sure more coals of affection keep coming.

Then something frightening happens.[adToAppearHere]

There has been a mistake. Your admirer has behaved in a way that surprised you, perhaps introducing you to people that you feel are out of your league and you find yourself in over your head. When you finally confront the person as to why they keep doing that, you then get the surprise of your life.

They begin to explain in detail who they thought you were, almost with a look of pain on their face and tears in their eyes. They’ve attributed all of these incredible positive attributes to you and the worst part about it is that they actually mean it. And you? Why you remain silent of course and why?

That’s not who you are at all, and you know it.

You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.

John Wooden

I should know. I’ve experienced that first hand. I felt humiliated, embarrassed and my relationship with the person changed forever. I tried to smooth things over, patch it up as it were but once the magic is gone, you can never get it back.

When we write these articles at Female Competition International about the competitors of our industry, we are well aware of what our prime directive is. Say positive things about the female wrestling world and promote the competitor’s interests.

And you know what? About 90 percent of that time that’s extremely easy to do.

There is that other 10 percent however that is a little troubling.

There are some competitors who we know of, that are capable of doing more, yet seem content not to. From my stand point (I did say my and not we), that’s when following the prime directive is very hard to do. The human mind is very powerful. People know the truth when they see it. That’s why so many of us dread it because it often calls for action to take responsibility.

I wanted to write an article on a certain competitor like I did on Indra of LWS (Indra LWS Doom Maidens Wrestler, Is She Ascending Or….).

I decided to back off.

I’m going to write a positive puff piece instead. I sense most competitors do not like any form of criticism no matter how nicely packaged. They also have friends.

Some are very influential.

From my view, when I take the time to put days of thought, mounds of research and reservoirs of reflection into an article; that is a compliment, as I feel Indra should ultimately view it. What she’s doing matters to me as a sports writer.

Somehow I doubt the competitor sees it that way.

If you are a female wrestler reading this, is that what you want? Only for us to say positive things and promote you?

I think how a person answers that question depends upon  if they feel that the women’s wrestling industry as a whole, needs to move closer to the real world of sports. If they want improvement, they realize that constructive reporting may ignite self-reflection and match improvement.

The challenge that we have is if we want readers to keep coming back to this website so we can track the numbers and sell advertising to corporations, our concern is that positive puff pieces will all begin to look and sound the same.

One way or another we will have to find the balance.

It’s an age old problem. High achievers and perfectionists are not comfortable with mediocrity. People who want to feel good all of the time and are happy to just enjoy life find those who place high expectations upon them to be hard to live or get along with.

Simply put, we would like to slowly raise the bar in our industry. An important study shows that higher expectations can benefit all involved.

The informative site bestyears.com shares this real life experiment.

“During the 1964-1965 school years, Harvard’s Robert Rosenthal conducted an experiment in an elementary school to see whether teacher expectations influenced their students’ performances. Teachers were told the names of children in their classes who were “late bloomers,” about to dramatically spurt in their academic learning.

In fact, these “special” children were randomly selected and no smarter than their classmates. At the end of the term, all the students were tested, and the results made an important point. The “special” children not only performed better in the eyes of their teachers (an expected outcome, the so-called “halo effect”), but they also scored significantly higher on standardized IQ tests.

In other words, teachers’ expectations had improved the academic performance of their students. Where they expected success, they found it.”

Another interesting site, ideas.time.com has another take on it. “In the story told by the Roman poet Ovid, Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he has created. George Bernard Shaw borrowed the theme for his play Pygmalion — later turned into the musical My Fair Lady — in which Professor Henry Higgins makes over the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, becoming besotted with her even as he teaches her how to speak proper English (The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain…).

Psychologists, too, have picked up the motif, researching what they call the “Pygmalion effect”. The finding, as social psychologist Robert Rosenthal puts it, is “that what one person expects of another can come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

If you are a female wrestler and FCI decides to write a more dissecting article about your body of work, please view it as a compliment. We have great expectations of you. We believe in you. Based upon your skills and talent, we feel that you can do more. What is our aim in doing so?

We hope it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Sources: brainyquote.com, Wikipedia, bestyears.com, ideas.time.com, fciwomenswrestling.com, fciwomenswrestling2.com, FCI Elite Competitor, femcompetitor.com, photos thank you Wikimedia Commons.