Imagination vs Reality

If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, click here.

Good evening everybody. I am just having a quick look. Yep, I have sound, and everything appears to be working great.

If you don't already know me, my name is Pam. I'm a life coach. My website is www.pampoole.co.nz. But enough about that, I want to talk about imagination versus reality.

Our imagination lives in the past or the future, it's very rarely in the present, because that's where reality resides. And I was reminded earlier this week during a conversation with my husband just how easy it is to fall into the trap of confusing imagination with reality in an unhelpful way.

We all do it. We are after all a creative bunch. And our imagination allows us to use past views, learnings, perspectives, experiences, and flavour them with our preferred tastes. And that doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative.

you know like some of us like a certain type of horror movie or a certain type of thriller, some of us like a certain type of you know romantic music maybe. Whatever we're actually considering or thinking about or engaging in at any moment, our imagination will happily get involved and flavour it with our preferred taste.

Our imagination tends to offer us the best, so the ideal, or the worst, so more colourful or less colourful? More variety, less variety. The thing is, in history this ability allowed us to recognise possible danger or risk, friend, or foe. It allowed us to see patterns and come up with possibilities based on old experiences and then kind of reassess or juggle that based on new knowledge or education. It is like an incredibly helpful tool. But like most tools, as helpful as they all are, no one tool fits all. And this is no exception.

Okay and using our imagination without awareness or intention just causes us to experience unnecessary upset or suffering. Okay it creates a life that's much more of a roller coaster ride than a ripple. Okay so look back to the conversation with my husband.

I have come to the realization that one of the areas we use, certainly I do use my imagination, in an unhelpful way, is in our romantic relationships. So, you’ll remember from a previous post that I asked my husband if he felt like going out to a local pub for a meal together. He was quite slow to respond. I said, “if you have to think about it that hard, I suspect it's lacking some appeal”. He admitted he didn't really feel like it. I was devastated, not really, I'm being dramatic now, I was disappointed. I had actually already imagined and played out the whole evening in my head as if he had already said yes.

I shared that I wasn't even disappointed because he didn't want to do it, or he wasn't really interested or feeling like it. I was disappointed because prior to asking him, my imagination had allowed me to experience the romance, the pleasure, the joy, and the fun.

So, when he said no, it was like watching your favorite movie and someone coming through and turning the TV off just before it got to the best part. It's like that experience, you know, when you're thinking about perhaps eating a food that you really enjoy and just the thinking about it actually ends up giving you more pleasure than when you put the food in your mouth and chew. Do you know what I mean? The reality of it didn't give you as much pleasure as the imagining of it, right?

The thing is, before I noticed what was happening, I had actually been about to go down the road of, he never wants to, like just in my head, you know, he never wants to spend time with me. I just wish he wanted to go out more. Retirement's going to be awful. I actually, honestly, I even considered starting an argument. I didn't, of course, and I don't think I seriously considered it.

But honestly, I did recognise that the old me, a previous version of me, would definitely have gone down that road. Fortunately, this version of me noticed that the strength of my feeling of disappointment didn't really kind of match with the circumstances. So, I questioned its intensity because it just seemed out of proportion, and I thought it doesn't really make sense.

It is absolutely one of the key signs that I am offering myself unhelpful images or thoughts, that my imagination is having a play without my supervision. I have learned that one of the best things I can do in moments like that is to literally just give myself a little bit of space and time to kind of have a look at it, to investigate.

To be truthful, sometimes I can do that there and then, and then there are other times where I have to just put it to one side, and I have a look at it later and I do some detailed reflection. It's actually one of my favorite coaching tools. Either way, it's an action that supports in a much more helpful way, the relationship with me and the other person and it allows me to avoid unnecessary suffering and upset.

The point I'm wanting to bring to your awareness or make is that our feelings, as many as there are, each of those are also experienced in different ways and or levels of intensity, depending on our thoughts and they can be inflamed by our imagination and honestly, it actually amazes me frequently at how a small innocuous thought or sentence like, you know, one that begins with I always or it never can add so much drama and intensity to an experience. Like, it never, it just, yeah.

When I first started noticing this in my own life, I remember thinking how incredible it was that such a small thing could have such an impact, a significant impact. When the thoughts and images offered by our brain are a more accurate reflection of reality, they offer us more balanced and more easily felt feelings.

The more intense the feeling, the more likely our thoughts are being influenced by un-factual or unhelpful thinking, or possibly being inflamed by our creative imagination. In other words, it's having a little input there and it's not accurately reflecting reality.

So now fortunately for me in this instance that I'm sharing with you today, I was able to just have an authentic experience of minor disappointment in response to my husband not feeling like going out.

But without the awareness of how the human brain works, I could have made this experience far more upsetting than it needed to be and in fact, it could have even damaged the openness and authenticity of our relationship, our ability to truly share what we're thinking and feeling with each other. Now look, I love how creative we are as human beings. In fact, honestly, I am incredibly grateful that I have such a vivid imagination.

However, like any tool, it is more helpful when we choose when, why and how we use it and fortunately, being human allows us also to learn and develop the skill to do that.

All right, well I hope that you've enjoyed our chat this evening. I love sharing my thoughts with you guys and my experiences and the insights that I get from that.

I just want you to know that I am about to open a very small membership. It has very limited numbers because of the live interaction that it will offer, and I've decided that I'm not going to market it outside of the people that subscribe to my email list. It's called a friends list so if that's something you want to know more about then go to my website www.pampoole.co.nz and sign up, get your name on there.

It doesn't cost anything to subscribe to the email list and actually it does give you some access to content that actually has never been publicly posted. It's strictly for those people who subscribe to my email list.

The membership will only be open to join for the first time at the beginning of 2024 and there will be a window of 7 days to join because I'm limiting the numbers. 

Alright my friends, thanks again, have a great week and I'll see you later.

If you would like to chat with me in person just book a free call.