This was published 4 years ago
Opinion
Common problems caused by over-exercising the imagination
By Jim Bright
Adam, a personal trainer in my gym, asked me this week why I didn’t get bored running for an hour on the treadmill.
I replied use your imagination. Which is what I do when trying to get through an hour of what otherwise could be torture.
Luckily for me there are large mirrors in front of the treadmill. These give me a panoramic view. I can see all the people coming and going. These unwitting strangers feed my over-active imagination, and as I huff and puff, I construct fantastical stories about these people who mostly I have yet to meet in real life.
TreadmillCredit: Nicolas Walker
I can be conveyed to a totally new world in my mind’s eye where the man with the receding hairline and tattoos is having it away with the lady with the peroxide blond hair, while the chap with the beard works for the secret service and is shadowing the lady with the grey-dark hair and diamond ring.
Having a good imagination can be a strength. If you are too readily able to imagine things that have yet to happen, you may well be very suited to a range of occupations beyond the obvious one of novelist. Planning and strategy requires the ability to construct in detail yet-to-happen scenarios.
Some in security circles have described the 9/11 terrorist attacks as succeeding due to a crisis of imagination of the security advisers who simply did not envisage the techniques the terrorists used.
However, the ability to construct these abstract worlds while often a strength, can also be a weakness.
The problem with a fertile imagination is that one can build up such a vivid picture of what could happen next, we fool ourselves into believing that it actually will happen next. We risk blurring the lines between fantasy and reality.
TreadCredit: Kerrie Leishman
This can be dangerous, because it can cause us to be selective in the cues we attend to in our environments as we seek only confirmatory evidence to support our prediction of how things are going to turn out.
If we do this for long enough we can go catastrophically off-course, ignoring all the warning signs and evidence to the contrary. These delusions can play out in our interpersonal relationships as well as in our managing others or organisational strategising.
Vivid imaginations can also lead us into expectations. Something seems so plausible (like a promotion) that we begin to believe not only that it could occur, but that it should occur. We become frustrated, sad or even angry when what believe should have happened does not eventuate.
Occasionally I end up meeting and becoming friends with some of my mirror man characters. I don’t think any of them so far, lead the lives I have so carefully constructed for them.
It is a salutary reminder, that what goes on inside our heads, unlike the mirror, does not always reflect reality.
Imagine that!
Jim Bright, FAPS is Professor of Career Education and Development at ACU and owns Bright and Associates, a Career Management Consultancy. Email to opinion@jimbright.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrJimBright