Chapter 11
Fake It Till You Make It!
My aim in creating Flipman and Flipman’s Strategy was to have a simple, powerful analogy that we could all integrate into our daily lives — a character and concept that could represent choice in every moment and support us in creating the life we really want, regardless of our background, our religious or spiritual beliefs, our educational level, our values or beliefs, our gender, our financial status, or our age. The concept of Flipman’s Strategy actually began in my life many years ago; I just didn’t recognize who he was then, and I hadn’t named him yet. To give you a solid understanding of how we can use this simple yet powerful strategy, I would like to unfold this part for you in the same way that it evolved for me.
I begin with a short story from my early childhood. It illustrates how every day we have opportunities to learn from the amazing teachers around us, but we can recognize them only if we are paying attention.
One day when I was about eight years old, I was in a bad mood with a grumpy expression on my face. My father said to me, “Terry, put a smile on your face.”
I replied, “Well, then I’d be lying.”
Dad said, “Sweetheart, I would much prefer one of your fake smiles to one of your sincere frowns!”
Well, of course, when you’re eight, you think, “What an idiot!” But as I got older, I realized that my father was expressing, in his own words, that wonderful adage I’m sure you’ve heard a thousand times:
Fake it till you make it.
This is a great piece of advice, but how many of us realize just how powerful and life-changing its meaning can be? I spent many years wondering what this simple but often misunderstood saying really meant. I kept asking myself, “How do we ‘fake it till we make it’?”
As I got older, my passion for finding the answer grew and grew. My desire to fully understand this concept and then be able to show people how to “fake it till you make it” became Flipman’s Strategy. I asked myself: “What would I have to do to fake it till I made it? And how could I teach someone else to do the same?”
Over many years and in many training rooms, by answering those questions and then combining the answers with everything I had learned about the power of the brain, our mind, and our behavior, I formulated the Flipman character. It fueled my passion as a results-based trainer and educator to be able to help people do (the action), not just know (the theory). That way, they would eventually be (integration) whatever they wanted.
It was the feeling, the doing, and the being that became so powerful for me, along with answering the question, “Do you have to feel a certain way in order to do the behavior?” The answer: No, you don’t! I wanted to show people that how they felt did not have to be the reason they couldn’t change. I wanted to show people how to avoid affecting their work life with their personal issues, how to avoid taking things personally, how to avoid letting their past ruin their future, and how to take ownership of their life. I didn’t want false hype and short-lived motivation. I wanted to offer people a solution — a strategy for staying out of the Pit.
I remember people reciting affirmations during the 1980s. In those days, people thought that all it would take for them to change would be regular recitations of a few positive phrases every day, such as, “I’m a powerful, positive, successful human being.” The problem was, many of them had Pitman posture, Pitman projection, and Pitman thinking! More recently, many people have been seduced into thinking that all they have to do is visualize what they want and it will be theirs. Sure, thinking in a positive manner is certainly better than being in the Pit, but just thinking something is not going to make it manifest. My mother used to say that the only time success comes before work is in the dictionary! That’s still true today. We have to actively participate in our own evolution.
So “fake it till you make it” took on a whole new meaning for me. It seemed to me that if we decide the outcomes we want and then act as if (fake it) we have already achieved them, then our unconscious mind won’t know we are pretending. If we persevere in this, over time our mind and our body will align and we will grow new neural pathways to support our new way of being. I also know the word “fake” can be seen as negative. “I don’t want to be fake!” Of course we don’t want to be fake, and we’re not being fake. I believe the word “fake,” in this context, is to imitate. We imitate the positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that will support us.
As I’ve mentioned, in pondering the concept of “fake it till you make it” I also started asking myself, “How could I show someone how to do ‘fake it till you make it’? What would that involve?” The answer may sound simple, but to be able to execute it to achieve the results we want, we need to fully understand the depth behind the simplicity. To be able to fake it till you make it, we need to fake the positive behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that are opposite to the negative ones we’re currently experiencing.
Now, let’s not rush this; it may sound simple, but as I said, it has many levels. So often we rush over what we think we know. If you want to really understand this, you need to go deeper. Let yourself sit in the knowledge for a while. Be with it. It’s so easy to intellectualize knowledge without actually integrating it fully. I know for myself that I need to keep coming back to this process, especially when I occasionally allow myself to fall into the Pit. So let me repeat: If we are to fake it till we make it, we need to fake the positive behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that are opposite to the negative ones we’re currently experiencing.
A journalist from The Australian interviewed me a few years back. He asked, “If you were to tell someone in one sentence how to feel motivated, what would you say?”
