222: Pronoia and Why I Love the Placebo Effect

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. I am here again at the park with Ryder. So if you hear traffic, birds chirping and or a dog panting in the background, that's what's up. In fact, I have to get Ryder tired enough that he's not bugging me to throw things while I'm trying to record. I got such a surprising and great feedback on episode 206. I don't know that I similarly recorded in the park in spontaneous, unedited fashion and I really questioned. That was one of those that I completely questioned after I hit publish and in the listener survey I got more comments about that one than most of the other recent episodes. Thank you. I'm so glad you liked it. Hopefully you don't mind this that I'm outside. It's not the cleanest recording. I'm just on my iPhone in the voice app. But it's this really nice permission that if I could record a podcast while getting fresh air, while helping the dog get out and get exercise, that is a triple win.

I'm curious what you could give yourself similar permission to do or somehow stack activities in such a way that something opens up. I'll give you another example. I I love a tidy, clean house, but I cannot say that I love cleaning at all during this pandemic. We've been home 247 and the house is just a pigsty. Now I'm trying to Drop the Ball is the name of a book to like Stop Caring so Much Tiffany Dufu Do Less Kate Northrup I try these things and that means letting it be cluttered and in my mind ugly in the house just because I can't stand to care at so many moments throughout the day that said, is it my preference to have a tidy, clean, light filled, beautiful home? Yes, yes, it is. But I don't want to impose tyranny on everyone else in the house. So today, Saturday, I felt this freedom to kind of just putter. I didn't told myself I didn't have to do any work though. Here I am recording this and I queued up some amazing podcasts. I was listening to Mitch Joel Six Pixels of Separation. He was recently on the Pivot podcast. I was listening to a new podcast that Mitch recommended called Three Clips, a podcast for marketers who podcast. And that gave me the motivation to just tidy room by room because I was doing something fun. I even. I don't do this often, but I even gave myself permission to keep listening to these really good episodes. Oh yeah. Brian Koppelman interviewing Damian Lewis on the Brian Koppelman's podcast. Damian Lewis is one of the stars of Billions. So good, so enjoyable. And I even let myself keep listening to a podcast while doing yoga. It was great. I mean, I don't recommend it. Is the purpose of yoga to be multitasking? Absolutely not. But it got me to do 30 minutes on the mirror and feel joyful about it. Something like this, where I'm used to trying to perfect the audio to the best of my ability, even though I always fall short, it's a nice permission to just say, maybe it doesn't always have to be so clean. And in fact, that would. What kind of different perspective might I have if I'm sitting on the grass throwing a Frisbee for Ryder and there's cars and people walking by? What. What thoughts might spark in my mind? I want to answer a listener question on this one because I was sitting here thinking, as I mentioned in episode 206, I don't know, I was thinking, what is on my mind today? What's true today? And for some reason, the placebo effect popped into my mind. How I feel about the placebo effect is that if it works for you, and it's a positive belief and a positive intention and a positive impact or effect on your mindset or your life, by all means, before I go further into it, let me read the question. By the way, this came in on the listener survey, so if you haven't filled it out yet, I am loving them. You're doing me a huge favor. Pick up pivotmethod.com survey. Here we go. The question was, how do I know when something is intuitive guidance versus want or fear, the universe helping or just a random event? The Universe can't always be on. When the universe is telling you to give up, do something else or just another obstacle.

Do you hear the cars driving by? There's like car alarms, cars driving by. I love this question and I've thought about it so often over the last 10 years. As I read more in Spiritual and Self Help, I start to wonder, well, is that true? Is life working for you and not to you? Is that the case?

After that whole intro riff on the perks of multitasking, total chaos erupted. Writers started going to the bathroom. If I catch the frisbee wrong, I get very sharp 7 month old dog teeth on my hand and this car was blasting music. So ha. I guess there are downsides that you've just experienced to pick up where we left off.

