My dear Friends,

What about you? How often do you find yourself in Lalaland? I love to daydream! Dreaming, in a way, is planning our future. We imagine the outcomes of decisions we want to make. We might think about what we might do at the weekend or how it would feel to be a trailblazer in female investments, or we imagine ourselves writing an award-winning novel – the Lalaland fantasies of our life in the more distant future.

We’ve all been there; you’re in the middle of a conversation when someone asks you a question, and you realise you are in another world. You go for a walk, and you can´t remember how you got from A to B because you were somewhere else.

Stop here right now because this has severe side effects. The warm emotions these fantasies arouse lead us to feel as if we’d already met the goal. As a result, none of our dreams become reality.

Positive -Thinking Myth

How often have you tried out the self-help industry´s “positive thinking” mantra to go into a more or less continuous loop of visualising this bright future and your dreams come true, somehow? Did it work?

There a whole industry out there trying to tell us that we only have to keep visualising our dream over and over again, and it will become a reality? Research over the past decade found this is the best way to self-sabotage whatever we dream about.

It is human nature for us to daydream more when we are stressed, bored, tired, or in a hectic environment. Science found out that men who daydream frequently and women who daydream vividly tend to be less satisfied in their life. Non-consciously we confuse daydreams for reality. We experience a strong feeling of happiness, almost as if we have reached that goal already, so we forget to compare that rosy vision with reality. All the good intentions remain a continuous daydream dance. A whole positive-thinking industry thrives on this misconception.

Daydreams consist of videos of yourself, mainly in near or far future events. What we want to happen is replaying over and over again, daydreaming about future events where we see ourselves in 10 years or at a later hour that very same day. It has been noted that about 30 to 47% of our conscious day is spent spacing out, drifting and daydreaming.

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality

Lewis Caroll

These dreams are formulated from sub-conscious mental energy based on misperceptions and biases. Daydreaming is linked to our “intention setting” and is often unrealistic. We want to go straight to an easy and nice outcome; there is often no pausing by the brain to assess anything alternative.

This can be the start of a destructive downward spiral. Unrealistic expectations are destructive because we fail to identify obstacles and will not seek the best solutions to overcome them.

Without a pragmatic plan, we fail to reach the unrealistic goal. Consequently, we embark on a thought process we use when we punish ourselves. We retract from reality even further, and we keep on dreaming and failing and feeling miserable- the result, any self-esteem goes out of the window.

Rosy pictures and sublimal perceptions associated with an outcome establish the anchor point for negative perceptions and links to future failure

Research has proven that people who apply mental contrasting-spontaneously checking positive fantasies vs. reality-were most likely to pursue their dream and succeed. People who only indulged in their positive fantasies were as self-sabotaging as those who were weighed down by seeing only the obstacles.

WOOP, the Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan

Sounds soo obvious and simple but escapes most people

Do enjoy your daydreams, but the next time you finish dreaming, remember daydreaming and positive thinking alone will not get you anywhere. Try mental contrasting and make a plan on how to come closest to making your dream come true. You`ll see the difference and gain more confidence along the way.