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How Your Imagination is Holding You Back

If you missed the first half of this article about imagination lets do a quick recap.  We’ve been discussing the positive things that our imagination can accomplish – Using it correctly can help us escape a motivational funk and build our ability to focus.  It can also help us solve problems creatively and actually turn problems into opportunities. This leads us to the ‘dark side’ of the imagination, how many today are simply anesthetized by their own imagination. How so?

Are you anesthetized by your own imagination?

Human beings always act and feel and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment.

- Dr Maxwell Maltz

Have you ever been on a camping trip deep in the woods?  Chances are on your first day after spending a few hours setting up camp and enjoying some time by the fire and then you are ready to get some sleep.  All tuckered out you then retire to your tent.  If you’re like most of us who don’t camp all that much you probably spent 5 – 10 minutes trying to get comfortable, and then you lay there trying to fall asleep. All around you you hear sounds, maybe crickets at first, then small twigs cracking. Your heart starts pounding, adrenaline starts pumping through your body, and you imagine that surely something is out to get you. You try and calm yourself by noting how ridiculous the notion is that you are being hunted, but in the back of your mind you’re still imagining a large animal attacking your tent and dragging you into the night.

Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.

-FDR

You may conclude that its natural to react this way, and you’d be partly correct.  It is natural to have a physical response to fear, but the fear itself in this situation is all imagined fear.  Fear that is generated solely by your minds reaction to the environment.  Reality is that outside its just a small animal digging through your garbage.  If you go to investigate the sound and find the small animal, you’ll probably find relief in this new found information.  However if you never took action to investigate, you’d probably spend the next hour trying to calm yourself down and get some needed sleep.

So we can conclude that its really the missing information in this situation that is pushing our mind to imagine fearful things.  There is one more piece to the fear equation, past influence.

Missing Information + Past Influence = Fear

Past influence has much to do with our imagination’s ability conjuring up fear. Going back to the camping example, what else triggers your fear of the noise right outside your tent? How many scary movies have you seen where a band of young campers meet their demise while partaking in a usually fun pastime?  Ever sit around a fire as a child and listen to your dad tell ghost stories?  All of these past influences are there whether you actually bring them to mind or not.  They are in our subconscious mind directing our reactions, this explains why they are at times very irrational.

Imagined fear is holding you back IRL.

Armed with the above information, how does this all apply in your day to day life?  Well, each and every day we are faced with problems, decisions, and conclusions that all require us to imagine the outcome, to draw on past experiences and add in missing pieces to solve the problem. Many of us either don’t give enough thought to the situation and let our subconscious react, automatically making a decision, a ‘rash decision’. Or we over think the problem to death, using our imagination to come up with 100 reason’s why there will probably be a bad outcome.  Either way we’re not focusing on the correct information, we’re focusing on what we imagine to be true. To solve a problem correctly we need to acknowledge both what we don’t know about a situation, and also ponder what past influences shape our current perspective of the problem.

Problems are pure imagination up to the point that you solve them.

If we use our imagination negatively towards a problem, chances are we’re going to make a rash decision, or worse talk ourselves out of taking any action at all. Ever not taken a job interview, or followed a dream of starting your own business because you believe “it just wouldn’t work for me”, or “I’m not that kind of person”?  Its all in your head, as they say, your turning your imagination against you- its not rational thinking. The truth (reality) is that you have no way of knowing if you could succeed in the given situation, you haven’t tried yet.  The truth (reality) also is that you’ve probably had negative influences in this area. Perhaps someone (with good intentions) has told you that you’re ‘great at following directions‘, but ‘just not that great at being a leader‘, depending on who told you this you may have let these “facts” lead you to believe that being a leader is just not for you.

Why imagine that you can’t do something, when you can just as simply imagine that you can?

In any case we need to use rational thinking to draw a conclusion, anything else is just an opinion.  Its an opinion that you can’t start your own business, because its not a fact until you try and succeed, or fail.  Its pure imagination up to the point that you try and accomplish something.  So why imagine that you can’t do something, when you simply could imagine that you can?

How to use your imagination for good, not evil.

We touched on this in the first article about imagination, but there are many more ways we can use our imagination to better solve problems and better ourselves in the process.  In the next article we’ll go deep into our brain, looking at practical ways we can truly harness our imaginations awesome power.