There's a huge emphasis, of course, in the self helpless fear of being empowered in your life, not being the victim, seeing things in the realm of your own creation. And that's what's that saying. Thoughts become things. How we think, how we train our minds to think, how we turn thoughts around impacts the results that we experience, the people that we meet, the conversations with Penny about home frequency and how that attracts experiences and people into our life. And so it's our work to try to get ourselves back into our home frequency as much as possible. So if you have a belief that the universe is working for you and things aren't just happening to you, and that feels good, and that's allowing you to view situations, people and problems as interesting challenges to be solved, then that's a really good thing. Where that perspective can get us in trouble is if we think, oh, this bad thing happened, it's completely my fault and we start to use it for blame and shame. That does not work.

There's another aspect of this, which is how can the universe be working for us if bad things are happening to good people? How do we explain that? How can you explain the disparity with which some people are even born into this world? Children who have barely lived get cancer or are in an abusive home, or things that are just absolutely tragic and in no way could you say that they have chosen that.

Some books that I've read will say that the soul, our soul, chooses our family of origin and chooses a certain set of life experiences and we don't know how we're gonna be able to shape those later on. But zooming out from those most extreme examples, I do think it's very reasonable to say no. Is the universe always just giving us exactly everything that we want for all people at all times. Absolutely not. But when you get signals from the universe, part of that means that your antenn and pattern matching are always on. So even if the universe is not always purposely working in your favor. Although I kind of like to hold that belief just for fun, because it feels good and it empowers me and it lifts my mood, even if it's completely not true, and I have friends, even family, that I deeply respect, that would say that's absolute hogwash. But I'll say that most of the time, that, that scenario, that belief, it kind of helps me. What I do believe, without fail, though, is that no matter what events are happening, no matter who's around, our pattern matching abilities from all the micro moments of our lives are always on. And if you tune in your, your radio, your antenna, to what are you noticing? What patterns are happening in your life and what are they inviting you to learn? I recently had a few different situations in a row where I felt that I was being bullied. It was so weird. I'm not used to feeling like that. And one instant incident alone seemed very random. And then another happened, and another, and they were completely different in tone, in context. One's work related, one's relationship related, one's totally separate. And after the third one, I thought to myself, okay, this is strange. Although no one situation is necessarily my fault. What is this pattern? And of course, I thought about Cartman's drama triangle. The victim, perpetrator, and savior or hero. And what is it about this dynamic? What. What is showing up? What is this asking me to clear? How is this asking me to, as a friend who recently coached me to do, take my power back and get clear for myself and really firm, not to get triggered, but to take my power back and to stand in my power. What would that look like?

As I said, that there's a guy driving by with freedom blasting out of his car. How cool is that? Okay, so there's a synchronicity. My antenna are up. You could say it's totally random, but I choose to look for these connections. There's a term for this called pronoia. You've probably heard it. It's a neologism. There's that damn word again. You would think I would have looked it up by now. Came up on the podcast with Mitch. I know my dad will know the pronunciation, but I still haven't looked it up. Anyway, paranoia describes the state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. I'm reading from Urban Dictionary. Whereas a person suffering from Paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them. A person experiencing pronoia feels that around them conspires to do them good. In 1993, the writer and Electronic Frontier foundation co founder John Perry Barlow defined pronoia as the suspicion the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf. End quote.

Again, if you're going to take something like this, this idea of pronoia, and use it to ignore systemic oppression or invisible privileges, or thinking that a meritocracy is fair when so many people are starting on third base, myself included, that's one thing. But if you're going to use paranoia in your day to day to say, even this very cranky person that just yelled at me.

There'S something interesting here for me, or there's something I can learn, or there's something I can practice, what is it? And that curiosity and spirit of learning and notion of pronoia as, as the universe is conspiring to bring me a great day. I'm into that. I'm into that at the level that again, it helps raise your own home frequency. Think about placebo pills. So in reading about the placebo effect, they've done placebo knee surgery and shown that the care of a doctor checking in on the patient, that, that alone can help so many patients feel better, even if they did not get an actual operation, but they thought they did.

I've often joked with Michael that we should create a. A pill called the gratitude pill. I'm sure, I think this actually exists. There are certain mock pills or medicines like this, but if you. I kind of give vitamins and, and taking too many vitamins and, and supplements, it's not my thing because I, I don't know, I think, I'm not convinced, let's just say, and I feel like half of them are a placebo of some kind. I'm sorry if that offends you. You can show me where I'm wrong. But I just feel like any industry that's going to try to sell me on a daily supplement for some of these extraneous ones every day for the rest of my life, of course they're going to sell me on that. But can I be healthy without it? I think so. If I get sleep, drink enough water, take care of the basics. But let's imagine there's a gratitude pill. And every morning when you take that gratitude pill, because it says gratitude on the bottle, you take it and you feel better. Well, great, then that's great. It just doesn't matter that the gratitude pill doesn't contain anything other than sugar or some yummy substance. Yep, that's hard to say. Some yummy substance. Who cares? It's making you feel gratitude in that moment.

