Is your mind playing tricks on you?

Today we are going to be talking to you about how your mind could be playing tricks on you and how you could become the trickster to guarantee the outcome that you want instead!

Have you ever had a scenario where you think something is going to be a certain way but it actually turns out not to be? For example, you build something up so much that it turns out to be worse than the actual reality.

We know you have because you're human, we all have. But the question is why do you keep doing it? Even though we know that it can create anxiety within us, we know that it can set us up for failure, we know that it can create an expectation which may actually not be true.

Well, we're going to be doing something different and we're going to share that with you so that you know exactly how.

First off I’m going to take you through my personal experience of letting my mind run away with me and not control what's going on.

One of my examples is when I actually proposed to Charlotte. I spent months and months in my own head worrying about the proposal and what she was going to say, what was going to happen, building it up thinking “oh my God what if she says no”, because we still have to stay where we're going, the drive back is going to awkward.

Will she say no? Will she say yes? I was just driving myself nuts and all this stress and anxiety I was putting on myself. When it actually came to the night, I was so nervous, the most nervous I've ever been in my whole life.

And when it was done, all was okay, all those months of anxiety and stress for no reason at all and deep down I knew that she's going to say yes, but I was just letting my mind run away with me and control the situation and the narrative which was making such a bad picture my head and instead it turned out to be amazing.

There was another time as well where Jon was at work and would never take holidays, like 6 years without taking a holiday.

Jon - I had to control everything so I would not go on holiday. I didn't go on holiday for the first six years of my career in corporate fitness because I was afraid that coming back I would have so many emails and problems and issues and complaints to deal with and the funny thing is when I did actually eventually go away, even if it was a few days, I came back to all those problems and I'd stress myself out about it thinking, I'm not going to go on holiday again, and it would just drive me absolutely crazy, like ripping my hair out. Just thinking I can't go on holiday anymore. I have to keep working every single day to make sure this stuff doesn't happen.

And that's tough because that kind of thinking is just so limiting isn't it?

If you think that that's going to be the case every time You come back, that it stops you from going on holiday in the first place, that's really not a healthy place to be, is it?

The reason this is happening is that we're living in our memories.

We're creating the same or even a worst-case-scenario based on past experiences and then we have this negative bias happening inside of our mind. We don't even always know it’s happening, but this is why your mind is playing tricks on you because we've got this automated process of going to our memories and then living them out in your mind and then provoking all of those feelings of anxiety or whatever feelings are showing up for you, which is really hard, So tell them how you got over it first.

Well, first of all, it took a few years to get to the point where I was just like, I need a break and became a bit more aware of the things I was coming back to and these so-called important things

I was stressing over about were not important at all. 

All these emails, all these issues, they did not need to be solved straight away, they did not need to be stressed about, they were not life and death.

If it took two or three weeks after coming back to sort them out then nothing bad happened and that's the thing is all of these things that were waiting for me, they just weren't important enough to stress about and have to get done literally on day one when I get back.

When that realization came in where I'm going to have this stuff to come back to, that's not going to change as it has been happening so much, it’s not life or death so I can take my time in getting to it.

I do not have to focus on it while I'm on holiday, I did not have to stress about it while I'm on holiday, I can actually enjoy my holiday and switch off and relax and come back to it and then just deal with things as and when I can.

He changed the narrative, the story that he's telling himself. He literally just reframed it in a way that actually these things are important, but they are not that important that you need to stress about it, therefore you told yourself a different story, you played out a different scenario in your mind which now wasn’t a worst-case scenario, It's actually a better-case scenario, maybe not the best but a better-case scenario, which is good.

That's one good example where you can become the trickster and actually take control and create the scenario that you want to experience instead.

I know you're asking the question;

How do we change? How do we take control and create that scenario that we want?

So, we're going to go through this process and explain to you how to do this.

Step 1 - I want to think of this like a flight simulator. I think you’ve all heard of a flight simulator when Pilots are going to go up into the aeroplane, they don't just jump straight into a plane. They go into a practice space, a big booth type of thing, a cockpit simulator and they run the route that they need to be taking when they fly, the flight path they go on.

The pilots are practising the flight path that they're going to experience and they're going to run these scenarios through this simulator.

