by Bonnie Gillespie
I have a question for you.
It’s about your setpoint.
Do you believe that someone is always running game on you? Out to get you? Taking advantage of you?
Or do you believe that everything is always working out for you? That even if something doesn’t go the way you want it to in the moment, the long-term best for you is what’s happening?
Here’s why I ask this: Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a CRUSH of customer service emails. Like, three times the volume of what we generally receive.
No surprise there; we advertised for the first time, invited hundreds of new people into our world, held a TON of free live trainings, and welcomed in the first class of 2020 for our enoughness membership.
That’s a lot of activity and with activity comes questions.
And while questions are expected, it’s fascinating to see the difference in tone.
Among the FAR more innocuous and typical, “I can’t seem to get my download of your audiobook to work. Please help?” (the fix is easy, BTW. We even spell it out right on the page from which you buy it. You can’t download it on a gadget, only on a computer using a web browser. And many people exhaust the link by trying so many times ON a phone or a tablet, which won’t extract a ZIP file… which we explain on the sales page itself… so… yeah), there are also the, “You’ve stolen my money. This link doesn’t work because you’re a crook. You’re withholding something from me. Tell me EXACTLY why this is happening and what you’re going to do about it,” ones. There’s, “Someone’s getting a better deal than I am; defend that to my satisfaction.” And there’s, “This reminds me of that one time someone ELSE did me dirty so that means you are too so you will PAY for my falling for it again,” which is truly confounding. Because different people. Different circumstances. Different time in life. Different YOU going through it all.
Yet when we are certain we’re getting the short end of the stick, we have VERY strong muscles for going right to the accusation, right to the, “See! I told you the world is filled with bad people doing bad things TO ME!” mindset… and we choose to be blind to the evidence that none of this is what’s *actually* going on.
It’s a phenomenon called willful blindness (and there’s an amazing book on this subject if you’re a geek like me and want to read more from Margaret Heffernan about all the things our brains will discount, disregard, and simply NOT SEE out of simple evolutionary efficiency). BTW, we ALL engage in this at some point in life.
I prefer pronoia as a setpoint, personally. This is the opposite of paranoia (everyone is out to get me) and instead focuses on all the ways things are working out for me.