Fortune Telling Thinking Errors

Fortune Telling is also known as ‘predicting the future’ and is one of the most common scenarios that we encounter in our practice, certainly on a daily basis.

Clients will frequently report how much they ‘worried’ about an event for weeks before it happened and then tell us that it ‘wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be’!

This is one of the fundamental problems with ‘predictions’, they rarely represent what actually happens.

Even more interestingly, hardly any clients consulting us for different problems report predicting really fantastic outcomes in the future only to find that those future events turned out to be a bit of a ‘damp squib’.

This is principally because almost most ‘fortune telling’ thinking errors focus on NEGATIVE outcomes not POSITIVE ones.

You’ve been feeling a bit ‘down’ recently and just having been enjoying life. Your best friend invites you out to a party but you predict that if you go you’re not going to have a good time. Everybody there is bound to find you a bit ‘odd’, the music will be rubbish and the food will be bland. You decide it would be better to stay at home and think about how dull your social life is.

You’ve always thought that hang-gliding looks like a lot of fun but are worried that being anxious will mean you don’t have the skills. If you give it a try you’re bound to lose your nerve at the last minute, the instructors will get annoyed with you for wasting their time and your own money.

You’re much better off conserving all that nervous energy spent on worrying for weeks and just let events ‘un-fold’ when they actually happen. So get rid of that crystal ball and bin the Tarot cards.

Managing Your Fortune Telling ‘Skills’

Test Out Your Predictions

You really don’t know how much fun you might have at that party until you actually get there. The food might actually be great and the music might be right ‘up your street’, so why not go and just find out how good you actually are at predicting the future.

Be Prepared To Take Some Risks

Surely it’s worth losing a bit of money for the opportunity of trying out a new sport that you’ve always been interested in doing.

There’s a common saying that ‘a ship is safe in the harbour’ – but that’s not what ships are designed for!

Try to live life ‘experimentally’ and take some calculated risks because this is what makes life both interesting and rewarding.

Self Fulfilling Prophecies

The problem with fortune telling is that if you are not careful you end up making your predictions come true by expecting things to go wrong before they do thus becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.