"Reality distortion" can be a good thing

What if I told you that whatever your situation at work or in life, you have the ability to profoundly change it for the better? Or that if things are going quite well for you, you could take it to a level that right now, might seem impossible for you to even imagine. Does that sound good for other people, but not necessarily for you? After all, you might be thinking, “You don’t know me and you have no idea what I’m facing at work, at home, or anywhere else for that matter.”

You would be right, I don’t know you. But I do know that you have the ability to look at any situation in a different way. You have the capacity to look at the “facts” and draw a different conclusion. Unlike what the words suggest, "distorting reality," is about interpreting circumstances in the most useful way possible. That’s what Steve Jobs did and in fact, he lived in what others called a "Reality Distortion Field." He was known for making things happen even when others told him that they couldn't be done.

It’s not that Jobs refused to see the problems at hand—he saw things as they were—and then he imagined the way he wanted them to be. Was he able to do that with everything and every time? Of course not, but to focus on that would be to miss the entire point.

The point is that you have distorted reality many times in the past even if you didn’t realize it. For example, every time you felt defeated but kept going despite the mounds of evidence telling you to quit. When you lost your job, got demoted or got divorced and felt like you were all washed up--you kept going. When you felt like you couldn’t take another class in college--did it anyway and kept going until you graduated.

If we don’t like what’s going on in our life, we can either give into it or we can say “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to change this. It might take me a while, but I’m going to do it.” You’ve done that before and you can do it again. You can redefine your reality--imagine any reality you want and then take actions to get there. Even if you can’t see doing that on a grand scale, realize that doing so on any scale is amazing.

Allan Allard, Career Coach