What If All Your Predictions Are Wrong?

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome today's episode of the show. Today I have an interesting question for you that's going to hopefully help you become more confident about stepping into your future with freshness, aliveness, bright optimism to create something new for you. Right? Because isn't that what confidence is? Move forward with faith, with a trust, with an optimism in yourself. What would you move towards if you had more confidence? How would you move forward in your life right now if you had more confidence, more optimism, more faith, more trust, more courage. That's what we want to create. That's what this show is all about. Thank you for joining me today. And the question that I want to ask you is actually the title of this episode, so it's not going to be a big reveal, is what if all of your predictions were wrong? Now, before you get up in arms, I'm not saying you are totally wrong all the time on your predictions, but what if all of them were wrong? How do you react to that? Is that relieving if you are like me? So probably my go to anxiety strategy for my whole life and still to this day, if I get stressed or whatever, is to go into the future, predict terrible outcomes, they call it catastrophizing in cognitive therapy and imagine scary, scary stuff and then get scared and then freak out. That's it. That's the strategy. It's a pretty good one, huh? Maybe frantically take a bunch of action to try to solve these imaginary problems, although a lot of them you can't because they're in the future. So just more of a lot of fretting and nervousness and worry and doom and lack of enjoyment in the moment. It's a great strategy, isn't it? Anyway, that's the main one for me, catastrophizing. But what if all those predictions were wrong? Then you would say, whew, what a relief. Now, if you have a lot of optimistic predictions about what's going to Happen and what you're going to create. You have a very exciting future. Yeah, well, it still might be liberating to say, you know what? Maybe I could be wrong. Because maybe something better could happen. Maybe something different could happen. Maybe I could be open to something surprising me. Wouldn't that be cool to be open to be surprised by life? Being surprised is fun, isn't it? So what if your predictions were wrong? And let's just examine that for a second. If you were to look back at the past and think of some of the predictions you made about your future, have they sometimes been wrong? There's a great quote by Mark Twain that says, I've lived through many terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. Think about that one for a second. So he's lived through a lot of stuff in his mind, only some of which actually happened. How many times have you been has that voice in your head that's predicting things been wrong? I think this is so important to look at because oftentimes it will be wrong and then we will. It will. It's almost like it rewrites history, right? It's kind of like a. It's almost like a propaganda move. That's the governments do this all the time, right? They say one thing and. Or they have one policy or one form of action or one thing and then they'll whatever turns out it wasn't true. And then they'll just change. Oh no, we've always said this other thing. Yes, right. And that's what this prediction party will do is they'll say like, you know, no, she's never gonna call you back. He is never gonna wanna date you. It's cause you're fat and bad and gross. It's like it's going at you and then you're like, oh no. Oh no. And then an hour later, that person texts you. Or a day later you get on the phone call and they're like, oh, sorry, I had a busy day at work and I didn't get back to you, but I'd love to see you this weekend. And then you're like, oh, puddle of relief. And then though, instead of being like, wait a minute, who told me? Who told me that he was gonna dump me? That was terrible advice. We don't even do that kind of, you know, finding the culprit and putting, you know, being suspicious of them. We just move right along with our life and the culprit just dances along with you. And so then the person's like, yeah, you know, busy day at work. I'll see you this weekend, though. I'm excited about it. You're like, oh, great. And you feel that moment of relief and excitement. You hang up the phone, and then that voice is like, you're not gonna have a good time this weekend. It's gonna go terrible. And then you're like, oh, no, Right. It doesn't even miss a beat. It's just there whispering. Whispering little poisons into your ear. And what if we start to challenge this thing and say, wait, hold on a second. What if these predictions are straight up. Straight up wrong? Not even, like, approximately right. But not as precise. I'm talking about, like, in the wrong arena, the wrong football field, the wrong stadium, Just completely off the mark. Can you see this in your own experience? I can. I can see this everywhere. I mean, I had my mind tell me that person's never gonna want to talk to you and go talk to that person. It's a great conversation. My mind told me that Candace would never want to be with me, and now we're married. I cannot tell you how many things in work and business and career that voice, because remember, that's my go to strategy. When I'm anxious or stressed, I should say, or uncertain. Maybe that's the best way to say it. When I'm uncertain. That's