One Question Friday: How Do You Keep Your Imagination Alive?

HubSpot allows all our teams to work together seamlessly, so no one's falling overboard unless we want them to. Okay, it's Sean, and I'm here with One Question Friday, where we take one listener question and we play the audio on air, and then we try to answer. We try to drop a knowledge bomb, right? I'm already imagining you listening to this, and your mind is, your mind is blown. The brain is leaking out the air. And, uh, that's, that's how you're gonna end this podcast. Okay, so let's go ahead and listen to this. Ben has sent me 3 audios. I can pick any one of the 3. Haven't heard it yet. I'm going to pick door number 1. Let's go. Hey guys, my name is Matthew and I have a question for Sean. So he talks about not wanting to be in the imagination graveyard. What are some tips and tricks that you do to keep your imagination, creativity alive, especially when you feel stuck or you don't know what to do? Oh, okay, perfect. This is right up my alley. And let me break this down for you in 3 parts. I'll, I'll first start by saying this. I think this question touches on something, a tactic that is one of the most useful things that I do that I don't really hear anybody else talking about. Okay, so that's the, that's the teaser, which is what I'm about to talk about is one of the most useful things to me, and I rarely hear people talking about it. So let's break this into parts. You, you're asking about imagination. You have this great little phrase, imagination graveyard. I don't think I said that, but I'm stealing it from you. So the first thing is, if I said, all right, picture somebody who's got an amazing imagination, right? Who, who in the world has an amazing imagination? Often what people will think about is a child, right? So when we're kids, we We get praised for our imagination, and we're always making up games and stories and magical creatures and imaginary friends and all this good stuff. So that's the first place we go. We think kids— imagination is for kids. The other place we go is maybe like a, um, I don't know, like somebody who works at Pixar. Like, oh, you're super creative, you create these movies and stories, so you need to be imaginative, and the rest of us, we don't really need that. And, um, I think that's totally wrong. So I actually will put this forward. I think that everybody is using their imagination every day, but you just don't recognize it because when you're a kid, your imagination is about fun and possibilities and magical fantasy lands. And when you're an adult, your imagination is actually manifest as stress, right? Okay. So what, what does that mean? Um, you wake up and you're, you look through the alarm clock, you see the time, and immediately you realize that, oh man, I'm, I'm gonna be stuck in traffic. Right? So where has your brain gone? Your brain has imagined a situation that hasn't happened, that is not necessarily a fact or proven, uh, but you're imagining that the, the either the roads are going to be clogged or the airport's going to be busy or they're going to lose my bag. Or you imagine that, oh, I have this presentation and I'm gonna, I'm gonna fuck it up, right? I'm gonna stumble on my words or I'm gonna get nervous or people aren't gonna get it or people are gonna laugh at me, whatever. We are constantly imagining Negative scenarios happening. This is very common in adults, right? And you know, um, how do you feel when you imagine these things, right? You feel anxious, you feel stressed, you feel depressed. These are all code words for the same thing: fear. And fear only takes place in the imagination. And so, um, the first thing to recognize, that imagination is not just something that kids do, it's something that adults do all the time. They just codename it stress, and that's because they are imagining bad scenarios that haven't happened yet that might. This happens as a parent. You watch your kid and instead of being, you know, marveling at how they're playing, you are imagining, oh, they might hit their head on that thing, right? Oh, they might stub their toe over here, right? How often do we do things like that? Okay, so that's step 1. Now the second thing is, okay, well, what's the big deal? We're imagining this. Well, what's the implication? What is the result of this imagination? Well, the first is how you feel, because when you imagine something going poorly, you feel stressed, anxious, you know, depressed, sad, whatever, whatever these negative emotions are, emotions that we usually go want to experience for an extended period of time. So it changes our mood, but it also changes our decisions, right? If you imagine that you're, uh, you know, gonna be stuck in traffic, maybe you'll leave earlier. You'll take a different route, or maybe you won't go at all. Same thing with you imagine that the presentation is gonna be, you're gonna forget what you had to say and you're, the, uh, people are gonna be looking at you like you don't know what you're talking about. So maybe you'll actually just ask somebody else to do it, or you'll, you'll avoid the situation altogether. So imagination drives not just your mood but your decisions. So what I mean, if at the beginning of this, if I said, how important is your imagination? You'd say, oh, it's, you know, it's important to have an imagination. But your mood and your decisions are like the most, two most important things that you have in life. And what I'm telling you is that they're driven by your imagination about what you're imagining the future to be like. And so all of a sudden, imagination becomes this pretty important thing. And the problem is imagination is a muscle that we haven't used consciously since we were kids, right? Like we're always doing it in the background, but how often are we actually intentionally trying to improve our imagination? It is a muscle that's just been weakening and atrophying since we were like, you know, 5 years old. And, um, so here's how I do it. Okay, so that's the importance of it now. Okay, what do you actually do about that? Well, the way that most people in my friend group, my peers, the way they think is extremely rational, analytical, logical, and they love lists. Like, nobody loves lists like a business person and a doer, an achiever. They love lists, right? You know, write it down, knock it off. And those do work to a certain extent. They actually work on getting a pretty good result, but they get there in the sort of like toughest, most stressful way possible. And I'm not really interested in that, right? Like, I wanna win and I wanna enjoy it while I go. To me, those