I’m sharing again the two-sentence quote from a friend that continues to resonated with me.

“I know it’s sometimes hard to believe the best. But isn’t it better than believing the worst,” he wrote.

I couldn’t just gloss over that sentence and forget about it. It made me recognize something in myself that I didn’t like.

For most of my life, I absolutely believed the best would come. I woke up so many times expecting something good to happen. And so much of the time, it did.

Each night in bed I tried to review my day looking for all the good that came to me that day.

Sometimes it was something as simple as a surprise phone call from a friend that had disappeared from my life.

There was always something good to recount.

A few months ago a relative told me when she gets up in the morning she often has a sense of dread that something bad would happen that day.

She asked me if I ever felt the same way.

I said no. I most often have the opposite experience. When I get up in the morning I honestly expect something good to happen. And so much of the time something good does come my way.

Lately that’s no longer true. I’ve started to worry that something bad is coming.

I worry that I will get a bad jolt when my missing-in-action insurance company finally responds.

There’s a reason for that fear. Each day on our local social media sites there are horror stories about the way insurance companies are only paying for a fraction of their hurricane damages.

I worry how I will pay to rebuild my home if that happens to me.

My daughter Andrea is chastising me about what she calls my newly acquired negative attitude.

“Read the stories,” I tell her. “You’ll see why I have sufficient cause to worry.”

She’s not buying it.

“You’re worrying about worse case scenario. There is no reason to stress yourself out like that,” she says.

Ahhhh, there it is again. She questions why I’m fearing the worst instead of believing in the best.

From the time she was a little kid, Andrea always believed in the best happening.

We used to tell her she was extraordinarily lucky in big things and small ones. Whenever she put a coin in the bubble gum machine she got a prize.

I remember when she first applied for a photographer’s job at the Philadelphia Daily News. I told her not to expect to be hired because major Philadelphia newspapers demanded five years experience. She only had two years.

“Someone has to get the job,” she said. “Why not me?”

She expected the best and she got the job.

There’s a well-known school of thought that says if we believe something will happen, it will.

It’s not hokey. There’s even a name for getting what you expect to happen.

It’s called confirmation bias. Those who believe in it believe everything happens because of your expectations.

My hair dresser is a big proponent of that theory.

When COVID-19 was at its peak in our area and most people were wearing masks, Nicole refused to wear one.

For more than a year I stopped going to her salon. She has close body contact with so many people every day and I didn’t want to take a chance.

Now that our area is no longer a COVID hotbed, I went back to Nicole’s salon.

She reiterated her COVID beliefs.

“If you believe you won’t get it, you won’t,” she says. “If you think you will, then you’ll get COVID.”

“People need to understand the power of the mind,” she said. “Our believes become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I believe in the power of the mind and I certainly believe in a self-fulfilling prophecy. But not in the same context as my beautician.

When I was doing my student teaching there was a boy who was shunned by his classmates. His teachers didn’t expect much from him and he didn’t expect much from himself.

I talked him into joining the student newspaper I was starting, believing I could help him.

I decided to do an experiment in self-fulfilling prophecy.

I picked George as staff photographer and trusted him with using my expensive Nikon camera. Other teachers called me “nuts.”

By showing him I believed in him, George started to believe in himself. In turn, I gradually saw a difference in how other students treated him.

When George won the award for most improved student, his mother came to the awards ceremony. She told me it was the first time any of her children were applauded.

There are so many interesting theories about confirmation bias - believing something is true because we believe it is.

In the dating world, how many times do believe someone has so many sterling qualities. We think it’s true because we believe it is.

With the passage of a little time, we often find it wasn’t true.

The high divorce rate shows finding what we expect to find doesn’t always lead to a positive outcome.

And yet, there are many times when it does.

I tend to believe in people.

I also believe in the goodness of people.

Start with that premise and see if you get what you expect.

I’d love to hear your stories.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net.