Now your mind has this function already in-built, that's the beauty of this human design that we have, we all have this simulator within our prefrontal cortex within our mind, within our brain where we can actually access this and do this practice form ourselves.

You don't have to go to a big booth and run this simulation. You can do it by simply closing your eyes or even just thinking about it so you can then start to run your own path of your own future, your own situation that you want to take control of, the scenario that you want to change.

You can start to run that scenario, best-case scenario in your own mind and simulate the experience so that by the time you step into that scenario you're showing up in the way that you want to and you’re experiencing the scenario that you want to instead of the old narrative and the old scenario that's probably worse for you.

Step 2 - when you're running that scenario, your second step is to visualize what you want to happen in that scenario

So, you want to visualize exactly what you want, picture it in your mind, what's going to happen, what are you going to see, what you're going to hear, what you’re going to smell, what you’re going to feel, What you're going to experience.

You're going to create this big detailed image, a movie in your head that is going to feel like you're there, it's happened already, you've experienced it, you felt it, you've seen it and it all turns out very well.

You are already so good at doing this but for the negative scenario. So, you're already doing this, this is why you get an emotional reaction within. You're already capable of it but now your job is to understand that you are actually in control of it, which is pretty awesome.

Step 3 - In your mind when you do this, you're installing this a bit like predictive text, you know when your phone guesses what you're going to say when you start typing the first couple of letters, that's what your mind is doing, you're installing a pattern so it can predict the behaviour that's going to come next and when you do that through visualization you're literally adding that blueprint, you’re adding the pattern so that it will start to run it automatically.

Step 4 – To cement it in there to make it a reality is to literally repeat vision, repeat that visualization at certain times of the day and the best times of the day to do this to really cement that is within that first hour before going to bed and within that first hour after waking up because this is when your brain is most susceptible to suggestibility when you run through your scenario your brain just thinks it's real, It's creating it, it's already processing that information and going through it so when you actually arrive at the event guess what? Your mind and your body are on autopilot, everything's happening as you've already envisioned and already visualized.

Like Jon said there, first thing in the morning and last thing at night is the best time, that golden hour that one-hour period before bed and when you wake up, your mind is like a sponge. 

Marketers know this, advertisers know this. This is why they put more ads on the times that people are more naturally going to be waking up and going to sleep because they want you to submit these patterns into your mind so you go by their stuff.

So instead of switching on to that kind of thing, switch onto what you actually want instead and start to own that time, own that space and own that creation of what is your experience.

As you start to run this best-case scenario in your reality, you're going to be able to trick your mind in the build-up of what you want instead of the other way around of what you don't want.

When we kind of put this topic out we had a question come back from someone who's interested in what we're talking about and hopefully through our answer we can help you understand this a bit better.

So, the question is: “I am a student and I get really bad anxiety about my deadlines at University so my mind always makes things out worse than they are?”

One point to make, it’s not actually a question, more of a statement, they just believe in this already so they're already living in this reality, this simulator of their life.

The answer here is within the language. There's a narrative that is being created and a commentary which may not be true. So, the key here is to understand that you're not always experiencing that anxiety, you may have had that in the past and expected that of yourself around your deadlines, but that doesn't mean it's always true and it doesn't mean that you have to show up that way. 

So use the tool that we just shared with you, the simulation and the visualization so that you can start to create the best-case scenario for yourself and all that takes is a second of you just pulling back, zoom out of your current situation, take yourself off, take yourself into your bedroom, into your dorm room wherever you are, take yourself away, zoom out, take a breath and actually start to paint the picture of what you want to see instead and I promise you, you will start to create a new narrative, one that is actually going to serve you but when you add all of the things that Jon mentioned around the senses, incorporating how you feel, touch, see, smell. Incorporate all of those things into this picture that you paint and it will feel so real that you will be installing the pattern so you can go away and you can start to experience that reality in your University with your deadlines so that you can actually show up and understand that your mind is just tricking you so why don't you be the trickster?

I really hope that answers that question for you and you found that very helpful.

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So that is it from us for today, we hope you enjoyed what we've been talking about and we hope it's helped you immensely. We look forward to seeing you again.

Take care guys.

See you soon,

Jonathan & Charlotte