are two non-negotiable things. Not willing to lose and not willing to have this, you know, rough, tough it out experience. Um, no, I wanna have an enjoyable, awesome experience while I'm doing it. So that's just the way I've chosen to live my life. Okay, so now what I do differently, instead of making a list, which is like a text format, I use the brain the way the brain actually works, which is a brain is more visual system. And, uh, it's a visual auditory system. And so I use my brain when I think about what I wanna do, my tasks, my goals, stuff like that. I don't make lists. I make scenes, like scenes in a movie. So I'm imagining how I want something to go. And, um, I think I even started this podcast saying something like this. I think, I think I said, I'm imagining you listening to this with your mind blown and your brain leaking, right? Like I think I said, literally said that at the beginning of this podcast. That is how I approach anything. So people are like, you know, hey, you do a lot of public speaking, um, you know, what's a tip to get better? And this is what I always say. I say, don't think about what you need to say first. Start by imagining the reaction at the end. How are people gonna feel and react at the end? You imagine the standing ovation. You imagine— I, I do this, for example, I imagine when I teach my class on Zoom, this is like, I teach a course people pay $1,000 per person to get into this course and they show up in a Zoom and I need to make this thing lit. It can't feel like a boring meeting. I don't worry about what words I'm gonna say. I worry, I think about how do I want this to end? What do, how do I want this to feel at the end here? And I, what I always do is I imagine the chat in a Zoom chat flooding with comments, people being like, this was a 12 outta 10. Oh my God, so many nuggets of gold. Dude, so glad I came. You know, I'm imagining these almost like congratulatory conversations that are happening at the end. I imagine the volume of chat just flying through the screen of positive feedback that gets me in a certain type of mood, right? That gives me that confidence that then I could just go and I can just operate naturally in the— who knows, the right words just happen to come out of my mouth then because I'm operating from the right state of mind. So what I'll do is I'll make scenes for my goals. So instead of saying I want to lose 10 pounds, I will imagine looking myself in the mirror and seeing what I see, right? I'll imagine the scene of looking at my body, or even better, forget the body. I imagine that I just posted my before and after on Twitter and I'm seeing the replies flood in, right? So I'm using my own psychology to my advantage. My psychology wants to get a bunch of likes and comments on social media, so I use that to my advantage. I imagine that scene going the way I want. Um, if it happens to be with finances or success, I imagine you know, a scene of that success. So I don't have to worry about how I get there. I just want to know what it feels like when I'm already there. And so here's some tips in doing this. I have a scene— what I do is I have a scene for all the different things that matter to me in my life. I have a scene for, let's say, my family, for example. I don't really share this with most people, but I, you know, family is super important to me. And so I imagine the scene of me walking into my house and You know, like as a kid, you run up to your parent and you like cling onto their leg like a little koala. So I already imagine one kid on one leg, one other kid on the other leg, and then one kid koalaling on my arm, and then me leaning over to kiss my wife, right? That's the scene that implies a house full of love, right? So that is, I sort of imagine the happy ending at the end, and that's my scene that I go to. That puts me in a certain mood, that gives me clarity of what I want. And then once I have a great mood and great clarity of what I want, I tend to just make the right decisions along the way, right? I'm operating from a place of abundance instead of a place of feeling like I'm lacking something. And then I make shitty decisions because my— you never want to make decisions from panic or fear or feeling desperate or a lack because you're going to make a certain type of decision. I want to make decisions from feeling good, feeling confident, imagining all the possibilities, and I want to make decisions that will lead me into that into that outcome. Okay, so I'll leave you with a couple tips on if you actually want to go do this. Take your goal that you've written down. Instead, imagine it as a movie scene. Like a, like a movie scene, it's not just what you see, it's what you hear. It's the— it's all your senses. Try to use as many of your senses as possible. So what do you hear? What do you see? How does it smell? How does it feel to be wearing those clothes, to be sitting in that car, to be sitting in that chair, to be sleeping in that bed, right? Try to engage all 5 senses. It makes it more vivid for you. The other thing is make it comical, right? So a movie can be a horror movie, a drama movie. I don't know. For me, I choose comedy. And so when I imagine something, I imagine almost the most extreme version of that because it makes me laugh. It takes a lot of the weight off my shoulders. Things feel really important and tight when you are kind of afraid of them. But once you play with the idea in your head, you play with that scene. Um, it becomes lightweight. And then I like to operate from a place of something being lightweight. Um, and so that's how I do it. That's how I use my imagination on really a daily basis, and it becomes a practice. And I want to practice my imagination more than I did as a kid when I used to make up, you know, little stories with my figurines and my toys, or, you know, when I used to draw and sketch and do things like that. I used to work that muscle out a lot back then, What I realized is you gotta do that as an adult too, because your imagination is always running and it's just, what is it? Is it running on autopilot? By default, it's kind of gonna imagine stressful, possible negative outcomes. That tends to be where we go as adults. And I don't wanna fall into that path, right? That's common. I'd like to go uncommon. And so the uncommon path is to actually train that muscle, practice imagining things that you want. That puts you in the right mood and that lets you make decisions from, from a place of, um, you know, from a place of winning rather than fear of losing. All right, so that's it. Hope that answers your question, and, uh, I'll see you guys next Friday.