Self-absorption, self-obsession, the need for validation from others, toxic vanity, being in the spotlight … the list goes on. Please do not judge yourself if you possess any of the mentioned characteristics – however, I would encourage you to investigate if your self-worth and esteem are contingent on how others’ perceive you. Ideally, our self-worth comes from within. We do not need to seek it outside of ourselves. When you find yourself doing so, pause, and offer yourself what you need.

When to Fake It Till You Make It (and When You Shouldn’t)

Faking it for the right reasons can change you for the better. Here’s why.

Posted Jun 27, 2016By Amy Morin

One day, a client came to see me because she felt socially awkward. She knew that her inability to make small talk was holding her back both personally and professionally. As a shy person, she hated going to networking events. But making connections was vital to her career.I asked, “What do you usually do when you go to a networking event?” She said, “I stand awkwardly off to the side and wait to see if anyone will come talk to me.” I asked her, “What would you do differently if you felt confident?” and she said, “I’d initiate conversation and introduce myself to people.”

Right then and there, she discovered the solution to her problem: If she wanted to feel more confident, she had to act more confident. That wasn’t quite what she wanted to hear. She’d hoped for a solution that would immediately make her feel more confident. But the key to becoming more comfortable in social situations is practice.Her instinct was to wait until she felt more confident, but that confidence wasn’t going to magically appear out of thin air—especially if she was standing around by herself. However, if she started talking to people like a confident person, she’d have an opportunity to experience successful social interactions, and each of these would boost her confidence.

Acting “As If”

Acting “as if” is a common prescription in psychotherapy. It’s based on the idea that if you behave like the person you want to become, you’ll become like this in reality:

1. If you want to feel happier, do what happy people do—smile.

2. If you want to get more work done, act as if you are a productive person.

3. If you want to have more friends, behave like a friendly person.

4. If you want to improve your relationship, practice being a good partner.Too often we hesitate to spring into action. Instead, we wait until everything feels just right or until we think we’re ready. But research shows that changing your behavior first can change the way you think and feel.

The Biggest Mistake Most People Make

Faking it until you make it only works when you correctly identify something within yourself that’s holding you back. Behaving like the person you want to become is about changing the way you feel and the way you think.If your motives are to prove your worth to other people, however, your efforts won’t be successful, and research shows that this approach actually backfires. A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that people who tried to prove their worth to others were more likely to dwell on their shortcomings. Ambitious professionals who wore luxury clothing in an effort to appear successful, and MBA students who wore Rolex watches to increase their self-worth just ended up feeling like bigger failures. Even worse, their attempts to project an image of success impaired their self-control. They struggled to resist temptation when they tried to prove that they were successful. Putting so much effort into faking it used up their mental resources and interfered with their ability to make good choices.

How to “Fake It” the Right Way

Acting “as if” doesn’t mean being phony or inauthentic. It’s about changing your behavior first and trusting the feelings will follow. As long as your motivation is in the right place, faking it until you make it can effectively make your goals become reality. Just make sure you’re interested in changing yourself on the inside, not simply trying to change other people’s perceptions of you.

Multiple theorists and researchers since Freud have independently converged on the same concept of psychological defences because of the potential utility of the concept.

Alfred Adler, known for emphasising the importance of overcoming feelings of inferiority and gaining a sense of belonging in order to achieve success and happiness, developed a similar idea which he called psychological “safeguarding strategies.”

Karen Horney, who believed that environment and social upbringing, rather than intrinsic factors, largely lead to neurosis, described “protective strategies” used by children of abusive or neglectful parents.

Leon Festinger developed the well-known concept of “cognitive dissonance,” proposing that inconsistency among beliefs or behaviours causes an uncomfortable psychological tension leading people to change one of the inconsistent elements to reduce the dissonance (or to add consonant elements to restore consonance).

Carl Rogers, who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, known especially for his person-centred psychotherapy, discussed the process of defence as “denial and perceptual distortion”.

Albert Bandura, known for ground-breaking research on learning via observation and social modelling, and the development of social learning theory, conceptualized defences as “self-exoneration mechanisms.”

The influential psychiatrist George Vaillant organized defences on a scale of immature to mature, defining them as “unconscious homeostatic mechanisms that reduce the disorganizing effects of sudden stress.”

Current discussions of coping mechanisms and emotion regulation embody the idea of defences as well. Is a defence mechanism merely a learned internal process manifested in our behaviour to protect us – or our ego – from pain? Is a defence mechanism a merely a coping mechanism to resolve internal stress?

Whatever you believe the answers to be, we can cultivate, learn, and practice adaptive, context-specific and generalised coping strategies that will aid self-development that can improve our health, relationships, self-esteem, workplace performance, and stress management skills.

Inattentional Blindness is the failure to notice an unexpected object in a visual display.

Cognitive Psychology is an approach to understanding human cognition by observing behaviour of people performing cognitive tasks. It is concerned with the internal processes involved in making sense of our environment, and deciding what behaviour to be appropriate. These processes include attention, perception, learning, memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and thinking.

The most famous experiment that shows evidence for inattentional blindness is the Simons and Chabris (1999) experiment where an audience or viewer watches a group of people pass a ball to one another wearing either black or white, and a woman dressed as a gorilla enters the frame for 9 seconds, then walks off. Results reported that 50% of the observers did not notice the gorilla enter the frame. In all honesty, when I saw the video for the first time at university, I did not see the gorilla enter the frame either.

In reality, we are often aware of changes in our visual environment because we detect motion cues accompanying the change. This information suggests that our ability to detect visual changes is not only due to the detection of movement. An obvious explanation of the gorilla experiment findings is that the visual representations we form in our mind are sparse and incomplete because they depend on our limited attentional focus. Simons and Rensick (2005) point out that there are other explanations, such as: detailed and complete representations may exist initially but may either decay rapidly or be overwritten by a subsequent stimulus. It needs to be said that in the gorilla experiment, the observers are instructed to count how many times the ball passes, so really, our attention is deliberately compromised. The real-life implications of inattentional blindness reveals the role of selective attention in human perception. Inattentional blindness represents a consequence of this critical process that allows us to remain focused on important aspects of our world without distraction from seemingly irrelevant objects and events.

Being present, in the moment (mindfulness) can help aid our attention. Distractions such as using our mobile phones, advertising material, other people, “multi-tasking” and internal emotional states all contribute to our lack of focus and attention. Think of a magician’s ability to manipulate their audiences attention in order to prevent them from seeing how a trick is performed. There are also safety implications, as you would know … if you’ve been paying attention, haha.

Just food for thought, my readers, and friends 🙂