Excerpt #4: Your Inner Movie Making Team

Over the coming weeks I will be sharing excerpts from my new book The Inner CEO. This week is a section from Part 2, Your Inner Assets. More details at www.theinnerceo.com

“The mind is its own place, and in itself,

can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton

My wife, TLJ*, is a disaster when I go to the movies with her. She literally gets immersed in the movie and lives and feels everything the characters do on screen. She will become so engrossed in what’s happening that she has no awareness of being in a cinema or indeed that there is anyone else with her. And if there’s any sort of scary scene in the movie, forget about it. Judy will be beside herself and usually screams or shouts at the character ‘Don’t go in there’.

It’s quite entertaining for other people in the movie theatre but not particularly if you’re the one sitting beside her!

The experience of being immersed in a dream or nightmare is the same. It’s not real but you believe it is, until you wake up. But have you ever considered that you’re literally playing a virtual movie in your mind all of the time? From when you wake to when you go to sleep, you are playing all sorts of film footage in your mind. And this film impacts your experience and behaviour in every moment.

This is The Projector analogy in action.

Your mind is like a movie projector; you experience and feel whatever you think about.

(* TLJ = The Lovely Judy, my long-suffering, amazingly patient wife. )

The Projector Inside

In a typical projector, you have a light shining through a lens onto a screen. The original projectors had a reel of analogue film moving in front of the lens. Modern projectors have an input from a digital file.

The movie is projected onto a screen in front of you where you experience the movie. In this analogy, the film is your thinking.

It is the creative element.

The screen is your mind, the part that holds the movie to allow you to experience it. The light is your awareness or consciousness that brings it all to life through your attention, which is focused through the lens.

For example, imagine yourself walking through the front door of your home right now. See the different things as you walk in, hear the sound of you walking and of the door opening and closing. All of this is projected onto a virtual screen in your mind. But where’s the screen? You can’t touch it or show it to someone else. Yet it is very real to you.

The reality is that your mind throws up thoughts for everything in your life — every single thing. The work you do. The goals you take on or don’t. The things you like and dislike. The people you interact with. Dinner later today. The meetings you have today, tomorrow and next week. The holidays you plan to go on.

Literally everything.

All of these thoughts become real through what I call the Projector FundaMental. If you think happy thoughts, you feel happiness. Think sad thoughts, you feel sadness. If you see a picture of success or winning, you literally feel the emotions before it happens. And the same applies to things like anxiety, fear or depression.

It’s my experience that most of us never really question the validity of our thoughts. We assume that what we ‘think’ is reality. And it’s very convincing. But just like the movies on screen, it is a construct. It isn’t real.

We live as if our imagination is reality. It isn’t. We are making it up.

Creating Our Experience

If you had told me back in my twenties, when I was struggling in my depression, that I was making up the way I saw life, I probably would have tried to hit you. It wouldn’t have made any sense to me. My life was s***, I was useless, my circumstances were very hard and that was the truth.

It’s still amazing for me to reflect on that version of myself and realise how well my mind had brainwashed me into believing what it was playing in my projector. The problem was that no-one had ever told me this was how my mind worked. But a little reflection will reveal the truth.

What does your mind do before an important meeting?

What does it do after an argument with someone?

What does it do when you’re looking forward to going on a holiday?

What does it do when you feel hungry?

The simple answer is that it projects. It plays ‘movies’, and whether those are positive or negative will determine if you feel positive or negative emotions.

Three Key Lessons From The Projector

1. It magnifies what you think

While the lens of a projector may be quite small, the size of the image when projected will be significantly larger than the size of the film.

Your mind does the same thing. It amplifies and magnifies whatever you’re playing. This is where the phrase ‘mountain out of a mole hill’ has relevance. But this is also where the word ‘vision’ has relevance. Someone who has vision will see the image so vividly and become so excited by it that they will run through walls to get to it. This is what often makes great leaders great or what inspires people to do amazing things.

2. You feel what you play

Have you ever watched a thriller or a horror and literally felt the back of your neck tingle in fear or excitement? That’s the beauty and craft of film makers the world over; they use all of our senses to create the experience they want us to have.

The exact same thing is going on inside us, except it has bigger repercussions for our lives. There is a direct causal link between what we think and what we feel. In essence, you feel your thinking.

3. It is the source of your dreams AND your perceived reality.

We know a movie or TV show isn’t real. We can turn it off if we don’t like it or change the channel. While sleeping, our Innie Movie Team often has fun playing various movies. Some might be enjoyable and others may be nightmares.

While in the dream, we experience it as real. If it’s a nightmare we can scream, our heart rate can rise and we can experience real terror. So much so that when we wake, we can experience incredible relief and joy. “It was just a dream”, we might say to ourselves or others.

The truth is that your Projector is continuously playing movies during the day when you are awake and interacting with the world. But the exciting truth is that you can become the inner movie director at any time, and change what’s playing.

It's exciting because when you realise the extent to which your behaviour is controlled by your thinking, incredible opportunities open up for change and improvement.

This is an excerpt from my new book The Inner CEO, which is available in ebook, paperback, hardback and audio. I will share more over the coming weeks.

For buying details please go to www.theinnerceo.com