Why you should be delusional
I talk to women in my DMs, on discovery calls for women who are considering 1:1 coaching with me and with my clients every day about the life they want to lead, the way they want their dating life to feel, the things they want to achieve.
And often, when we really drill down there are these beliefs they have about themselves - “I'm not attractive enough" or “there aren't that many good guys in my town so it'll be hard for me to find someone" or “I don't like dating” - all of which are having an obvious effect on how they show up in their lives. And not just in a dating sense. If you believe that having conversations, making a plan and having a drink with a stranger is hard or difficult, I can bet that you have some level of dread for every networking coffee or job interview and probably avoid them unless forced.
Sound like you? If we believe that things are hard for us, we want to do them less. They also feel harder for us (this is basically the placebo effect in action - your beliefs about the experience effect your actual physiological experience).
But when I propose an alternate approach to my clients - “what if you just decided that you were attractive enough?” or “what if you decided that dating was fun?” I often get pushback with something like “but in my past experience, it hasn't been that way.”
And girl, I get it. But if we wait for there to be external proof of every belief we want to have, we'll be waiting a long time. There was no external proof that you had gotten into college before you got in. There was no external proof that you were going to get that first promotion before you got it. There might have been indicators that you were doing a good job, sure but our brains are always selectively filtering and interpreting everything in our world and in subtle ways we can taint every piece of data without realizing it.
You can probably think about a time when you received a compliment that made you feel so damn good. Grin ear to ear. And another time when you got a compliment and immediately sloughed it off. “You look really pretty today.” “Thank you but really, I look exhausted.” Just seeing or hearing external proof does not make our experience of something true. Whether or not you interpret the external data as relevant or not depends on which belief you're collecting data for!
And on the flip side, if you want to believe that your physical appearance is attractive to the type of person you want to date, you need to recognize that if that hasn't been your belief up to this point your brain has SO MUCH PRACTICE collecting data that you're not attractive enough that it's going to feel really uncomfortable trying to believe something new.
Our brains don't like change.
Which brings me back to my original point. Be delusional. Why? Because your brain is going to be snarky anyway, whether you stay with your current beliefs about yourself or try to insert new ones so why not start working on the new ones. You know your inner voice is going to act up and tell you “you're lying to yourself” or “you're pretending to be something that you're not” regardless.
Think about it like putting on a Halloween costume. You know in the moment that you're not a sexy devil. But as you put on the outfit, you give yourself permission to look and act like a sexy devil for the night. You don't need to fully, deeply, empirically believe that you're a sexy devil in order to let the persona affect your behavior and experience. Putting on a costume feels easier because there are external markers and this one day/weekend a year, we all give each other permission to act differently without anybody snarking about it.
But we have that permission all along, to start acting differently or feel differently about ourselves, just by choosing to do so.
When we act delusional, when we start to experience the world as we want it to be rather than what it is, we offer ourselves a new experience before the proof is there. How would it feel if making money were easy? How would it feel if people constantly saw you as attractive? How would it feel if you loved your body? How would it feel if life was more fun?
What if you put on the costume of someone who loves their body and realize that actually it feels really good. That when you love your body, your clothes don't feel like enemies anymore. And when you are someone who loves your body, you look at other bodies with admiration instead of jealousy and that feels way more supportive. And because you like these feeling, you might start to figure out the ways to bring it into your reality more often. And then the funny thing is, the proof will start to appear.
Not necessarily overnight. But if you start today, it'll happen sooner than if you start tomorrow.
