Have you ever typed a message on your phone or in an email, only to re read it later and it says something completely different? Auto-correct has altered what has been written and we didn’t notice…often not until after we have pushed ‘send’.
From time to time I see a parallel of this happening with my thinking. I might have an idea. It looks like a good idea, maybe a bit out of my comfort zone, but very doable and worth a try.
Then I wake up the next day and feel ‘Yeah…nah!’ Yesterday’s energy and enthusiasm to follow through on my idea or implement it has disappeared.
When I scroll down through my thought process the thread starts to read…
- Maybe it’s not such a good idea.
- Maybe I should just keep the status quo.
- What if…(insert various disaster scenarios here)…?
- Who are you to do…..?
Yep my internal predictive text has sent me down a very familiar rabbit hole.
Granted I’ve hung out here a lot, so I guess that’s why my ‘internal predictive text monitor’, felt it had the authority to autocorrect my idea and rewrite it as a series of problems. And given that I’m now looking through a ‘Yeah…nah’ lens it seems to make sense to take notice.
And so the idea returns to the periphery of my consciousness.
However I’m waking up… and I’m renaming Auto correct as Auto INCORRECT.
Predictive text is based on the memory of past experiences and beliefs, and these are often limiting. For me it can be fear based, playing small and not poking my head over the parapet. I see it’s applying old, ‘out of date’ thinking, that I learned or adopted along the road of life, to protect me from failing, making mistakes, being hurt or encountering criticism. Very innocent and understandable as like most people, I don’t enjoy any of those scenarios. However when I stand back and consider this objectively this response really doesn’t make sense.
Auto incorrect is feeding into a conditioned resistance towards having an unexpected experience of life. Yet life is a series of happenings. We may have an idea or a plan of how a situation might turn out; but really we don’t know how the next moment is going to play out.
The flow of life is unpredictable. Sometimes life deals up pleasure, and sometimes pain. Our inbuilt resilience is agile and responsive. Unfortuantely this resilience has often become buried by our ‘predictive texting thinking mind’ and the ‘auto incorrect’ that swings into action before we even know it.
My invitation to you is to have a play and be curious if this could be the case for you.