the old most. It's the most wired in strategy, you know? So I do. I've done a lot of retraining of my own brain to be different with it. But, man, if it's more uncertainty or I take on more risk or something challenging happens or whatever that voice is right there. Like, I think he emerges like, you know, like those cartoon devils. He just kind of. There's, like, a puff of smoke, and he's right there, like, and been waiting for this moment. Terrible things are gonna happen to you. Oh, man. There's this Simpsons I used to. That's what I grew up on. I watched a ton of Simpsons. I didn't like season one. It's too weird. But season two through 12, I just lived on. That stuff really shaped my sense of humor, which is why I'm so hilariously awesome now. But there's an episode where Marge, if you don't know the Simpsons, don't worry about it. She's a character, but she calls a psychic a phone psychic, and he's gonna ask him some specific question in her life. I don't even know what her question's about at this point. I don't remember. But he doesn't even care about what her question is, it's like a radio show. And the guy's like, we're getting a new collar. And the psychic's like, maybe she does ask her question. I don't remember. But he doesn't even answer it. He's just like, all right, I'm seeing something for you. And she's like, leaning forward, like, what is it going to be? And he says, you will die a terrible, terrible death. And she gasps. She's like. And he's like, oh, wait, wait. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That was our last caller. Hold on a second. I'm getting something for you. You will die a terrible, terrible death. So good. So good on so many levels. There's like, the shock, then there's the pull. They pull it back. And then the shock again. And the absurdity of, why would he be saying that on this radio show? How could that make him. How could that make him a popular psychic? It's so good. In any case, she's like, you know, horrified. Right. But I feel like that's. The voice of the prediction is like, you will die a terrible, terrible death. I jokingly call it death and ruin. Death and ruin will befall you. And so maybe your predictions are not as catastrophic as the voice in my head, but they're still kind of just generally glum and negative. Right. This presentation is not going to go well. It's probably going to go poorly. You're probably going to stutter and look like an idiot. Yep, that's what happens. Losers like you. Right? So how, if, you know, if you observe that it's wrong a lot, and I'm saying maybe all of it's wrong, because how do I go so far as to say all of it's wrong? Well, even if it imagines and says, okay, this is how it's going to go, and it's mostly right, it's not catastrophic or whatever. It's just reasonable prediction. And then it goes sort of like you predicted. Nothing ever unfolds exactly as you predict. Why? Because what you predict in your mind is a mental model. It's a creation of your mind. It's images and stories and words and thoughts and movie scenes. It's a model. And it's an extremely useful capacity that humans have is to model something in their minds. In fact, there's an interesting thing about the most brilliant invest. I was gonna say investor, inventors of all time, Nikola Tesla. He would do, like. He would, like, sit there and just visualize. And some of his visualization exercises were like, he would visualize like shapes from different angles and stuff just to like get his mind going into. Then he, then he, you know, he'd just like receive, he'd kind of get himself into this visualizing state and then he would, in his words, he'd like receive insight, receive knowledge. And that might sound strange to you, but if you've ever done any creative pursuit yourself. For me, as I do a lot of writing, teaching, speaking like this to you, like these podcasts, I'm not sitting down and like writing out a script. And it's the same thing for when I teach or whatever. Like I get into a certain state and then boom, I let whatever, wherever creativity comes from, I let the divine move through me. And you can do that too. Anyone who's ever been creative, whether it's in sports, high level athletics, or writing or teaching or art or music, it's like, you might not use the word channel, but it's like it's coming through you rather than out of you. And your mind predicts something, it's a model, but then when you live it, it's way different. It's way more rich and full and varied. And if you say, ah, just as I predicted, exactly as I predicted, that's you trying to reduce this whole vast cosmos that's in front of you right now that is so complex your brain can't even comprehend it. Your soul can, but your brain can't. And it's trying to reduce it all down to like, I knew it. What's that about? It's about one thing, certainty. And that's why you make predictions in the first place, is to get a sense of certainty. And your mind will take garbage predictions and hold to them for nothing other than a sense of certainty. Because certainty makes your nervous system go, hate. I'm in control. And if I'm in control, then I can be safe. Doesn't mean I'm really alive or enjoying myself, but I'm surviving, right? And we can do better. That's a pretty low bar to just survive this life. So let's raise our sights a little bit. So your predictions are always incomplete, even if they're pretty accurate, they're always incomplete. And how often are they