Acting “as if”

A couple weekends ago, I was speaking at a seminar designed to help entrepreneurs.

At the beginning of the seminar (well before my speech was scheduled), I had the opportunity to participate in an “icebreaker” exercise led by a different speaker, which exercise the speaker credited to Tony Robbins. In this exercise, we were instructed to go up to strangers in the room and introduce ourselves three times in succession but in accordance with changing instructions. The first time, we were told to introduce ourselves to people normally. The second time, we were asked to walk up to people as if we already knew them. And by the third go-around, we were told to approach people as if they were long-lost friends.

The results of this exercise amazed me. The way that I felt and the intensity of connections that I formed in these three situations were extraordinarily different. The first time, I felt “OK,” and formed no connections whatsoever. The third experience, by contrast, energized me (a lot) and, more importantly, generated a fairly intense, instantaneous connection with the people with whom I spoke.

Since that weekend, having been blown away by the effectiveness of the exercise I learned at the seminar, I have been toying with the question of whether or not I can train myself to apply the technique I learned during that exercise more broadly in my day-to-day life. My goal here is not only to learn to connect more intensely with other people (although that’s a worthwhile goal in itself), but also, to learn how to use the technique I learned there to become happier and more effective in general.

To accomplish this goal, I’ve been trying to follow a three step process:

1. Train myself to identify and characterize, in detail, what I specifically do and feel, e.g., what I’m thinking, how I breathe, how I hold my body, etc. when I am happy and effective (let’s call this my “optimal state”) vs. unhappy and ineffective (my “sub-optimal state”)
2. Train myself to reproduce my optimal state at will – basically by having my body and mind reproduce the actions that I’ve memorized during step 1 above
3. When I notice myself being in my sub-optimal state, consciously attempt to shift myself over to my optimal state by: (a) acting “as if” I’m already in my optimal state, and (b) simultaneously attempting to reproduce my optimal state based on what I’d been learning during steps 1 and 2 above.

To date, I’ve had a few, small successes with this strategy, but the going has been slow. Nonetheless, my sense (based on my experience during the seminar as well as success stories I’ve heard from others using this technique) is that I’m on to something here and that, with practice, this strategy will prove to be a valuable addition to my self-improvement arsenal.

If anyone reading this blog has had experience trying this technique on their own, I’d love to hear about it.