1357: What if it actually goes okay?

18 Jun

This one is for my fellow catastrophisers and would-be excellent health and safety officers!

Episode transcript:

Good morning, Daily Peppers, and a very happy Wednesday to you. Now, I think a lot of us are feeling pretty tired lately, and I have this saying that goes tired equals bullshit thoughts. So today I thought I would interrupt some of those bullshit thoughts, especially around predicting the future. Now, I am really good at catastrophizing. Give me any situation and I can tell you how it would go catastrophically wrong within, say, three steps. I think I would truly flourish in a role where risk assessment and health and safety was involved. My ability to create the downfall of humanity based on something really quite banal verges on incredibly impressive. And the thing is, when we're tired and when we have more bullshit thoughts, sometimes we're even more able to see the risks.

But here's something that I've learned that I think you've learned too. And it's that life is very rarely predictable. And I mean that in a really good way. There are so many times where I have stayed up the night before, panicking about all the ways it can go wrong and creating such a vivid image in my head to find that actually it wasn't that big of a deal. Or actually it went okay. I know there's that brilliant quote about what if you fall, but what if you fly? And that can be really helpful, but sometimes that doesn't feel accessible to us. And actually the best possible outcome is that actually goes okay. Not everything has to be absolutely spectacular or life changing.

Sometimes it is more than enough for something that we were worried about simply to work out. All right. And that's where I invite you to land today. Now, if you've been around a while, you'll know that I am absolutely, completely against toxic positivity. And I want to acknowledge that sometimes things do go to shit. But actually, if we look back at our lives and all the things we've worried about, that vivid image in our head rarely came true. And in fact, we've probably got more memories of, oh, I can't believe I spent so much time worrying about that and it went okay as opposed to when it didn't. So I invite you to think about today.

What if it actually goes alright? What if that vivid disastrous version in your head has been cooked up by your dreamshitter as a way to stop you from doing the scary thing? And what if, and this is a scary one and hard to contemplate, what if the worst case scenario did happen and you survived? You are much more capable than you think you are. And sometimes I think the image of ourselves we have in our head versus our reality. There's a bit of a mismatch. Because we are resilient, we just tend to forget it. So a lot of food for thought there. Keep noodling on it and I'll see you tomorrow.

Transcription automatically produced by Castmagic.io

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