Why ‘Acting as if’ is one of the Quickest Ways to your Dream Life…
Perhaps nobody sums it up better than HRH Lady Gaga.
“I operate from a place of delusion – that is what fame is all about. I used to walk down the street like I was a fuckin rock star when I was nobody. I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be – and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.”
Except we can take off the boxing gloves. There’s no combat involved in this. Just the will to open our minds.
When we act as if we are the person we want to be; when we walk the walk of an international business woman, the owner of a successful animal sanctuary or with the stride and poise of a top athlete, we are quite literally pre-paving our reality. By standing tall, adopting the characteristics we want to have then and feeling the feeling of having that kind of life now, we set into motion powerful forces we can barely comprehend.
To a certain extent, yes, we need to become compulsive liars. But since our ‘reality’ ain’t all it’s cracked up to be; since the world we see around us is simply the by-product of all our past thoughts (and if you don’t believe me you might want to read up on a little Quantum Physics), being a little bit Pinocchio can make for a fairy tale ending after all!
For example, I was recently reading an article about a woman who ‘fibbed about her age’ to a Casting Director for a movie. When she was pulled up on this (a birth certificate was required in this particular instance) and asked why was she so deceptive, her response was quite simply:‘Well, I feel like I am 35, not 48 as the candles on my birthday cake might suggest. So that is my reality.’
And clearly something magical must have been working. She’d carried this belief around with her for a number of years, been hired for many a role which would normally have gone to somebody ‘younger’, and thus being 35 became her reality. Nobody was any the wiser… well, not until the birth certificate red tape came about. We can walk the walk on any number of subjects. Look, I am not about to suggest you start deceiving the authorities, but I am suggesting you start asking yourself a few questions about the kind of stories you are telling yourselves.
Because it’s us who gets to choose.
And we can be whoever we want to be. We can give ourselves any kind of label. We can put ourselves at any kind of age. And so much of that is contained in our very walk, swagger and demeanour.
We can have so much fun with this, not only in the way we carry ourselves on the street but:
– by surrounding ourselves with objects which reflect back our desires. Wanna be a published writer? Think about your props. A file marked ‘royalty payments’ staring out at you from your bookshelf as you hit the keys of an old fashioned typewriter with specs on the end of your nose sipping coffee from an expensive mug and intermittently checking your diary for the next book signings in New York which you have penciled in might just be all that it takes… Okay, so that was a wee bit stereotypical. But you catch my drift.
– by going places that make us feel like our Highest Version of ourselves. If we desire more affluence we can take ourselves to a Mercedes car showroom and act as if we are considering our next set of wheels; we can hang out in Puerto Banus with a cocktail or two and blend in with the crowd (in itself ironic as most people will be doing exactly the same as us); we can have a spending spree on the L.K Bennett website a la HRH Duchess of Cambridge (doesn’t matter that we don’t complete our transaction) or we can simply take ourselves off to Waitrose, grab a trolley and visualise the organic smoked salmon, Bollinger and Heston Blumenthal desserts winging their way in on top of our more usual Waitrose Essential range. But that is just one version of abundance. The fabulous thing is we each have our very own and we know the little (and slightly bigger) things which make us feel super fabulous!
– by hanging out with inspirational people who bring out the best in us. And while this isn’t always possible in the flesh if say Barrack Obama isn’t your next door neighbour and your dream is to become the first black Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, you can still read up on those whose journeys make your spine tingle, learn how they motivated themselves to walk their own walk.
– by letting other people’s opinions and society’s pigeon holes wash over us like the ebb and flow of the tide. One thing’s as sure as the sun rising: when you dream big (or even medium-sized) well-meaning family and friends will crawl out of every possible nook and cranny in the woodwork to coax you back to ‘reality’. Actually ‘coax’ is too soft a word. They will be so mortified by this new version of you that they will yell you back into the old familiar shape they realise. But this has absolutely nothing to do with you and 100% to do with them and their fear of crossing the comfort zone threshold. Let not it affect your balance! In fact, this is more often than not the ultimate sign that you are 100% on your true path. So keep on walking the walk on that path less tread. Remember the biblical tale about Lot’s wife who got turned into a pillar of salt for looking over her shoulder? Nuff said. There’s not a sausage to be gained by looking back.
Now stand tall, shoulders back, tummy in, buttocks taut and go take the world by storm!