So less than thinking that everything in our universe or the universe is constantly orienting life to be so magical for us, what if we just notice? How do we respond? How does our body react? Eckhart Tolle says, in A New Earth, life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.

There's also a great passage from Mary o'. Malley. She wrote an article called the Six Levels of Higher how to make the Shift. In it, she says, life is not just a random series of events that happen because you did it right or you did it wrong. Instead, it is an intelligent unfolding that is revealing itself to you all day long, bringing you step by step from unconsciousness into a state of higher consciousness. She continues, take a moment now to feel how different that is from the way you usually perceive life as something happening to you that needs to be controlled, fixed and changed. Imagine what it would be like to let go of the whole game of resisting life and instead to trust it. In this trust, you could then open to it, listen to it, and grow from every encounter.

Returning to the question that prompted this how do I know when something is intuitive guidance versus want or fear? The universe helping, or just a random event? After all, the universe can't always be on when is the universe telling me to give up? Do something else? Or it's just another obstacle?

Maybe you don't need to know until you know. I always try to pay attention to how does my body feel. The way that I determine a want versus a fear is a want. I use the metaphor of a magnet. A fear is often a repulsion. You're repulsed by something or you don't want something, or you're trying to avoid a worst case scenario, or you're avoiding something and that is motivating a certain action that you're considering on the other side. A want is that positive polarity of a magnet where you feel drawn. You can't even explain explain it. You're just pulled in a certain direction in a magnetic way that goes beyond reason. It goes beyond the mind. It feels exciting in your body and joyful. Sometimes it's not always that clear cut. And if you still feel confused, give yourself permission not to know. Give yourself permission to wait, to look for signals you can Ask for a bigger and bigger signal. I attended a book launch for Lyssa Rankin. She wrote a great book called the Daily Flame with letters that she wrote to herself over the course of a year while her mom was passing. And she said that she felt so insecure about what to do next at a certain point in her life. And she said, universe, I'm going to need a really big, really clear, really loud sign, and I'm going to need a lot of them. And I just laughed. I thought that was such a good example, because sometimes maybe we feel shy. Oh, what right do I have to even ask for a sign? Or will a sign even exist? How will I know it when I see it? What if that's how you're feeling? You just ask for as many and as loud as the universe can make them. Experiment with this. I can't guarantee that you're going to get a million signs, but what I can say is, if you're paying attention, your antenna will pick up the signs. Your antenna will make meaning. That's what we do. We're imaginative creatures.

Whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed, I also try to break things down into smaller steps or small experiments. That's what I cover in the pilot section of Pivot. So if I feel unclear about a big course of action, then I'll just determine what are some small experiments that can help me better understand what my next big move should be. I'll give you an example of this. I was really struggling with what to do when I was attending Union Theological Seminary. This was in 2018, was my first semester. In the fall, I took four classes. A language class, French, theological literature, while getting married and putting an offer down on a house. It was an insane quarter of my life. Then January rolled around. I was just keeping my business on maintenance mode. Some people thought I was quitting my business to go to seminary school. That was not it at all. I was really trying to run my business full time, but for me, that's 20 to 30 hours a week. And I was trying to also go to seminary full time. Where that got tricky was that in the second semester, I started to feel really overwhelmed. It was almost. The burnout was starting to backlog in a way. I just had. I just. Just wanted to give myself at least a quarter or two or semester or two to get used to it. So I knew that what I was doing or how I was working wasn't yet sustainable. But I was trying to get a handle on things and figure out how to proceed. There came a point, though, in the second semester where I was starting to feel more drained than not at the end of school days because I would stack my classes on two or three days of the week and take calls and meetings in between and do homework on the weekends. It was very tiring, but I was starting to feel more drained than not. And energetically speaking, I wasn't tired in a good way. I was tired in a. In a drained way. And then one weekend I remember thinking, what do I do? I don't. I'm not a quitter. I don't. What do I do here? And this is important to me and I would love to finish this and see this through and get a master's in inter religious engagement. You know, it just all sounded so cool and I was really loving the course material and the books and the teachers were amazing. So I surrendered it. I said, I'm going to need a sign here. I don't know what to do. Within one weekend. I want to say it was 24 hours, but it could have been 48. I had three of my biggest corporate clients reach out for five in person speaking engagements spread out in the next month. These were dream clients where if I told my past self that these three clients would have been emailing me at the same time asking me for in person events, that would be one of my most financially, you know, one of my best quarters, definitely pay for school and then some. I was just delighted. And there was my answer, because I couldn't. I would have had to drop one or more of my classes if I missed what it would require to go do these in person speaking engagements. So my answer was made for me. But I needed to ask, I needed to give it some time. And in that moment I knew, all right, if given the choice, I'm gonna go with my business and my business momentum, because I had been building toward that for. At that time, it was eight years to get that exact level of interest and momentum from that caliber of clients. And so I decided to go on leave from Union. And even that was not permanent. Even that was not. I'm gonna drop out forever and never come back. But I just said right now, this semester, I need to drop before the halfway mark, which is when they. The deadline that you can even drop a class and then let things unfold from there. That decision then sparked a huge business renaissance. Major rebuilding of all my systems, my team, my setup our software throughout that summer of 2019. It had me restart my podcast. If you go to episode 123 called Peeking out from the Plateau, I talk about the six month pause where I didn't podcast, I didn't send a pivotless newsletter. That decision completely unleashed the floodgates for me to renew my business in so many ways that now in 2020, when this insane pandemic situation has hit, I was so much more prepared than I might have been otherwise. Still got hit in a big way financially, but mentally, emotionally, systems wise, team wise, I feel more supported now than ever. And that is how those dominoes tipped themselves in terms of one really tough decision that I didn't know how to make at the time.

The last thing I'll say there is that sometimes you cannot know the answer up front. In fact, this is one of the biggest messages that I share in Pivot. And when I give keynotes now, they're virtual keynotes, but keynotes nonetheless. You can't know the answers to your pivot up front. So sometimes you don't know if you're moving out of want or fear or a mix. It's hard to say. If you can pause and wait, that's perfectly fine. Give yourself permission to do that. In some cases, you may not feel that you have the time to pause. So you make a decision. And that decision will give you more data. And from that new vantage point, you're going to learn so many things. So if you're somebody that I call high net growth, if you have a growth mindset, then any decision you make is going to teach you things. How much money did I spend on Union for no degree? I don't even know. 30,000, maybe more. Can't remember how. Each semester was 11 to 15,000. So semester and a half plus books it wasn't. It's not inconsequential, especially for somebody self employed, but I don't regret it at all. And I still don't even know if I've processed that time in my life. And that part of my quote, put yourself in the path of Pivot, which is another podcast episode you can listen to. I enjoy the mystery of that. I enjoy the curiosity of. Huh. I wonder what that decision was about. There was a year or two that I built a meditation app before Headspace was as crazy big as it is now. Back in the days when we were early at it and I invested 10 to $15,000 of money that was really tight at that time. And I learned because the app didn't take off, I still think we had a great idea, but I learned I never want to build an app again. So I got a $15,000 lesson in.

I don't want to get in the software business. I'm happy to have learned that. I really am. I really am. I also would look at that as a flow of money. We cannot know where every dollar is going to go and never make any mistakes of how we spend every dollar in our lives. If we think of it as a flow, if we do abundance mindset, we can trust that when we spend money well, it's because we're learning and growing and of course getting lucky. And when we spend money badly, we learn probably 10 times more in those cases. And we learn what we don't want, which is sometimes just as valuable as what we do want.

I hope you found this helpful as always. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can leave a voice message@pivotmethod.com ask and if you haven't yet filled out the survey, do me a favor. Pivotmethod.com survey pardon all the noise. I hope it wasn't too distracting. You're getting the authentic Harlem on a Saturday afternoon with rider experience. Have a beautiful rest of your day everybody.

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Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.