By Adreanna

Did you know that when you daydream about your dream job, or perfect vacation, or dwell on negative thoughts, your brain doesn’t know the difference between imagination and reality? Yup, it’s true! Your brain is a people-pleasing, emotionally driven weaver of dreams genie. A genie whose job is to grant the wishes of your mindset, not your actual words. Your genie doesn’t care if you’re telling it “I don’t want to screw this meeting up.” If your energy and mindset surrounding that thought is negative or pessimistic, it will begin to work in that direction to affirm your feelings and expected outcome. Your brain will start searching your subconscious for resources and clues to help make those dreams a reality, or to confirm those negative thoughts. It’ll do everything it can to bring your attention to the hidden abilities and knowledge it has stored, to help you achieve the outcomes you’re focused on, whether they’re positive or negative. Cool, right?

Imagine you’re stressing about an upcoming meeting, visualizing all the ways it could go wrong. You start to doubt yourself so your brain goes into your subconscious and brings back all the memories of times that you’ve been unsuccessful. Remembering those times and worrying that you are about to experience things in the same way all over again, you start to feel tense in your chest as you imagine the disappointed look on your boss’s face while he glares at you with disapproving eyes. Your mouth starts getting dry at the thought of missing a slide in your presentation. You start to sweat thinking about all those eyes being focused on you. Imposter syndrome sets in because now your brain is in full swing, adding on more and more negative thoughts and reasons to worry. Your anxiety takes over, making it hard to focus on finishing your presentation. You spend so much time worrying about failing that you miss important points to add to your argument. You stay up too late the night before worrying, and before you know it, the sun is up. You’ve barely gotten any sleep, and now you’re running late to the office because you forgot to do laundry. Now you’ve got to plan a different outfit because the shirt you planned to wear is chilling in the bottom of your hamper. You meant to wash it, but you got distracted. In the chaos, you forget to grab an important document to back up your points as you leave your house, so you double back to get it.

The forgetfulness leads to a time crunch, and before you know it, you’re in a panic over being late. The stress leads to missing your exit, causing you to arrive at work even later, and now you’ve made a bad impression on your boss. He now has that look on his face that you imagined; everyone is staring at you because you look disheveled from rushing through your morning. You’re so distracted that you miss that slide in your presentation and completely forget to hand out that important document you rushed back home to get. All that ruminating on the negative leads you straight to the outcome you didn’t want to have. You return to your office affirming your reason for being worried in the first place. “I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I shouldn’t have even tried.” But here’s the thing, your genie gets a dopamine cookie because it granted the wish that your energy told him that you wanted. It’s also going to record this situation in its database for use later.

But, if you take the same situation and present it to your brain genie from an optimistic mindset of reaching your goals, it will get to work in a different direction. You begin to visualize all the ways you can be successful when you present your project. Your brain will start sorting through all of its available information and present you with ideas and resources that you can use to help bring your desired outcome to fruition. You’ll start picking up on little clues that guide you on where to take action to avoid potential disasters. You’re clear-headed and focused on creating the best work that you can. You remember to do the laundry and prepare all of your materials in advance so that you can ease through your morning. Maybe you’ll leave for work early to dodge a traffic jam and have some chill time to prep for your meeting. You may run into a colleague who’s dealt with a similar request, and they offer you some insight you hadn’t considered. Since you’re already early and open to receiving new information, you had time to complete some last-minute revisions before you start your meeting. You now feel calm, and confident, and your boss is impressed by your punctuality and preparedness for the meeting. Suddenly, you’re on your way to getting what you truly desire. Again, in this situation, the brain genie will get a dopamine cookie because it did its job of granting the wish your energy told it that you wanted.

Brain Genie gets its reward either way!

By the way, your brain genie’s got muscle memory, because, you know, it’s gotta keep things running smoothly in the background. It’s whole mission is to get you what you need when you need it as quickly as it can. Because of that, it gets another cookie! So, to make life easier, it sets up these energy presets, like the ones on your car radio. You’ve got a positive brain station and a negative brain station. Whichever one you tune into and spend time with the most will have the most readily available info to get you where you wanna go. So, the more you work on mindfulness, positive thinking, and healthily processing life stuff, the more your brain will focus on collecting good “tunes” for your playlist. When you hit roadblocks, your genie will dig into your collection and serve up just the right “songs” to help you out. It works the same way if you are constantly in a negative mindset. If you’re always looking for trouble, Brain Genie will go above and beyond to make sure you have plenty of trouble to attend to and that’s what it will offer to you first any time you face a challenge big or small.

This is exciting information to have learned, considering I am a chronic daydreamer. Because what that means is if I can visualize all the abundance, success, growth, health, and joy that I want in my life, I can rest assured that my brain genie is on the lookout for opportunities that will get me exactly that.

Visualization is super important when it comes to manifesting because to your brain, being able to see something means that it’s already real, and then it works to make it happen just like you imagined.

Obviously, the key to manifestation isn’t as singular as simply daydreaming about the life you want to have and waiting for Amazon to come to deliver it to your door next day prime. Visualization is just one step in a list of steps to take if you want to be serious about changing your experience and perspective on things. Brain Genie can only make you aware of the opportunities and resources that can aid you in your pursuit. What it cannot do is force you to take advantage of the opportunities that it has brought to your awareness. That comes from your own passion and determination to have what it is that you truly want.

Being able to visualize the life you want to lead is as easy as it sounds. It simply requires that you sit down and daydream about the life you want to have in full detail. You must see it, feel it, hear it, taste it, smell it, and believe that you can have it. Thankfully for me, I am delusional and confident enough to believe that I am capable and deserving of all the things I daydream of for myself. I’m excited to say that it works out well for me too. I’ve accomplished a lot of my bucket list items, and operating from a mindset of opportunity over lack has found me moving closer to the life I want to live.

Do you find yourself stuck in lack or negative mindset? If so, I can help you retrain your brain to focus on finding solutions to life’s obstacles instead of ruminating on what went wrong. Leave a comment below to share your experiences with either, or both, of these ways of thinking, and be sure to visit the contacts page to request your free 15-minute consultation so that we can begin working to transform your outlook on life.