John Assaraf (speaker/author) asks whether people live to avoid disappointment and explains the concept of "disappointment avoidance." He cites Dr. Srinivasan Pillai’s phrase and describes a neurological imprint from past failures that triggers fear and stops action. He encourages trying again differently to interrupt fear patterns and move toward success.
Chapters
Hey friends, it's John Assaraf, New York Times best selling author of Having it all and the Answer. Now, I want to ask you a question. Are you living your life based on avoiding disappointment? Now here's what I mean by that. Most of us have been raised to avoid disappointing our parents, our teachers, and that leads to us making decisions based out of the fear of, of avoiding disappointing another person. And there's also the case of avoiding disappointing yourself again. Now, many of us have references, many, many references of when we tried something or said something or promised something to ourselves or to another person. And we haven't been able to come through with the promise. Well, that leads to a condition that my friend Dr. Srinivasan Pillai in Harvard says is called disappointment avoidance. And what happens from a neurological perspective is every time we think about achieving a goal that we haven't yet achieved, or achieving a goal that we've tried in the past that may have not worked because of the emotional, physical, and maybe even spiritual pain that we got as a result of not achieving that goal, we develop a neurological imprint on that pain. And then when we try to do it again, guess what happens? That memory sends an electrical signal to our brain, or through our brain and our body, and it causes us to stop taking action, to stop doing what we need to do in order to achieve the goal. The first thing to remember is your past does not equal your future. It doesn't matter how many times you've tried and failed, long as you pick yourself up. Try it again. Just not the same thing. Try it again a different way. That way you will have more opportunities to succeed as opposed to allowing disappointment avoidance to hold you back. Think about what you may be avoiding and figure out a way to take action anyway that will keep you moving forward. And more importantly, it'll interrupt the neurological patterns of fear and keep you away from avoiding disappointments and move you towards gaining more pleasure and more successful.
