findingthefloor

Episode 130: It's ok to be delusional

It's ok to be delusional- Episode 130

“Yes, you are fooling yourself. But it’s precisely by fooling yourself that you make real change.” In this episode I continue to share more from the book, The Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinsser. This week we learn about envisioning our great future and being constructively delusional. I first begin by talking a little bit about my children’s imagination and then our own imagination as adults which turns into more worst case scenario type things or foreboding joy. Then I share from the book the technique of envisioning and using that as we learn to involve more of our senses. This idea is quite next level mental filter but adds on to the last few ideas of seeing the best of ourselves in the past and in the present. I love how he relates being delusional and learning to ride a bike. Can you envision great things in your life? Well start with a lemon and go from there.

Show Notes: Hi Friends! I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. Below are all the references.

What I learned this week: I really have loved all the insights that I have gotten from the book, The Confident Mind by Dr. Nate Zinsser. This week we talk about using you mind to envision your future. Many times we as adults tend to think that we don't have a lot of imagination but I think we just fool ourselves and tend to imagine worst case scenarios. What Brene Brown calls foreboding joy. Here is the quote I mentioned in the podcast.

“Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.” From Brene Brown - gifts of imperfection. So instead of imagining all of the bad things that can happen to us or the people that we love, Dr. Zinsser is telling us to envision ourselves doing great things. That we can choose to do that as much as we could choose worry and anxiety. Being delusional is part of being able to practice seeing yourself - actually envision yourself doing whatever grate thing that you want to do. I learned that you can begin by practicing envisioning something simple like a lemon - cutting it, what it might smell like and even what it might taste like. Then you can use that skill to envision yourself practicing your sport or a speech or something that you do at work. What Dr. Zinsser tells us that as we learn to involve as many sense in the process that can help fool out nervous system and our mind feel like it is practicing despite it being in our mind. And the best way to do that is using an internal perspective. So instead of envisioning yourself - like you would watch yourself on a screen outside of yourself, he says that when you envision you do it from your internal self as if you are performing the event or sport. The other thing I really liked is near the end saying that it is ok to be delusional and he using the example of when we learned how to ride a bike. That despite it being hard and maybe not getting it at first most of us believed that we could eventually ride a bike and as parents we also did the same. Even though we might have fallen off and there was no evidence that we would be successful most of us still kept trying. And that is what he is saying that we can see ourselves doing something we have never done and work our way to making the envisioning or imagining true. I also liked him telling us to also have time when we envision "flat tire" events. That we spend just 10 second thinking about the event and 3 times longer seeing ourselves overcoming the event in a effective and successful way.

“Dream about your ideal future, even if it’s a lie when compared to today’s reality, then get to work and make that reality happen. Win that First Victory and the rest can follow.

Final note: (from the book) Having learned to manage your memories of the past and your thoughts about yourself in the present, this chapter has covered how to think selectively and constructively about your future, using the mental process of envisioning. Your self-generated images have tremendous potential to energize your, to improve your physical, technical, and tactical skill sets and to prepare you for an upcoming performance.” (151)

You can get the book on Amazon or find it at your local library. (if you click on the image it will take you to Amazon and I will get a commission if you buy at no addtional cost to you.)

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse