Fooled
We’ve all felt it. You had put your faith in a thing - whether it’s an idea, an institution or a person - only to discover that what you believed to be true was not. It’s a sinking feeling. A rude awakening. Your bubble burst. You wonder how you could have been so stupid.
You’ve been disillusioned.
Disillusionment feels awful at first. So does getting a shot in the arm or firing an underperforming employee. Like those unpleasantries, disillusionment has long-term benefits that outweigh the short-term discomfort.
If you engage your brain instead of your emotions you’ll discover that disillusionment is an advantage. After you get over the initial gut punch, relish the fact that you are now smarter than you were before.
A positive Re-frame
The key to using disillusionment to its full advantage is to re-frame it as a positive rather than a negative. If we fear it and dread it, we will try to avoid it. That is like avoiding seeing your doctor because you are afraid of what she might find. It keeps you in the dark instead of facing the truth.
As a former professional magician I was a purveyor of illusion, fooling people into believing my lies about what they were seeing. To be effective, I had to understand how the mind is fooled so I could create misperception. I learned that the mind is easy to fool and illusions are difficult to discover. Not just in a magic show, but all the time.
For example…
Imagine you support a cause and regularly donate to an organization in that domain.Then you find out that it was mostly just a grift for its leaders to get rich. You don’t want to believe it, but the evidence is clear. You are mad. You feel like a fool. You feel the urge to never donate to another cause again. You are disillusioned.
What do you do with that? Not giving to other charities because of one organization's malfeasance is not a good solution - it hurts people in need and deprives you of the goodwill you would feel if you donated.
A better solution is to be more discerning in the future about who you donate your hard-earned money to. You may get burned again, but it’s less likely if you are more cautious. This approach treats disillusionment as a lightbulb - an “a-ha!” moment you can use to inform future decisions.
The Disillusioner
Disillusionment requires two things: 1) a false belief (illusion), 2) a recognition that the belief is in fact false. Without the recognition, you are just in the dark. And that recognition requires some new piece of information that proves your belief wrong - a “disillusioner.”
If you don’t encounter a disillusioner, you will never recognize the illusion. The difficulty lies in opening yourself up to potential disillusioners. Our brains are designed to protect our beliefs, so we avoid or discount conflicting information (confirmation bias).
Now consider this: We all have unrecognized illusions at this very moment, we just don’t recognize them as illusions - yet. How many of those illusions will you ever be disillusioned from? If more disillusionment is a good thing, shouldn’t we not just hope for but actually seek out disillusioners?
The point is - don’t fear, avoid, or resist disillusionment. Be proactive. Look for ways you might be wrong. It’s no fun in the short-term but can pay off big time moving forward. The fewer illusions you have the better...unless you’re at a magic show.
Think well - live well.
- Steve Haffner, speaker and mind performance strategist
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