Mel Robbins talks about a friend who's waited years to get married but hasn't found a partner yet. The conversation explores how to sit with the pain of wanting something deeply that hasn't happened, without easy answers.
I have a friend who always wanted to get married.
Yeah.
And hasn't found the person.
Yeah.
Not yet. And yet it's this thing that they wrestle with. And how do you handle that experience when you— it's something you've thought about for so long, you know? Yeah. And it hasn't happened yet.
One of the topics that I explore in the book is called possible selves. Here's the basic premise. Okay. So all the time we are generating possible selves as we go about our lives. So when your friend is thinking about one day wanting to be married, she's generating a possible self. Yes. When Mel decided, hey, you know what, I think I should do a podcast, she was imagining a possible self. When I, as a teenager, learned that she could no longer play the violin, and had to figure out how to find some way to reinvent herself, she too was generating a possible self. Yes. And so possible selves come into 3 buckets. There's hope for selves. Uh-huh. Those reflect our dreams of what we hope will happen in the future. Feared selves reflect our anxieties and our worries about what might happen in the future. And then expected selves reflect what is just most likely to happen, good or bad. So yes, I could tell you right now, Mel, I'd really love to become the next Taylor Swift. Too bad, don't know how to sing, don't know how to write songs, and probably in 5 years I'm still going to be a cognitive scientist, right? So that's my expected self. Okay, so what can happen when a big change comes our way is that all of these doors close that we were hoping would stay open. And now— Or that you expected. That we expected. Or that you feared. Now a bunch of doors also open that we fear. I never thought that my life could maybe turn out this— like, I didn't— I don't want that door to open. That door is so scary. I don't like what that future looks like. And what I've learned from my research is that When it comes to imagining possible selves, we can sometimes have an overly constrained imagination for what is possible for us based on stereotypes, experiences, social norms, you name it. How many times have we been thrust into a new environment? All of a sudden, I'm a caregiver. All of a sudden, I'm a chronically ill person. All of a sudden I'm jobless. And we've been so afraid about who we might become. And one thing that I am so eager to spread is, well, in those moments of inflection, how can we conjure up more promising, positive possible selves than we previously imagined?
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
