https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tEsVrFDNm3E
If you could be who you wanted to be, this is a question you can ask yourself. If you could be who you wanted to be, or let’s say if you could be who you wanted and needed to be, or maybe you could even extend that, if you could be who you wanted and needed to be in a manner that would be best for you, and best for other people, because why not extend it that way? What would that look like? And then you could force yourself to draw a conclusion that you’ve already drawn, or you could open yourself up and see what you dreamed. You know, when I was a clinician, I actually used to literally do that with people’s dreams, because dreams do dream up. Dreams are the birthplace of ideas. That’s a good way of thinking about it. That’s the imagination, the dream. And if we were struggling, say, in our therapeutic dialogue with issues of identity, it was often very useful to turn to dreams, because dreams would produce visions of possibility. That’s what dreams do. That’s not all they do, but that’s something that they do. And so you could say to yourself, well, this is knocking in a real sense. If I could be who I could be in the best way that I could be that, what would that look like? That’s a great question to ask. It’s a frightening question in some sense, because imagine that you develop a vision of yourself that’s an improved version of yourself. And you might even say, imagine that you developed a vision of yourself that’s a remarkably improved version of yourself. The gap between your present self and that ideal vision is going to produce an internal tension. It’s a kind of judgment, right? Because once you formulate an ideal, the ideal judges you. That’s a useful thing to know, too. No ideal without a judge. And people say, well, you shouldn’t be judgmental. It’s like, you shouldn’t have an ideal? That’s the same claim. What are you going to do without an ideal? You’re going to not have an ideal? If you don’t have an ideal, then what the hell are you going to do? Are you moving towards a less ideal state? Is that the goal for your life, to move towards a less ideal state? Or is the goal of your life to move towards a more ideal state? And I would say that the very idea that it’s a goal presumes that what you’re doing is moving towards something more ideal. It’s built into the notion of goal itself. Imagine who you could be. I have a program online. I designed it with my colleagues at Harvard and at McGill University. One colleague, Dr. Daniel Higgins, who was a student of mine at Harvard, and another colleague, Dr. Robert Peel, who was my graduate supervisor at McGill. We scoured the research literature to see if we could find a scalable, inexpensive, online, mass-distributable intervention that would decrease people’s anxiety and confusion and disappointment, frustration, the whole coterie of negative emotions, and improve their positive emotion. Those are separate systems, by the way, the negative emotion system and the positive emotion system. And we spent a couple of years looking through the research literature to see if any such intervention existed, and we found converging evidence from a couple of different fields of inquiry that suggested that biographical writing could be of great aid. So here’s something to contemplate. If you have memories that are about, that are more than 18 months old, and those memories come up of their own accord, and they bother you, they still contain emotion, especially negative emotion, then there are parts of you, this is one way of thinking about, there are parts of you that are still trapped in the past, that are crying to be released, or there are impediments that you encountered in the past that are still blocking your way, or there are pits that you fell into because of the error of your ways or because of bad luck that you’re still afraid you might run into again. And the reason those memories come up is because the instincts that drive your negative emotions are trying to warn you of danger. And it’s the case that if you allow yourself to dream of those memories again, to let them unfold inside you, and if you write about them carefully, that you can find your way once again, and that those memories will recede. It’s part of a broader, that fact is part of a broader set of facts that characterize both clinical improvement and learning. Tammy made some reference to that in a narrative way with her story. If you confront that which frightens and stops you voluntarily, you become braver and more able. And that’s true with things that might bother you now that you’re compelled to avoid, but also true of things in your past that haven’t yet been dealt with. And so one of the exercises online, self-authoring exercises, helps you walk through your past, assessing the emotional experiences of your past in the different epochs of your life, and trying to get your story straight. Why? So you know where you are. Why? Well, if you don’t know where you are, how are you going to plot a course to where you need to be? Because one thing you need to know to get where you want to go is where you are now, otherwise you’re lost. Another part of this exercises is a future authoring program, and we found a literature mostly produced by industrial psychologists interested in, for example, facilitating or improving performance in the business world, demonstrating, for example, that if you want to motivate your employees, one thing you could do is ask them to detail out their goals as employees. Or you could contrast that with having them develop a vision for their lives. And it turns out that if you encourage those you work with to develop a personal vision, that they become much more effective at work.