How to Think Like the Stoics (and Stop Anxiety)

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And also, if you've ever gotten anything from any episode I've ever put out, share an episode with a friend. You probably know somebody that needs to hear this and it would be great to change your life in some sort of way. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Today, I'm gonna talk to you about something that maybe you've never heard of and actually sounds like a crazy idea until I tell you the benefits of it. We're going to be talking about visualization, but not visualizing the life that you want.

0:43We're going to do something that's called reverse visualization. It's also called negative visualization. And you know, study after study shows how visualization can help you create the life that you want. But most of the time when we think of visualization, we think about our best selves and we think about having all of the money and the happiness and the success and the love that we want. And we visualize the perfect future. What I'm going to talk to you about is the absolute exact opposite of that. What does it look like if you absolutely fail and all shit hits the fan? That's what we're going to talk about today.

1:19Today I'm going to talk to you about something that's called negative visualization. It's also called defense pessimism. The idea originally comes from, if you go back thousands of years ago, from stoic philosophy. And at its simplest form, the idea is to visualize the thing that you are most afraid of happening. visualize the absolute worst that could happen. You might be like, that seems like a terrible idea. Why would I ever want to do that? That sounds something like I want to avoid that future. Why would I visualize it? I'm going to feel the feelings if it's happening. It seems like it's a terrible idea.

1:53It seems counterintuitive to all the things that you know and what you've been taught. But trust me, it will make sense as we go through it today. and I'll show you how you can actually use negative visualization to change your life, to plan your life out, and then also how to desensitize yourself to the things that you're actually afraid of. So the first thing that this can help you with is business. If you have a business or if you're thinking about starting a business, the thing I want you to do is to visualize the absolute destruction of your business if you have one. Visualize you procrastinating and not taking action and not doing what you need to to grow your business.

2:38Maybe making the excuses of why you're not where you want to be. Maybe getting in all of your feelings and continuing to procrastinate more. Maybe scrolling on Instagram or watching Netflix instead of growing your business and then visualize that business failing completely. And then what the effects of that business failing completely are. Then you end up, you know, you fail, you end up losing a bunch of time, you lose a bunch of money, you waste all of your energy, you can't pay your bills, you lose your house, you're homeless, you can't feed yourself, you starve, you die. That's, whoa, That's where we've gone as bad as it possibly can.

3:20Visualize it all. I want you to see every single step of it. And I want you to see it. And I want you to see not like, hey, the business fails and you walk outside and you get hit by a meteor and it kills you and your entire family. Like that last part is probably not going to happen. But actually visualize yourself not doing what needs to be done, the business failing, and then everything that comes from that. You know, when I brought on my VP of operations in my company, I recruited her over and she was a, you know, pretty high up. She was a chief of staff for a multi-billion dollar company.

3:55And she had us go through this strategy, not to visualize it, but she had this thing that was called pre-mortem, which is planning out how the business will fail. She said, hey, if you bring me into this business, I want to plan every single way that the business could fail. And the reason why is because once you plan all the ways that the business could fail, well, then what you can do is you can look at those three ways, five ways, whatever they are, and then you can plan and put a plan together to make sure that it does not happen, which in turn makes the business succeed. And so that's the first thing I want you to do.

4:28If you have a business, plan your business failing. What about your relationships? If you're in a relationship. Visualize the end of that relationship. Visualize you, you know, not going for date nights, not prioritizing them. Visualizing you, you know, not caring about your partner emotionally and disconnecting from your partner emotionally. Maybe visualize them feeling so disconnected from you that they end up cheating on you and then you find out about it. Visualize the absolute worst that could happen in that relationship and how that relationship could end. And then what you do is you write it all down and you put down all of ways that could possibly end.

5:06And then you can plan to make sure that it doesn't happen and you can change your actions. And then your health, visualize you not making your health a priority. Visualize you saying, oh, I'm too busy to go to the gym. Oh, I'm too busy to eat food. So I'm going to stop and get McDonald's. Visualize you not eating the right foods. Visualize you ignoring all of the red flags for the next 10 years. and then visualize you walking into the doctor's office and then telling you, hey, you have three months left to live or whatever it might be for you. Visualize all of the worst that could happen. Oh my God, this is the most depressing freaking episode I've ever put out, right?

