This is going to be a difficult concept to articulate clearly so Ill conceptually spiral towards it until we strike the heart of the matter. The first understanding you need to have is that when you have a cool idea and you share your plan with somebody else, you lose your motivation to complete that task. A good example is a creative project you dream up. Youll have the most amazing and beautiful vision for it and, as social beings, it is our nature to share our enthusiasm with others. The problem is that when we share our vision, we feel a premature feeling of accomplishment. This reduces our drive to pull the idea out of the imaginary plane and into the physical.
To take this fact further, even imagining how youre going to pitch the idea to people will create that feeling of accomplishment. If youve read Mans Search for Meaning you will already understand the power of imagined conversations. While it is good for your sense of well-being, imagining these types of conversations can be detrimental to the fruition of your project.
But what if there was a way to have your cake and eat it too? (There always is, by the way.) We can explain our ideas freely with full enthusiasm and receive feedback all the while increasing your completion drive. We do this by reframing. I like the concept of having the child mind and the adult mind. Dont let these labels confuse you because we all retain the child mind in countless respects. If youre an adult and you say ow when you get hurt, then that is the child mind. Youre crying out for mom to help you.
So my point here is that when you share your plans with someone, the child mind cant help but spill all of its creative energy out into the conversation, and behold the only thing you have created is an exciting series of words. The adult mind, however, uses this conversation to swallow energy instead of spitting it out. This is where reframing comes in. You have to understand your motivation for sharing your idea. This takes a high level of self-acceptance but you can do it, just dont be afraid of being weak in certain respects. The reason that you lose completion drive when you share your idea, real or imaginary, is because you want people to enjoy your idea. Their approval is enough for you and there isnt any longer a need to actually create it. As long as you are seeking a positive outcome, you will only lose energy. This is why in your head you must say I will share my idea with the goal of receiving feedback that will help me complete it. This statement alone elevates you to the adult mind where you are no longer seeking a positive reaction in others but instead actively problem-solving.
When you reframe in this way, youre speaking from a perspective that only stands to gain energy. Consciously you have decided that this project is your priority and speaking to others about it is only in service to that goal. Naturally the question that arises is: If its that simple, why do most people inhabit the child mind when sharing their plans? Its because this type of thinking isnt taught. It requires a high level of autonomy which most of our upbringing is spent having sucked out of us. Even if one million people read this article, I can only reasonably expect one thousand to actually understand and internalize this - and nine hundred of them already understood what Im saying here a long time ago. I will eventually write an article about the secret club of special people who understand life more than others do but for now Ill leave it at that.
To package up this thought, I will try to condense it into one sentence - Most people have an approval-seeking tendency when sharing their goals with others, but it is possible for them to overcome it and get all the same joy from sharing their goals while not losing their creative steam by using cognitive reframing. So much of my writing is about cognitive behavioral therapy that its basically the theme of this website now. I should just title the page Cognitive Behavioral Magic at this point because the ideas I want to share mostly revolve around cognitive behavior therapy and the law of attraction (Which is something I use very intentionally but kind of covertly).
For those of you who have gone through cognitive behavioral therapy, this concept is probably something that you are sick of hearing of. If that is the case, just stop being a pussy. You are so preoccupied with being pitied that you forgot the whole point of trying to be pitied in the first place was to be loved. I don't say this lightly, I mean it as a 100% true statement: HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS MOTIVATED PRIMARILY BY THE DRIVE TO BE LOVED.
I can hear the bitter contrarians already, so allow me to clarify that to be loved can be an entirely solitary experience. Some call it God's love, but I prefer to look at it from the psychoanalytic lens of 'The experience of love is a baby's sense of security'. A baby feels secure in the presence of its mother and as it matures, the mother as a concept is gradually replaced by the complexities of the world. Thus in order to feel loved, you must understand the relationship you've built with the world, and then reframe it.
And herein lies a crucial concept for self growth. It's a 2 step process that underlies almost every aspect of self-actualization. First comes acceptance, then comes growth. You will never be able to change if you're not even willing to face the facts about what kind of person you are - what your weaknesses are and what your most evil tendencies are. When you cope and tell yourself things that aren't true, you're basically just playing a game where your prize is that you get to keep feeling like a victim.
