How to Act As If Effectively

The piece that most teachings leave out is the most important.

Any quick google search on “how to act as if” will give you countless suggestions about visualizing, journaling, scripting and affirmations.

Useful, yes, but woefully incomplete and therefore frustratingly ineffective.

Let’s talk about visualizing –

Yes, it’s a valuable tool, but what and how you visualize makes a huge difference to the effectiveness of the practice.

Go too big – like, I have a million dollars and I can pay cash for this Lexus – and your brain’s BS alarm is gonna trigger and you’ll know it’s a lie.
That generates massive resistance that you then have to expend energy and time overcoming before the visualization can even begin to sink in.

How about meditation?
Yes of course meditation is wonderful.
It’s so delicious to get lost in the zen of your dream life … but what happens when you open your eyes?

There’s nothing that’ll snap you out of the imagined luxuriousness of being waited on at a swanky resort than opening your eyes and seeing a pile of last week’s laundry still on the bedroom chair.

Affirmations and Mantras?

Yup, they work for sure … when you remember to do them.
Not only is it hard to craft a practice around them (because they feel like a lie and there’s that BS meter going off again), it’s even tougher to remember them in stressful situations when you most need them.

What all of these tools fail to take into account is that your brain hates change.

Your beautiful human brain is wired to keep you safe.

Not happy. Not prosperous. Safe.

It will always default to the way you’ve always been.

It sees change as risk and risk = unsafe.

So if you’re relying on intangible methods like thoughtwork

What’s missing is the acting skills.

You’re not just thinking the thoughts, you have to learn how to act as if you already are who you dream of being.

You’re basically taking a ‘fictional’ character and making her real.

Actors do that all the time.

Only this time, your ‘fictional character’ is your Future Self,
Your stage is your real life,
And you have complete creative control on how this show goes.

If you’ve ever wondered …

How exactly do you act as if you have a million dollars when every dime is tight?
How do you act as if you have your own chic little apartment when you’re currently living in your parents’ basement?

How do you act as if you’re a wildly successful entrepreneur when you’re currently a barista working for $8 an hour? (insert blog post link)

I have the answer for you.

When you approach any goal, or desire, or next level, as a theatrical exercise in Becoming your Future-Self-of-choice, it becomes a multisensory experience and a multipronged campaign. 

You begin to use every part of the world that you live in, not just the mental side, to be the person that does what you want to do and therefore has what you’re aiming for. 

Every change we’d like to experience has an inside and an outside component. 

You’re far more likely to see results when most of your life – your habits, thoughts, choices – is pointed in the direction of your goal self.

Wanna stop smoking? You’re going to need to tweak some thought patterns (like why you like to smoke and the payoff you get from being able to distract yourself) AND some external patterns, like the habit of stopping off at the cigarette counter every time you go to the grocery store. You’re going to have to slowly get rid of the visual cues that remind you to smoke – like the lighter in your pocket and the ashtrays scattered round the house.

Wanna build your home business? You’re going to need to tweak how you think about working from home and working at home, AND you’re going to need to carve out some place to actually work in that tells your brain that ‘this is where we work’. Craft a ‘working wardrobe’ and szoosh up your Zoom background and now you’re looking and feeling more pro.

Brain + environment.
Thoughts + actions.
Inside + outside.

Yes, change can happen with attention focused on just your thoughts or just your actions. But the fast track is to attend and tend to both.

That’s how you become your Future Self, sooner, starting right where you are with what you have

Here’s the really juicy bit I want to highlight. 

You will create your internal and external change without being fake.
(Do not get me started on the ‘fake it till you make it’ nonsense!)

When you act-as-if effectively, there’s nothing fake about it.

 You’re not becoming somebody different.

You’re becoming another iteration of you.

 One that was always there but never took center stage.

You’re Norma Jean becoming Marilyn Monroe. 

Archibald Leach becoming Cary Grant. 

Clark Kent becoming Superman.

Or perhaps (subversive thought warning!), Superman learning to become Clark Kent so as to stay close to Lois.

This is how effective acting-as-if works – when you include the actual ‘acting’ part.

It’s time to reclaim your power to craft your own story so that you play the starring role, and then you incrementally tweak your environment, your wardrobe, your habits and expectations so you become her deliberately, strategically and sooner.

Click here to join my latest free class on exactly how to do this.