Being delusional is often looked at as a bad thing.
It’s true. You can’t live in your little fantasy with overly optimistic and unrealistic expectations.
But surprisingly, with just enough delusion, it can help you begin to gain your confidence.
Being delusional is like a pre-requisite to achieving confidence and belief in yourself which is the first step to achieving anything in life.
Which one is more motivating? Assuming and expecting the best result out of something as you begin that experience or assuming you’re not good enough or you’ll fail?
Being positively delusional can be useful in situations like this. It puts you in a more solid position to take action — with optimism and belief that you can and will.
- It’s better than selling yourself short.
- It’s better than drowning in negative self-talk.
- At least it gives hope.
It gives that initial push and boost of confidence to believe and act upon that belief.
You won’t be disappointed when you don’t get what you want.
Because you already believed in yourself in the first place, you’ll be content knowing that whatever you had put your effort into, you gave it your all and it turned out that maybe it just wasn’t for you.
It’s not that you weren’t skilled enough or good enough.
Many of our beliefs can be a little delusional without us realizing it. Everything that we believe to be true might not exactly be true.
The book Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Vedantam and Bill Mesler explores this concept.
Take a look at this excerpt from an interview with the author on how we fool ourselves more than we may realize and how it can be useful (for the better):
Think about the phenomenon of parenting and what parents experience when a child is born. Nearly every parent has the experience that I had when my daughter was born, which is you believe that this child is the most special child in the universe. And of course, when you step back and look at it, you know that this belief has to be a delusion, even though for me it doesn’t feel like a delusion. But there’s a reason that our brains produce this delusion when we have children. Parenting is incredibly hard and time-consuming and costly and difficult. And when parents are deeply invested in their children, when they see their children as unique and special, parents are willing to invest the time and effort needed to raise children properly.
So in some ways, it’s better to be positively delusional, especially when it is a motivating factor to do and to do better.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this!
—
Previously Published on Medium
iStock image