That tangent was long-winded and borderline unnecessary but I said some good stuff so I'll leave it. To get back to the matter I actually planned to write about; Watch the things you say, and think about how to transform your loserthink into winnerthink. We established yesterday that winners use words that empower themselves and losers use words that lessen themselves. A good example is the use of the word 'just'. This one is so much fun to me because winners and losers use it in such a way that perfectly illustrates the deeper point I'm meaning to make here.
The winner uses the word 'just' in order to convey the ease with which they accomplish things while the loser uses the word 'just' in order to convey their powerlessness and evoke pity. For example, when the winner wins an award and is asked to give a speech he says 'I just did my best'. When the loser fails at a task and is asked to explain why he failed he says 'I just did my best'. Understand that while the words are the exact same, the meaning is almost opposite. The winner meant 'all I had to do is try, and I got what I want' and the loser meant 'I do not have the ability to complete the task'.
Of course this analogy is flawed because it already places the winner in an advantageous position and the loser in a disadvantageous one so let's flip the roles in order to really understand the difference in perspective. The winner fails to complete a task and is asked to explain why he failed. He says 'I should have done x but I did Y instead'. Here he is demonstrating confidence in himself. He does not see the failure as a sign of his poor character but as a lesson learned. Inversely, when the loser wins an award and is asked to give a speech, there's no telling where he will go with it. You see, when a loser is put in a position of power, even if just for a second, he will reveal so much about his neurotic psychology but the fact is that every loser is different in their neuroses. Even though we put the loser in a box in order to use the word 'just', it is difficult to generalize what kind of bullshit a loser is going to say, but have no doubt - it's going to be bullshit. This is part of the reason that the winner is easier to put ina box. He operates in accordance with reality and reality is generally far more simple than bullshit is.
This article was a bit disjointed but I got across a lot of my observations so I'm content with it. For my next article I'll probably go in a different direction - something more fun.
We live in a world of illusion. All of life is just a dream and with consciousness we can control the dream. That statement, once understood, is the backbone of creating a life worth experiencing.
If you buy into the fundamental premise that life is only a dream, then you will understand that our beliefs shape our reality. How does one change their beliefs then? With words. It is no coincidence that the abrahamic religions, which each have their own claim to ruling the world, all equate the spoken word to God's power of creation. You can come to your own conclusions about the origins of this world, but I have encountered this truth from the level of pure rationalism as well as from my spiritual experiences. Words have the power to fundamentally transform your life.
If this isn't making intuitive sense to you, then I urge you to read a book called 'The Four Agreements' by Don Miguel Ruiz and 'Journey to Ixtlan' by Carlos Castaneda. They both follow ancient mesoamerican teachings about the nature of reality at a fairly introductory level.
Cool so you understand the illusory nature of life and I've posited that we can steer our lives using words. From here, I'll give you practical examples. Look at sad people and the words they use: 'I don't know how', 'Why does this always happen to me', 'It's not fair'. Let's look at the subtext of these statements. Each one contains the presuppostion that life is something that is happening to them, rather than something they are doing. There is an implication that there is a physical power above them and they are not in control. To refer back to Judeo-Christo-Islo teachings, there was the moment when Moses met God on Mount Sinai and he asked a question to the effect of 'What do I tell the people that you are?' and God said:
That, to me is the core of using words to create a better dream. Use 'I am' statements and avoid 'I am not' statements. It cannot be overstated how stupid some of the most powerful and successful people in the world are. The only difference betweem you and them is that they have complete and total faith in themselves: I AM.
to put a bow on this topic, I will leave with some statements that will make your life better if you repeat them 100 times a day for just a week. 'There is nothing that I can't overcome'. 'I am the king of my own world'. 'I am capable of solving any problem because I take decisive action'. I can keep going on but my goal here isn't to prescribe a solution for you. It's to guide you towards an inward discovery of what you are capable of becoming when you use words to empower - not lessen - yourself.