5:43We're not done yet. Visualize this job that you have. Maybe you stress out about your job. Visualizing you not taking the right action to show your worth and visualize you not doing what needs to be done and visualizing you messing up and losing your job. visualize all this stuff and you visualize anything that you're afraid of any fear any limiting belief the fear of other people's opinions the fear of failure the fear of not being good enough not being smart enough not you know being able to be successful enough to run a business to be able to pay for your family's needs whatever it is you visualize the thing that you are most afraid of you could visualize you know so many people are afraid of public speaking and maybe you're like, I want to start public speaking, but I'm so afraid of it.

6:29Well, visualize you not preparing for the presentation, not doing enough research, fumbling on your words, looking like an idiot, embarrassing yourself in front of your entire company, whatever it might be. And then the very last thing that I want you to visualize, visualize your entire life. Visualize you not doing what you need to do to create yourself into the absolute best version of yourself. Visualize you deciding to skip out on your development. Visualize you, you know, not doing the hard things, giving up on your potential, not living up to your potential and getting to your deathbed and regretting that you lived a life that was half lived.

7:13Now, some of you guys listening already feel anxious and I'm surprised you're still here. I'm surprised you didn't just turn this shit off already because that was depressing, right? It's good that you feel anxious or sad or depressed about those things. It's good because we're going to talk about what you do with this and why this is an important thing to do. It is important to visualize the life that you want. And it's also important to visualize your life being an absolute train wreck. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. The reason why, number one, this is important. There's a couple different steps.

7:46Number one reason why this is really good for you is because one of the reasons why we don't build our business or take action or do the things that we need to do to change our life is because there's so much uncertainty in change. There's so much uncertainty. And when we visualize what could happen, it takes all of the uncertainty and makes it feel a little bit more certain. And the thing that I love, you know, I was doing this with Mindset University not long ago, is we did this and everybody tried to visualize the worst that could happen. And they realized that the worst that could happen wasn't really a big deal.

8:22Like it was like not that big of a deal. And, you know, they, they like had to like go deeper and they were like trying to make it worse. And then as they were making it worse, they're like, this would never happen though. But my mind is thinking that if I run my business in the ground, I'll somehow blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I'll end up in jail. And the person's like, that's ridiculous. I would never end up in jail. And so, you know, it takes the uncertainty and makes it feel more certain, which is a really important thing for humans, because when there's uncertainty and it's just kind of like the future is just like missed in front of us, the human brain says, no danger, don't do it.

9:01What I want to do is I want to visualize all possibilities. So that's the first thing. The second thing that it does that's really, really important is it desensitizes you. It makes you feel less anxiety about the future because you've already seen all of the paths that could possibly be in front of you. And you're sure it's probably not going to be as good as you want to be, but it'll probably still be pretty good. And so the good thing about visualizing the worst that could happen is that the worst that could happen desensitizes you. It's the same as when somebody is, you know, really, really terrified of snakes.

9:37And so they're like, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to bring in a snake into the room. It's going to be in a glass box. No big deal. It cannot get out of the glass box. And we're going to put it on the other side of the room. The person will see it on the other side of the room. They get really anxious. They get really stressed. And as time goes on, it's not as bad. It's okay. I'm still not happy about it, but it's not as bad as it was when they first walked in. Okay. Now what we're going to do, we're going to move it a little bit closer to you. And then move it just a little bit closer.

10:05And oh my God, it's coming closer. Okay. But let's keep it there for 10 minutes and it starts to kind of calm down just a little bit. Okay, I'm calming down. I'm not that bad. And eventually if they do this enough, it's called exposure therapy. If they do this exposure therapy enough, they can eventually get, and it might not be today, it might be tomorrow, it might be the next day, somebody to hold the snake that was absolute terrifying to them. It desensitizes you and it takes the uncertainty and makes it a little bit more certain. And so there was a study that was done on this in 1996 and it was called defensive pessimism.

