The power of pretense…
When I was eight years old, the Mercury astronauts were capturing the imagination of the world. I remember watching John Glenn and being utterly fascinated by the idea of travelling into space. Like millions of other kids, I was caught up in the excitement of those early space missions and the astonishing idea that human beings could actually leave the Earth and return safely again.
So I found a large flat cardboard box, drew levers, gauges, and controls on it with crayons, and built my own spacecraft. Then I climbed inside, and as far as I was concerned, I went into orbit with John Glenn and came back down to Earth with him. It was completely real to me. I wasn't merely observing history. In my own childlike way, I was participating in it.
Of course, no one had to teach me how to do this. Children seem to come equipped with an extraordinary ability to pretend. Give them a cardboard box and before long it's become a castle, a pirate ship, or a spaceship headed for Alpha Centauri. Hand them a stick and suddenly it's a sword, a magic wand, or a six-shooter. They don't worry about whether they're doing it correctly. They simply enter the experience completely.
And somehow, in the course of becoming adults, many people decide that pretending is silly, which is rather unfortunate because pretending turns out to be one of the principal ways human beings learn.
Actors pretend to be other people. Pilots train in simulators. Athletes mentally rehearse competitions. Even medical students practise on models before they're trusted with real patients. Nobody objects to any of this. Yet suggest that someone acts as though they were already more confident, more organized, or more successful, and suddenly people become very concerned about authenticity, which I find rather amusing.
After all, every skill you've ever learned began with pretending.
When you first learned to drive a car, you probably didn't feel like a driver. You felt like an impostor. You had to consciously remember everything: mirrors, signals, brakes, steering. It all seemed terribly unnatural, and perhaps a little terrifying. But you acted like a driver long before you felt like one, and eventually the pretending disappeared. Or perhaps more accurately, it became reality.
William James, often called the father of American psychology, understood this very well. He suggested that if you want a quality, act as if you already possess it, not because you're fooling yourself or denying reality, but because action has a curious tendency to reshape identity. He recognized that human beings are influenced not only by what they think, but by what they repeatedly do.
Many years later, plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz discovered something equally fascinating. He found that changing a person's appearance didn't necessarily change the way they felt about themselves. Some patients underwent dramatic transformations and still saw themselves as unattractive or inadequate. Others changed very little physically, yet their entire lives improved because their self-image changed.
Maltz concluded that human beings tend to live in accordance with the picture they carry of themselves, and one of the ways that picture changes is through experience, including experiences that are deliberately created. In other words, through pretending.
I've often noticed this with my students learning hypnosis. At first they don't feel like hypnotists. They feel awkward and wonder whether they're saying the right things. They worry that everyone else knows some great secret they somehow missed. Then something interesting happens. They continue learning, continue practising, and continue acting like hypnotists until one day they suddenly realize they are hypnotists.
Nothing magical occurred.
The role gradually became the reality.
Perhaps you've experienced the same thing, maybe as a parent, a manager, a martial artist, a public speaker, or simply as someone learning to navigate life. Most of us have found ourselves in situations where we felt unprepared or uncertain, only to discover later that we'd grown into the role without really noticing when it happened.
So here's a simple experiment.
Think of some quality you'd like more of. Perhaps confidence, calmness, patience, or organization. Then ask yourself an unusual question.
"If I already possessed this quality, how would I sit? How would I stand? How would I speak? What would I pay attention to? What would I tell myself? What would I stop doing?"
Then spend the day behaving as though that quality already belonged to you. Not perfectly, and not with grim determination. Just curiously. Treat it as an experiment. You don't have to convince yourself of anything. Simply try the behaviour on, the same way a child tries on a costume or an actor tries on a role.
Children do this naturally.
They call it play.
Eventually, something remarkable begins to happen. The behaviour becomes familiar, the familiar becomes comfortable, and the comfortable starts to feel natural. What once felt artificial becomes spontaneous, and what once required conscious effort begins to happen by itself.
Perhaps pretending isn't the opposite of reality.
Perhaps it's one of the ways reality gets built.
- Mike
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