“Therein lies the problem!” I replied. “I aim to run two miles every day. Do you think that I wake up every day going, ‘Yay! Woohoo! I’m going for a two-mile run!’ No way! Especially on those really cold days, I fight with my Pitman. Sometimes he comes with me, all the way to the treadmill. ‘Only do one mile today,’ he teases with his seductive voice. Then I get a stitch in my side. ‘Could be a tumor!’ Pitman whispers, trying to seduce me off the treadmill.”
The journalist laughed, and I explained further: “Have you ever seen the difference between people walking into the gym and the ones walking out? You can hear Handel’s “Death March” playing on the way in and “Zip-A-Dee-D00-Dah” on the way out. We let how we feel get in the way of what we do! People think they need to be feeling motivated to do motivated. We think we need to have the feeling first, in order to do the behavior, but we don’t. It’s usually the opposite. If we just make the decision, do the behavior, and fake the feeling for a while, more often than not we will actually start feeling it for real!”
This journalist was so moved by this simple but inspiring explanation that he decided to write a whole section on the topic!
Think about any part of our lives, from our relationships to mowing the lawn. When we don’t overanalyze how we actually feel about it and “just do it,” it’s amazing how enjoyable it can be. More often than not, our feelings will eventually catch up with our behaviors. So instead of waiting for the feeling to arrive, why not behave that way first and pretend to feel it too? You’ll soon find that you actually do start feeling that way. Instead of being stuck, you start moving.
We often don’t move from where we are because we spend most of our time dreaming about where we want to be, and resenting where we are, without doing anything differently. “I want to be happy. I want to be fit. I want to be kind. I want to be wealthy.” It’s great to have goals, but goals are just the outcomes of doing the right behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. Change the word “be” to “do” — do happy, do kind, do wealthy, do fit — and you’ll start to manifest the behaviors required to achieve these states. That’s when you’ll be. Doing is the bridge to being — going from conscious to unconscious.
Let me give you a quick example of how, by simply changing our behavior, we can change how we feel. Remember the grumpy look on my face that caught my dad’s attention? How would you teach me to fake the positive behavior that’s the opposite of feeling grumpy? What would you get me to do? Most people say, “Just smile and think happy thoughts” (I have a friend who can think the happiest thoughts ever, yet she still looks sad!).
When we say, “Smile,” we’re asking the person to do an outcome, and people can’t do outcomes; we can only do behaviors. Smiling is the outcome from doing a series of behaviors that create the smile. We don’t do a smile; we get a smile. We smile so habitually that we don’t give a second thought to how we smile. Give yourself the time to really contemplate this important distinction, because when we can break down the habitual behaviors we do that create our current outcomes, we are far more able to create new behaviors that support the outcomes we most desire. This is where most of us get stuck. We don’t even notice the habits we have that keep us stuck.
Think about the physical behaviors we need to do to change our faces from looking grumpy to looking happy (the opposite positive behavior) so that the outcome is a smile. Most of us will just start smiling without stopping to understand what we had to do to create that smile. Now as you smile, think about what your face is doing. Which way is it moving? What’s happening with your eyes, your head, and your mouth?
Imagine a sad face. What behaviors would you need to do to that face to make it smile? Let’s start with your head. How would it be positioned if you were grumpy?
Answer: Usually downcast. So the first opposite behavior could be to...
Lift up your head;
Open your eyes;
Lift the corners of your mouth;
... and finally,
Show your teeth.
Do all of those things, and you will end up with a happy face!
I can hear Pitman saying, “That’s fine. I may be smiling, but I don’t feel happy.” The wonderful thing about all of this is, if we fake looking happy for a while, we will actually start to feel happy.
Can it be that simple? Yes, it can! Of course, if we want to sustain these new behaviors there’s a lot more to it, but we have to start somewhere. I’m not saying that this simple exercise is going to eradicate deep issues that need to be worked through, but it will help us operate in a state that supports us while we work through these very issues.
Play a game for me. Take your index finger and place it horizontally in your mouth, between your teeth, and push it back. (Yes, you will need to open your mouth.) Go on, no one’s watching!
The moment you did that, the corners of your mouth went up because the zygomaticus (major cheek muscle) contracted or were pulled upwards. The brain recognized this behavior as the one you do when you’re happy, so it started producing “feel good” chemicals. Studies show that endorphins, natural painkillers, and serotonin are released when we smile. All together these make us feel good.
Wouldn’t you love to say to some Pit people in your life, “Shove a finger in your mouth and get happy”?
The three stages — conscious mind, unconscious mind, and physiology — show, in a very simplistic way, what we have discussed: how our brain processes our perceptions of our experiences, creating a biological response in our body. Therefore, if we make a conscious choice to change the way we perceive a situation or event and then support this perception with matching feelings and behaviors, we will be much more capable of creating the outcomes we’re looking for. We need to become conscious of implementing the most effective internal and external strategy possible. We need a strategy to support the production of new neural pathways that are in line with the life we desire. That’s where Flipman’s Strategy comes in!