Ellie Hattam reviews the “fake it till you make it” workshop

How far does ‘faking it till you make it’ actually help?

I was recently involved in a workshop in school which was named “uncomfortable learning” run by Jason Gray, a vocal coach who aimed to help us increase our confidence levels by putting us in situations which made us feel awkward and out of our comfort zones. This provoked me to start thinking about the ‘fake it till you make it’ concept, and how far it can actually help us to become more confident

Because our brains are trained to think certain things and behave in certain ways, our learned thoughts can easily turn into behaviours, and these behaviours can be hard to shake once we have got accustomed to them. However, when we ‘fake it till we make it’ we are showing our brains an alternative way to think, feel or act. It shows your brain another way to look at things, and the more you maintain it, the more you can unlearn the behaviours that you have been so used to, which can help you develop and overcome fears immensely.

So how far does using this method actually help with your performance in a situation you find to be anxiety provoking? I have found various studies showing that there are some scenarios that this is more effective for than others. For instance, if you want to overcome a fear, ‘faking it’ can actually help you get through the fear far more easily than if you were just appearing as a nervous wreck. Essentially, pretending that your fear of spiders isn’t real, then when you encounter a spider, your brain has been tricked into thinking the fear doesn’t exist. You can fake it by simply just imagining how you would like to feel, and through doing this, you will adapt a new mindset and this more positive mindset will associate itself with the scenario. Even though you are faking it, your mind subconsciously starts to retrain itself.

You can also use this ‘fake it till you make it’ scheme when you want to develop a specific new personality trait. The best way to become more enthusiastic, motivated or ambitious is simply to act like you are enthusiastic, motivated or ambitious! Quite literally, through acting like you have these skills, you will gradually become this person with these new traits. The longer you maintain these actions, the more your new attitude will grow, until one day you will have solidified this new personality trait so much so that you do not even have to think about faking it, as it is now an unconscious way that you think.

Ways that ‘faking it till you make it’ can be put into practice can involve such simple adaptions to your daily life. For instance, if you are feeling unhappy, sometimes the best thing you can do to lift your mood is to smile, no matter how much you don’t feel like doing this. Even a fake smile can help to lower stress and lift your mood. To improve confidence, you can use your body language to clearly show how you feel. To stand confidently, stand with a straight posture, your shoulders back and keep your chin up. Even though these small adaptions may seem small, they can have a detrimental effect on how people view you, and how you feel about yourself. Someone that stands with confidence automatically comes across as more authoritative and poised than someone who is slouched and slumped over. Even though inside, you may feel nervous and intimidated by the situation you are in, by using confident body language, you will start to feel more confident within yourself.

You can also fake emotions. For example, when things are not going your way and you can barely see a way through whatever nightmare situation has arisen, stay positive! Despite feeling pessimistic and put down, focus on positive aspects of your work or the situation, and repeat them to yourself. It may feel silly and worthless at the start, and it may feel easier to just admit how you are really feeling, but in the long run, this will not help you! Even though it may just feel like you are faking an optimistic attitude to start with, over time the attitude will start to become more genuine. Your attitude may not impact your ability, but it will improve the way people view you as a person, and being able to maintain a positive attitude in a crisis is a quality that is extremely valuable in all aspects of life. Son in this respect, ‘faking it till you make it’ can really help to change your mindset.

However, there are some instances in which you should not use the ‘fake it till you make it’ mentality. There will sometimes come a point where no matter how much you are faking it, you are not actually going to make it. If you maintain a fake mindset for a prolonged amount of time, without it actually changing your mindset, then you may start to lose sight of who you really are as you have taken the faking it to such extremes. This may be the point at which you adapt a new technique! Although, in most cases, by faking confidence or other personality traits, you will eventually adapt these traits and start to retrain your brain.

Overall, I was fascinated by my findings of the’ fake it till you make it mindset’ and it has really opened my eyes to see how the outcomes of situations are actually all based on how you view them to be… even If you are faking it just so you have a positive outcome!