Useful Pretense

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

We are all accustomed to the fact that pretending is bad. This is untruth and hypocrisy in relation to people, this is the flip side of deception. The hardest thing to understand is that the person I trusted took and deceived my expectations, undermined my trust, used my feelings for his own purposes. Used me without my knowledge. And this is actually a blow to self-esteem.

But any negative phenomenon has a positive reflection. Will you be surprised? Pretending can act as a guide to profound personality changes. Each of us has repeatedly thought about the following questions: “How to change? How to stop taking everything to heart? How to become more outgoing? How to restore trust? etc.

The amazing TEDTALKS speaker, Emma Cuddy, put it in an amazing way: "Pretend until it becomes part of you!"

And I want to join this, because in fact, this phrase has absorbed everything that I have been saying for a long time to clients who want changes in their lives. Any change is achieved by changing oneself. The environment and situations can change only if roles, positions, and most importantly, views and attitudes to life have changed.

Our behavior has been forming for many years, many of our postures, gestures, intonations have become a habit. It goes without saying that the need for global change leads to the need for personal change. If I have been modest all my life and I have been instilled with a prohibition on my own opinion with my mother's milk, and in order to get approval, I have to sit in my dusty corner and keep my head down, then of course I continue to sit like this in my conscious life.

And what do profound changes bring? Learning to speak my thoughts, defend boundaries and crawl out of the corner as many times as I need in order to feel comfort and harmony within myself.

Where to start? Track your desires and needs in yourself, analyze unpleasant, annoying, repetitive situations. Think about what you should do? And then, in a suitable situation, reluctantly do just that. At first it will be a pretense, but gradually, each time you become more confident, you will feel the changes in yourself. Gradually it will become a part of you!

Seems incredible? Many years ago you didn’t know how to walk, but you pretended to be. Stubbornly and persistently until it becomes an integral part of your life.

So, hypocrisy to the detriment is for others to think that I am who I would like to be. Hypocrisy for the good is for yourself, while others do not believe in you, you are reborn. That's the whole difference.

For luck!