Are you in your own head?

Wouldn't it be amazing if you could look at someone and just "know" what they were thinking, why they said something, and the motivation behind the way they are being? To just be able to see into their head?

Believe it or not, it is not uncommon for us to truly believe that we "know" why someone is or isn't, was or wasn't, could, couldn't, should, should've, or shouldn’t’ve.

Our mind allows us to quickly take a situation, the way something is said, the way someone's body language was expressed, and put an interpretation on it. More often than not, this interpretation is based on something that we have experienced in the past. 

What's interesting about this is that by using our past experiences to assess what we are experiencing today, we ultimately limit ourselves by only allowing us to be as good as our past outcomes.

Ok, so what? Our ability to quickly assess a situation or experience against our past is something we do very well, and it helps us survive every day! It is what allowed us to survive long ago when our threats were literally life or death. That animal looks upset and the last time I saw this type of reaction things ended bad. So I’d better not do that again, or I’d better stop, or I’d better not try that, or… fill in your own limiting experience here.

So, what’s another way to be? What’s another way to take in our surroundings and our experiences and allow ourselves to act in a way that is detached from the past (notice how I didn’t say RE-act, as in acting in a way that we’ve done before)?

What I’m pointing to here is the power of experiencing “what is”. To recognize the interpretations. To separate them from the facts. Let’s look at an example. Imagine you were video conferencing with me and I rolled my eyes and did what you see in the animation below. What would you take out of this?

Could it be that I’m not interested? that I don’t care? that I think what you’re saying is stupid? that maybe you’re stupid? (I obviously don’t think that, can’t you tell??)… what else could I mean by what I did? What else could we interpret from it?

Or, perhaps, another way to look at it is: I simply rolled my eyes.

From a place of interpretation, where would the conversation go? I imagine it would go sideways pretty darn fast. What if we were to take it from a place of fact? Eyes were rolled. Now what do we want to do with that? “Hey Rabee, I noticed you rolled your eyes, I was wondering what you meant by that?”. Which way is a more powerful way to act?

Imagine if you took everything in life and looked at it factually. What possibility would be out there for you? What would your relationships look like? Who would or could you be friends with? What can you gain by approaching things this way?

It may not be possible to always be factual and just take things for “what they are”. I mean, we would just end up being like robots with no emotion (I will have to re-write this in a few years when computers start to have feelings). How terrible would that be? After all, we do need the bad times to appreciate and experience the good times.

The ask here would be to allow yourself to look at things factually, even if only for a moment. What you will find is that you will become more open to other ways, other views, and other possibilities in general. Ultimately, your curiosity will go up and in turn, so will your possibility.

Most of our opportunities or dreams are shut down by ourselves, and usually based on past experiences that we, or other people around us, have had. So why limit yourself to the past? What could you create if you got out of your own head and took things for what they were?