being DELUSIONAL needs to stop

Today, we need to talk about a phenomenon that has taken over the culture of personal development and manifestation: the mantra to “Just be delusional.”

I'm here to make the case that it's high time to reevaluate this concept.

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1. Ummmm, reality?

The first reason why just being delusional, I think, isn't actually that great of a strategy is because, for most people, it's actually really difficult to do. The reason for this is because of the snapback to reality. 

The premise of just being delusional is basically to ignore your current reality and pretend that the things that you're trying to manifest are already in existence. Now, if you are trying to manifest more money, if you are trying to manifest more fame, more followers, a relationship, just act as if, just pretend, just make believe essentially that you have those things right now. 

Now, in theory, this is a good idea because, of course, when it comes to the law of attraction or the law of assumption, what we want to do is we want to align with the vibration or the feeling or the energy of the thing that we want to call into our life. 

So if we want more money, we want to feel abundant. If we want a relationship, we want to feel more love. If we want to have a big audience, we want to feel the feeling of having that impact. But a lot of people who are teaching just be delusional, are telling us to ignore our current reality. The problem with this is when you look at your bank account or maybe you look at your YouTube following, or you wake up in the morning and you're just alone in bed, you get snapped back into reality. And so what a lot of people are doing wrong is they're trying to focus on the physicality of those things in their reality rather than the actual emotion behind them. 

Manifestation and aligning to a vibration is actually very simple. You just have to think about the emotion or the feeling that you're going to experience regardless of whether that reality is around you. 

The more that you feel something, the more that you're going to attract into your life experiences that give you that feeling. So it's all about the feeling, not necessarily about the reality that you currently have around you. 

This is why one of the greatest manifestation tools that we have available to us is actually gratitude, and when it comes to being delusional, what you are doing is you're not being grateful. You're not training yourself to be grateful for what you have here in the present moment, and by actually trying to ignore your current reality, you’re essentially trying to live in the make-believe. 

The goal is actually that you feel abundant or you feel like you're making an impact the whole way along the journey whilst you are building your millions of followers or millions of dollars.

A much more powerful way that you can use this whole concept is to try to feel excitement and certainty that one day those followers are going to be there. Post as if you know that one day you are going to have millions of followers.  

2. why do we make our big goals sound like a game?


We are already having a hard time being seen as equal to men in the creative and entrepreneurial spaces. We have been fighting so freaking hard for equality to be seen as capable individual human beings in the entrepreneurial space, and then we are showing up and saying things like this, “just be d Lulu, or How did you achieve your success? I don't know. I'm just a lucky girl, and things come to me.” When men are achieving things, they get called tenacious, they get called courageous, and they get honoured for their consistency and their resilience. We're doing it to ourselves by saying that we don't work hard, that we aren't consistent, that we aren't capable, and that the only reason why we have the success that we have is because we are lucky. 

Or when men set big, hairy, scary, audacious goals, they get praised for the impact that they're trying to have. We call that certainty, and yet we're coming out as women and saying, just be delusional. 

I know it's just for fun, but what I'm trying to say is that it just makes us sound like we are playing make-believe while the men are out there trying to change the world. 

I'm an optimistic person, and I absolutely want to always feel that I'm in the best vibration possible, but the reality is that you grow through challenges. You grow through being able to build that self-efficacy and that self-respect because you overcame something difficult. 

I am not trying to say that you shouldn't use the law of attraction, and all you should do is work hard, but I think we need a really good balance. And when we lean too far into these manifestation trends, we're actually discrediting ourselves for the courage and the work that we put into things. 


3. What’s so bad about today?


We are already struggling with being disengaged from reality. We spend so much of our time living in our phones, not really playing out the lives that we've built for ourselves. If you are disengaging from your reality and you've trained yourself to disengage from your reality in the pursuit of achieving a goal, why do you think that it's going to be any different when you actually achieve that goal, when you actually get the millions of followers or the millions of dollars, but all you've done in the process is not be grateful for your current circumstances, not be focused on the journey, not overcome any kinds of challenges so that you feel proud of yourself when you get there, do you think actually achieving those things is going to feel good or you're going to know how to actually live and cement into those experiences probably not. 

Training ourselves to live in this futuristic state completely takes away from the joy of the moment. 

The achievement of your goals and visions very rarely actually feels as you want it to. Being excited about something, the anticipation of something, working towards something, building up how proud you feel every step of the way.

If you are just disengaging and just being delusional and pretending you already have that thing all the time, then you really are taking away not only the magic of the journey but truly the magic of life. 

4. Delusion ruins people’s lives


Delusion itself is actually something that people really, really struggle with. There are mental disorders where delusion is a big, big part of the symptoms that people go through. For example, people who over-fantasize about relationships disengage from the reality of a relationship with someone and create a delusional fantasy around that. Hypochondria is another one. People have severe delusions about the state of their health. grandiose delusions where people think they're far more capable than they actually are, and they put themselves in dangerous situations. 

Putting yourself in rooms where you are the newbie, and you're surrounding yourself with people who are far more experienced is a good thing, but having so much delusion that you think your skills or your experiences or your expertise are, this is something that is actually tied to mental illness. 

Why would we train ourselves to do something that people really, really struggle with on a day-to-day basis? 

Substitute delusion with certainty 


When you want to set big, scary, audacious goals, why do you have to be delusional? Why can't you be certain? Why do you have to pretend like you have that thing today? Why can't you show up every single day rather than just be certain that it's coming your way? 
Think about this example for a second. You walk into a restaurant being delusional, sitting down at the table and pretending that your order is already there, and then you look down, and you see that it's not.

Whereas being certain is walking into a restaurant, putting an order in and relaxing, knowing it's coming, acting as if you know that it's on the way. You can still step into the shoes of the person that you want to be without having to pretend that you already have the results and completely skip the journey altogether. 

If you want a YouTube channel with millions of followers. You can show up and speak to the camera as if you are certain that one day millions of followers are going to be there. You can be certain that you have the skills, the capability, and the self-worth to achieve anything you want in life. 

You don't have to be lucky. You just have to back yourself. You just have to know that it is possible for you to achieve these things. You don't have to pretend you don't have to lie to people and say that you have more money than you have or that you have more success than you have. You just have to know in your heart that you have dreams. You have to put it out there to the universe. You have to show up certain that it is going to happen for you, and you just have to enjoy the journey along the way. 


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Erin Henry