One piece of advice I often see warbled and shrilled by the personal development dimfluencers?
“Try to get out of your head”
These words drive me round the bend.
Probably because I’ve spent a lot of my life (at least 20 years) following advice just like this in an attempt to quell my endless loops & cycles of overthinking and add more peace & calm to my overall experience, only to discover that the
advice itself was adding to the problem and making things worse!
I know a suggestion like "Try to get out of your head" is well-intentioned.
But I don’t think that being well-intentioned is a reason not to call it
out.
Has it not dawned on these dimfluencers that urging people to get out of their head is asking them to use their thoughts to stop using their thoughts?
You can't get more dim than this!
You might say I'm poking holes or trying to find problems where there aren’t any.
But I say this cuts right to the heart of the matter.
Anyone telling you to get out of your head might as well be plonking you on stage in front of a theatre full of people, illuminating you with a huge spotlight, telling the audience to hush and then saying to you “try not to be self-conscious”.
i.e. they're creating the conditions for you to fail, not succeed.
In fact, it's worse than this.
Because people take this advice on board, wonder why it hasn't worked, spend all the effort & muscle they can muster to try to make it work, then give themselves a hard time when they're inevitably
still stuck in their head.
Which, in turn, leads to more thinking about why they can’t get out of their head and being stuck in their head even more. And the downward spiral continues.
Clearly the way to get out of
your head is by thinking less, not more.
And the way to think less isn’t by thinking more about not thinking.
Instead, it’s by exploring the place before, between and beyond thought.
This requires a willingness to journey into unknown territory and an openness to see & experience new things.
If you're ready to sally forth and you're looking for a guide:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
That’s all for today.
Have a great weekend.
- Tom