not accurate? And that's okay, that's beautiful, that's perfect. It doesn't mean you stop making plans or trying to predict things, but do it consciously, do it on purpose. And so when the unconscious compulsive predictions of catastrophe or whatever occur, you say, know what? All my predictions are wrong. And if you want to sit down and intentionally, you know, project something like, okay, if I put this much time in here, I get this done by here. Or, you know, like a marketing projection for your company, your business. Sure. That's an intentional, intentional prediction. You might be wrong. You might be right. You can test it. Those are usually pretty. Pretty reasonable. This other kind of predictions I'm talking about, about negative. And people aren't going to like you. And the catastrophe, the death and ruin, they're usually very unreasonable. And so when you start to have them arise, just intervene again and again and again. In fact, let's turn this. Because this is an action I'm going to share with you. So let's turn this into your action step. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step is to notice when your next prediction arises, which might be all the time, but the next one that arises, it seems negative. Death and ruin. You will die a terrible, terrible death. I want you to just notice that and call it out and say, whoa, whoa, whoa. That kind of habitual prediction, or call it catastrophizing, name it. Say, you know what? Those are wrong. Those are wrong. Life is so much more vast, so much more complex. I'm willing to be surprised by life. And now I'm going to do something. Now I'm going to take action. I'm going to direct my focus to something I have control over, and I'm going to do that thing. What you're doing is you're meeting the need for certainty in a different way. You're training yourself to meet the need for certainty in a different way. This is a. It's like, I'm a big fan of animals. I love dogs. We have a dog and a puppy, too. Yeah, A little guy, little girl. And when it comes to puppies, it's about catching what they're doing and redirecting it. So she is a. She's a shark, by the way. She's a German shepherd. I never had a dog like this before. And so she's a. She's gonna be a bigger dog, a stronger dog. That's what we wanted. But she's a freaking shark. So she'll, like, snap at things. And her bites are. She's got these sharp little teeth. She's a beast. And so, you know when she bites, she tries to bite at you. She tries to bite your shoe, tries to bite a blueberry bush. Every time you make the correction sound. Which they're sleeping in my office right now, so I'm not gonna make the correction sound, by the way. By the way we got this puppy, we're integrating her into our lives. And if you ever raised a puppy, it's pretty freaking chaotic. And my mind was stressing out. It's a Tuesday right now that I'm recording this Sunday night before I went into work. This is my first work week with her. We had her for three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And I was going back to work. First dog. I took like a whole week off for the most part. This dog, it's like, no, Life keeps going. Let's go. So I'm trying to integrate her into my life and she's with me a lot during the day because my wife's taking the boys, going to school and driving around doing all this stuff. It's hard to do with a puppy. So I got the puppy. I actually have both dogs with me today. And you might even hear them, they're starting to move around. I got to finish this episode up. So my mind predicts on Sunday and I get all stressed out. I'm not gonna be able to record this week. I'm not gonna be able to work this week. Nothing's gonna work out. And I'm freaking out. And guess what? That prediction was wrong. This is my third episode that I'm recording today. Oh, get some. Okay, so you gotta call it out. And this is the same with puppy. When she's chewing on something or biting something, I say, I make the correction sound and then say like, ah, ah. And then I hand her the thing to chew on, which is a little rope, toy or a little something, right? Sometimes we use this old towel. Chew on this, don't chew on me. And do it again and again and again. And I'm gonna do it a hundred times, probably a thousand times with this little one because she's a beast, chomper shark. And then eventually she doesn't do it. Rare occasions, our one year old dog will pick something up he knows he's not supposed to and I just look at him or make a little sound and he's like, okay, cool, cool. I was just looking at it. I wasn't going to chew it or anything. And it's the same thing with your mind. You could train your brain. So when you notice the terrible predictions happening, make that sound. You can be playful with yourself, go ah, ah. Like you're correcting a little puppy. And then give yourself remember, because what's underneath that is you want certainty. So give yourself certainty in another way. What can I control right now? A great source of certainty is. Let me take some action. Right now. Let me create this thing. Let me do this thing, even if it's just freaking push ups in that moment. Some deep breaths like I'm going to control. Here's what I can do. Let me bring my focus to something I can do right now, today, and that boosts your sense of certainty and energy and changes your habit. Thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

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