I read an interesting article this week about the power of pretending. It’s not a new concept really, as we have all heard of the truism, “Fake it till you make it.” The article, by Michael Michalko, makes the point that you become what you pretend to be. The synopsis is that your attitude influences your behavior, and, conversely, your behavior influences your attitude.
Here’s what he writes:
“Michelangelo believed he was the greatest artist in the world and could create masterpieces using any medium. His rivals persuaded Junius II to hire him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, because they knew Michelangelo had rarely used color and had never painted in fresco. They were sure he would turn down the commission due to his inexperience. They planned to use his refusal as proof of his lack of talent. If he did accept it, they were convinced the result would be clownish and planned to use the result to point out his inadequacies to the art world.
Michelangelo accepted the commission. Because he had the attitude of a great artist, his behavior followed. Going through the motions and practicing with colors and painting in fresco, endlessly, he became an expert in the technique. He executed the frescoes in great discomfort, having to work with his face looking upwards, which impaired his sight so badly that he could not read save with his head turned backwards for months. By acting upon his belief that he could create anything, he created the masterpiece that established him as the artist of the age.
BEHAVIOR INFLUENCES ATTITUDES
And it's also true that our behavior influences our attitudes. Tibetan monks say their prayers by whirling their prayer wheels on which their prayers are inscribed. The whirling wheels spin the prayers into divine space. Sometimes, a monk will keep a dozen or so prayer wheels rotating like some juggling act in which whirling plates are balanced on top of long thin sticks. Many novice monks are not that all emotionally or spiritually involved at first. It may be that the novice is thinking about his family, his doubts about a religious vocation or something else while he is going through the motions of spinning his prayer wheel. When the novice adopts the pose of a monk and makes it obvious to themselves and others by playing a role, their brain will soon follow the role they are playing. It is not enough for the novice to have the intention of becoming a monk: the novice must act like a monk and rotate the prayer wheels. If one has the intention of becoming a monk and goes through the motions of acting like a monk, one will become a monk.
The great surrealist artist Salvador Dali was described by his fellow students at the Madrid art academy as "morbidly" shy according to his biographer Ian Gibson. He had a great fear of blushing and his shame about being ashamed drove him into solitude. It was his uncle who gave him the sage advice to become an actor in his relations with the people around him. He instructed him to pretend he was an extrovert and to act like an extrovert with everyone including his closest companions. Dali did just that to disguise his mortification. Every day he went through the motions of being an extrovert and, eventually, he became celebrated as the most extroverted, fearless, uninhibited and gregarious personalities of his time. He became what he pretended to be.
The Greek philosopher Diogenes was once noticed begging from a statue. His friends were puzzled and alarmed at this behavior. Asked the reason for this pointless behavior, Diogenes replied, "I am practicing the art of being rejected." By pretending to be rejected continually by the statue, Diogenes was beginning to understand the mind of a beggar. Every time we pretend to have an attitude and go through the motions, we trigger the emotions we create and strengthen the attitude we wish to cultivate.
Even if we cannot manage it by ourselves,
The Secret of Mona Lisa's Smile
Think, for a moment, about social occasions-visits, dates, dinners out with friends, gatherings, birthday parties, weddings, etc. Even when you're unhappy or depressed, these occasions force us to act as if we were happy. Observing other's faces, postures, and voices, we unconsciously mimic their reactions. We synchronize our movements, posture, and tone of voice with theirs. Then we mimicking happy people, we become happy. You begin to behave like the people who surround you, and that behavior influences your attitude.
Leonardo da Vinci also observed that it's no mystery why it is fun to be around happy people and depressing to be around depressed people. He also observed the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits. He attributed that to the solitariness of the artist and their joyless environment. According to Giorgio Vasari (1568) that while painting the Mona Lisa Leonardo employed singers, musicians and jesters to chase away his melancholy as he painted. The musicians and jesters forced him laugh and be joyful. This behavior created the attitude of joy and pleasure as he painted. As a result, he painted a smile so pleasing that it seems divine and as alive as the original.
Even Facial Expressions Can Change Your Emotions
CIA researchers have long been interested in developing techniques to help them study facial expressions of suspects. Two of the researchers began simulating facial expressions of anger and distress all day, each day for weeks. One of them admitted feeling terrible after a session of making those faces. Then the other realized that he felt poorly, too, so they began to keep track. They began monitoring their body during facial movements. Their findings were remarkable. They discovered that a facial expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the nervous system.
In one exercise they raised their inner eyebrows, raised their cheeks, and lowered the corner of their lips and held this facial expression for a few minutes. They were stunned to discover that this simple facial expression generated feelings of sadness and anguish within them. The researchers then decided to monitor the heart rate and body temperatures of two groups of people. One group was asked to remember and relive the most sorrowful experience in their life. The other group in another room was simply asked to produce a series of facial expressions expressing sadness. Remarkably, the second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first.
The CIA researchers in a further experiment had one group of subjects listen to recordings of top comedians and look at a series of cartoons while holding a pen pressed between their lips an action that makes it impossible to smile. Another group held a pen between their teeth which had the opposite effect and made them smile. The people with the pen between their teeth rated the comedians and cartoons much funnier than the other group. What's more, neither group of subjects knew they were making expressions of emotion. Amazingly, an expression you do not even know you have can create an emotion you did not choose to feel. Emotion doesn't just go from the inside out. It goes from the outside in.”
Interestingly, Emerson wrote about a similar thing in an essay series in 1850, the “Uses of great men.”
“We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and concentration,- as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being." Foremost among these activities are the somersaults, spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we were.
The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.”
And it was Einstein who wrote that everything in energy, including our thoughts.
Author Mike Dooley has made a career on that concept that our thoughts become things. His tag line is thoughts become things, choose the good ones. He writes that we live in a responsive universe and that whatever we think about becomes reality. He cautions that it is not wise to imagine all of the detail, just to imagine what it is that you want in your life and that the universe has no choice but to give it to you.
And if you are anything like me, you probably have a multitude of thoughts and I often wonder how these competing thoughts manifest themselves. Perhaps it is a little like a thunderstorm, cold meets warm, and the confusion begins. To that end, he indicates that not all thoughts carry the same weight.
But there are thoughts that stand in our way, and those thoughts are the core beliefs that we hold. Examining those core beliefs is a mechanism for removing them. In thinking about possibility this week I realized that I hold a core belief that is rather shocking. That belief is that I cannot learn. I cannot learn what I need to learn in order to manifest the life that I am wanting to leave. It’s a crazy idea; and interestingly enough, just realizing that I hold that belief has changed it.
We all hold thoughts; we all hold limitations. But through possibility, exploring, entertaining possibility, we do have the ability to transmute them.
'Possibility' is a concept: it is the idea of the imagination itself, where what has not occurred in external reality may be thought of as occurring. 'Possibility' is mental space"
Modern neuroscience has shown that attention builds the brain. What we pay attention to and make effort towards we wire in our brain tissue. If we pay a lot of attention the area of the brain we use grows larger. This is true throughout our lives, no matter how old we are.
What motivates any of us to pay attention to something? We pay attention because we believe there is some benefit from that attention - either it's fun, or we think we can gain something from doing it. Where do those beliefs come from? They come from the stories of possibility we tell one another.
Let us tell each other great stories of possibilities.
"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Martin Luther King used the metaphor of a dream in his famous speak of August 28, 1963,
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
