I recently started watching _Boston Legal_ on Sunday nights, because Candice Bergen had joined cast. (She joined cast so that more people like me would start watching _Boston Legal_ on Sunday nights.) Like most Candice Bergen fans, I mainly associate her with her character on _Murphy Brown:_ tough, smart, funny, sharp, no-punches-pulled, slightly over-the-top, and definitely not someone you want to have angry with you. Even _Vogue_ editor she played for a few episodes of _Sex and City_ fit this mold.

While I'm certainly enjoying watching her on _Boston Legal,_ it's been an interesting challenge for me, because character she plays, Shirley Schmidt, is different from Murphy Brown. I expected her to be playing a larger-than-life version of her usually type. Instead, we're shown a very different Candice Bergen, and I'm noticing that even after three episodes, I'm still having to adjust my expectations.

Shirley Schmidt does embody all of strong qualities that Candice Bergen's characters are famous for: brilliant, no-nonsense, sharp and canny. But she's also much softer and more compassionate than I expect from her characters. This new character is still Candice Bergen, but she's a far more subtle and nuanced Candice Bergen than I expected.

I realized this after first episode. And yet, I still expect her to behave in way she did in Murphy Brown. I expect her confrontation scenes to be bigger and louder and broader, and I don't expect to see her character as a layered and multi-faceted person.

This is creating a certain amount of strain on my relationship with Candice Bergen. I'm having to alter my expectations of how she behaves, and who she appears to be as a person.

Sadly, I don't actually have a personal relationship with Candice Bergen. I simply have same relationship to her that millions of other television fans do. But even in this one-sided relationship, I still have safety and validation needs, and this change in her character is disrupting those needs. The fact that she has evolved, that she is playing a different character requires me to adjust my expectations and redefine my relationship with her, and this makes me feel less safe in our relationship.

(At this point, in interest of avoiding a restraining order, let me state that I am only using Candice Bergen as an illustration.)

In Hollywood, actors are, often arbitrarily, assigned a "type." We see an actor in a certain role, and identify her with that role. The stronger identification, harder it is for us to accept her in different roles. Actors constantly struggle against "typecasting," because once they're seen as a certain "type," they find it more difficult to be cast in roles that differ from this "type."

Jim Carrey, for example, is a fine dramatic actor; however, it's taken him many years (and a number of baby steps) to be able to be accepted in more serious roles, and audiences still relate to him best when he's being a clown.

But typecasting doesn't just happen in Hollywood. We also encounter typecasting in our family relationships.

For most of us, we first experience typecasting because we're ones being typecast. Our families have an uncanny knack for not recognizing how much we've evolved and matured as individuals. No matter what our accomplishments, no matter how much we've achieved, our parents and siblings invariably remember us as we were in our most memorable (and usually our least favorite) role from our childhood.

When we spend time with our families as adults, we struggle against this typecasting. We try, in increasingly less subtle ways, to get our families to recognize and relate to us for who we are, rather than for who we were. It's an ongoing struggle--one that we seem to lose more often than we win, reverting to type and playing out our well-established roles in family drama long after we believe we've outgrown them.

What we rarely notice while we're feeling typecast ourselves, is that we're making same typecasting assumptions about our family members. We're so concerned that our family members notice how much we've changed and evolved that we don't take time to notice how our family members have also grown.

Can you solve problems easily? Can you learn new things efficiently? Can you increase your brain power? Whatever you think and feel about these questions, those thoughts and feelings will have an effect on your brain function, because brain power and psychology are intimately connected.

Checkmate in four moves, book said, so I looked until I found it. I love chess puzzles, and I used to think those elegant solutions were not often possible in real games. Then it occurred to me that they probably are there, but that without expectation of finding them, I settled for less worthy moves. I find elegant ones more often now.

A man I know spent his childhood with wealthy kids and their families. Is it coincidence that he now makes more money than most of us? Did his rich friends give him money? Did they help him in business? No, no, and no. He simply feels that a certain level of income is normal, and his mind will always push him towards that level.

Are you beginning to see how expectation and belief can expand or limit not only your mind, but your life? So how do you apply this to increasing your brain power?