Micro Class - Mental Contrasting

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This is a good one. Mental contrasting, a great idea from the procrastination equation. We're going to juxtapose mental contrasting with creative visualization. So creative visualization is obviously very, very popular. The basic idea is imagine what you want, your ideals, outcome. Right. Well, what's interesting is that research shows unequivocally that that by itself doesn't work. You need to do what researchers call mental contrasting, which where let's just say this is you, right, and you're imagining your ideal future. Yeah. Everything comes to fruition that you want to see. Now, creative visualization stops there. That's all you do. And in fact, if you believe in the law of attraction and the secret and all that stuff, you don't think of anything negative. God forbid you do that. You're going to attract it into your life. Whole nother conversation. But what research shows is that this is the least effective way to go after your goals. What you want to do is start here, Imagine your ideal outcome, but then you want to come back to your current reality. You want to mentally contrast where you want to be with where you are. That will generate a little bit of pain if your aspiration level is for a certain level of abundance and you're currently struggling to pay your rent. Wow. Now again, people who advocate the creative visualization process often tell you to ignore this reality and just focus here. If you believe research has been done for decades, you don't want to do that. You want to embrace your reality. And then you want to realize that to go from where you are to your ideal outcome is going to be challenging. Again, research has shown unequivocally that people who realize that it's going to be hard to get to their outcome that they want, yet they believe they can get there. They believe, they truly believe they can get there. And they know that it's going to be hard. Those people far outperform people who think it's going to be easy and delude themselves by ignoring all the steps in the process. Now, what happens when you focus on this gap between your ideal outcome and your current reality is it creates what researchers call a necessity to act. And the reality is, as you know, it doesn't matter how much you visualize, nothing is going to come into your existence magically. It's going to come into your life because you act consistently. You reduce your procrastination, you increase your motivation and mental contrasting is a really cool way to do it. So think about that. Think about your ideal. Get fired up about it. Feel how awesome your life would be, think about your current reality, maybe some of the ways you're struggling, and think about what you're going to need to do to close that gap. And then go do it. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See ya. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that micro class. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome and 2 our optimal living Membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my Optimal Living classes. This is where I take all the ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Relationships 101, Habits 101, etc. You'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson ME membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.