"We think, therefore we are."

God always gives us what we expect. Sometimes it's unfortunate that He never checks twice to make certain that it's what we really want, or what's really best for us. His love is unconditional, and there are no conditions to His well-known promise, "Ask and you shall be given." So - God always gives us what we expect.

In the more obvious areas of our lives, knowing that God will give us what we expect gives us a warm and wonderful feeling of confidence. In the subtler emotional areas of our lives, we sometimes forget that God's promise is universal: it's not just that He provides on a material level. Every expectation that we put out to the universe come back to us fulfilled. That's the deal.

If we expect our life to be unfair, it will be. Everyday we'll come in contact with people and become involved in situations that are unfair to us. If our reality is that "life is unfair," we look upon those people and those situations as confirmation that our negative truth is valid, and never realize that if we hadn't been expecting them, they'd never have come into our lives at all, because we had no need for them. Because we told God that we needed them, simply by expecting them, He sent them to us, no questions asked.

If our perception is that another person has power over us, that thought becomes our reality. Without giving it a second thought, we give our power to the other person, and our perception that the other person has power over us is confirmed as they use that power to control and manipulate us. The other person didn't have to take our power; we gave it to them because we expected them to be in the power position.

If we believe that everything that happens in our lives happens because we're bad people being punished by an angry God for past mistakes, then unpleasant and unfulfilling situations and untrustworthy people will flow through our lives on a regular basis as our expectations are made real, and - once again - we will confirm our own negative truth that bad things happen to us because we're bad people who need and deserve the punishment we've been given to bear on a daily basis.

Sometimes this belief runs so deep and so strong that when it's fueled by the negative reality we've created for ourselves, and confirmed for us over and over again, it becomes who we are. Our whole life is directed by our emotional need for the people, events and circumstances that will allow us to continue to confirm our perception that we are bad people, and that the chaos in our lives is just punishment, for our own peace of mind.

Realizing the impact of our perceptions on our reality (that is, realizing that what we expect out of our lives is exactly what we'll get out of our lives) is a vicious cycle, and a difficult cycle to break. Our sense of self is often offset by the standards of the society we live in, standards that most people have a hard time living up to.

When we expect to be who society expects us to be - and can't - we think of ourselves as 'inadequate.' This sense of inadequacy is fueled on a daily basis by the very lifestyle we lead, until our conviction that we are losers in the game of life leaves us feeling that we are powerless to do anything to change it. And - since we expect to be powerless - we are.