10:38optimism in simulating alternatives. And the research looked at defensive pessimism, which is negative visualization, just another word, along with optimism, and actually found that visualizing negative alternatives or imagining how past events could have gone worse provided psychological benefits for the people who did it. Defensive pessimists use these strategies to alleviate their anxiety and then feel more prepared in the future. So by visualizing these things, they actually, you might feel more anxious thinking about it. But when you go into life, you alleviate anxiety, you feel more prepared.

11:14So that's the second thing. The third thing that is really important with this is it allows you to strategically plan. As I told you in business, it's called premortem process, which is planning out every single way that your business could fail on paper. You can do this with your marriage too. You can sit down with your partner and say, hey, listen, I want to plan out every single way that our marriage could fail. And it sounds crazy, but the reason why is because then once we see how it could fail, we can make a step-by-step process to make sure that we don't do the things that would make it fail, that we don't skip date night, that we don't not make each other a priority.

11:52And you can plan out the failure of the business, the failure of the relationship, the failure of your life, the failure to ensure that it does not happen. And there was a study that was done in 1997. it was called counterfactual thinking, the intersection of effect and function. And the paper dives into the role of counterfactual thinking. So by mentally rehearsing how things could go wrong, people can develop strategies to avoid the outcomes that they don't want, which then leads to a more productive and less anxious approach. So that's number three. And the fourth thing, oddly enough, it gives you way more sense of control.

12:36Because you've already seen everything that could happen. If you've seen everything that could happen, then no matter what happens, you're going to be prepared for it. And you've already seen it, and you've also already planned it out. And so you've seen the worst that could happen. You've planned out the worst that could happen and the best that could happen. You see all potential futures that could possibly happen in front of you. And then now you just have to take the right action towards the one that you want. And so it gives you much more of a sense of control. It gives you, allows you to be more proactive and less anxious in your approach as you're doing it.

13:14And so now all you have to do, because you've already seen everything, you've already planned everything out, is you have to go, oh yeah, I've seen this before. Versus like, oh my God, this is something I've never seen. I've seen this before. And you know what? I've already made a plan to make sure that it doesn't go the wrong way. And so there was a study that was done on defensive pessimism that was done in 1986, and it was called Defensive Pessimism Harnessing Anxiety as Motivation. And the study found, this is where the actual term of defensive pessimism came from. The study found, and the researchers, what they really worked on was that some people deliberately thought about worst case scenarios as a way to manage their anxiety.

13:52and the ones who did, those individuals felt way more control and motivation when using this strategy. And so I know it seems very counterintuitive, but also counterproductive to visualize the negative, but this is what I recommend that you do. And you don't, please don't do this every single day. I recommend that you take one day and you wake up in the morning and you visualize the absolute destruction of something important to you, the absolute destruction of your relationship, of your business, of your life, the absolute destruction. And you see every possible way and you get so creative of how things could possibly go bad.

14:29And then what you do is you then take a pen and paper and you say, what are all of the ways that this marriage could go bad? And you write all of them down. And then you sit down with your, you know, marriage partner in the same way that you would with your business partner. And you say, hey, these are all the ways that I think our marriage could go bad. I want to sit down and make a plan with you. You could do the exact same thing as a business this partner. Hey, these are all the ways I think our business could fail. I want to create a plan for all of these to make sure that we do the right things.

14:55What happens is you start to realize when you do this, that you have more of a sense of control. You don't feel so much fear about the future and you're able to take proactive action. And then what I would recommend is then go back to visualizing the life that you want and visualize that every single morning so that you're visualizing in your, in turn, brainwashing yourself to believe that the life that you want is possible. You're brainwashing yourself into believing that you can create every single thing that you want, but you also, just in case, are prepared in case shit hits the fan. So that's what I got for you for today's episode.

15:30If you love this episode, please do me a massive favor. Share it with someone that you know and love so that they can benefit from listening to it as well. And also, if you want to learn more about coaching with me outside of the podcast, go to coachwithrob.com. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission. to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.