 In this video I'm going to talk about, I think, called spontaneity. Now, I'm not just going to talk about spontaneity for the sake of it. I'm going to do that because it can have the benefit of changing your life if you can really understand what spontaneity is and incorporate it more into your life. Already you may have a reaction of, oh God, spontaneity. What good is that going to do me? That's nice for other people. Maybe at some point I can be spontaneous, but I've got problems. I need to deal with things. Now, if that's your reaction, stay with me in this video because I completely accept that maybe you have issues and you have things you're worried about and you have responsibilities and everything else. But spontaneity is one of the things that can actually help you deal with those things in a way that you probably can't even imagine right now. So stay with me as we talk about how spontaneity can help improve almost every aspect of your life. Okay, when you think about spontaneity maybe the first thing you think of is somebody frolicking through a summer meadow and just not a care in the world, completely spontaneous. Just do whatever they feel like doing. And of course for most of us that does feel like it's a million years away. The good news is that's not what I'm talking about because I could say to somebody, go and be spontaneous and they'd say, well what does that look like? And if I told them we'll go and frolick in a summer meadow that's not very helpful because why are they doing that, right? It can't be planned obviously if it's going to be spontaneous in any case. But here's my definition of spontaneity. And it's very simple, it's very practical. Spontaneity is a space in which there are no goals, intentions, self-improvement, motives, anything. So spontaneity is a space. Spontaneity is not an action, it's not even an intention, it's not a behavior. Spontaneity is a space. Now if we realize that spontaneity is a space, it means well okay, I can control what goes in the spaces of my life. I could probably control that a little bit more. I don't have to convince myself that I can be so relaxed that I have to go on frolick in a summer meadow. Spontaneity is a space and anybody can be spontaneous. Anybody can establish that space for themselves. Now why am I talking about spontaneity? Spontaneity is kind of a counterbalance to something else that we're all very very familiar with which you could consider to be responsibility or obligation or things that are planned and scheduled, right, structure. Now the thing is we all know the importance of structure and responsibility and plans and all this. But in our culture which really runs on structure and plans, this side of the equation, the structured obligated part, has really been lauded and the spontaneous part is seen as secondary, maybe not even important at all. Now if we bring that attitude into our own personal life, the societal attitude towards spontaneity and therefore we overlook spontaneity in our own personal life, we're making a big mistake because spontaneity can be transformative. Now I'll tell you why. Think of the nervous system or the body, it runs very naturally. Now to set goals for ourselves is actually quite an unnatural thing. Only human beings set goals for themselves at all. In the natural world there are no goals, there is no self-improvement, right. Only human beings do this. Now when things are operating naturally, think of all the functions that your body takes care of. It takes care of your blood pressure, it takes care of your heart rate, your temperature, all these different things. Even the fight, flight or freeze response is controlled naturally by your nervous system. The ramping up phase is the sympathetic nervous system and then the parasympathetic nervous system calms you down. Even when you pick something up or you're lifting weights, right, there's a part where your muscle contracts and then it releases. What I'm saying here is in nature the way things operate is that there's two phases to things. There's like a contraction release, contraction release. Even think of your heart moving and pumping blood around your body. The sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic nervous system. It's kind of biphasic. Now that's natural. Now the area of goal setting, the only thing that humans are the only ones to do this, it becomes unnatural. It involves the conscious mind or the neocortex as opposed to the much older nervous system which does things automatically. Now because of this, we're using this new piece of material for this goal setting stuff which is somewhat removed from the way things work in the nervous system. We are terrible at this biphasic mechanism which runs everything naturally in the nervous system. On, off, on, off. Our problem is that we're all turned on in terms of goals or action. Even or maybe especially when we suffer with procrastination or paralyzed with fear about something. The intention, the message consciously is do more, do more, do something, do anything, do it now. It should have been done yesterday, right? And we never actually consciously get trained in telling ourselves the release part of the biphasic thing which is stop, proactively stop. And the thing is in goals and productivity it has to be a conscious signal we send to ourselves to turn it off, right? Goals are not natural, so therefore they're always controlled consciously. So if we're consciously in charge of this, we're in charge of both the phases of the biphasic process, the on, off. We're good at saying on take action but we're very, very bad at identifying when we stop ahead of time, proactively. The problem is consciously we tell our nervous system okay, take action now. The nervous system says, well, okay, and it cooperates. But we forget to tell the nervous system, stop now. We don't give it a conscious order that the contraction phase has ended and now the relaxation phase is here. This has huge implications for us, not sending that signal. With spontaneity, what I'm suggesting is spontaneity is a space. It's a space where we tell the nervous system proactively, deliberately, consciously. We are finished with goals. Now I'm not saying we drop our goals. Of course goals are a good thing. Absolutely. But if we don't consciously know when the goal is finished, when am I stepping away from this, the nervous system is going to be in, stuck in the on mode, right? And over time that will not be good for us at all. It'll actually, will be burnt out and there'll be a backlash for that. The nervous system will stop trusting us in terms of the signals it's receiving and it'll overwrite everything anyway and it'll take over and it'll force us to stop. So spontaneity, what I'm advocating for here is just have a space in your life where there is no self-improvement. Now let's really think about this for a second. Have your goals but have a conscious deliberate space where I am not going to do anything goal related here. At all. If it has any scent of a goal or some kind of a motive for self-improvement. That is not the space in which to do it. Okay. I've heard people say things like, well, someone gave me this self-care plan and I'm supposed to do it after work and there's 15 things on the list and I looked at this self-care plan and it looked good but there's still a motive with that. Spontaneity is a space in which there are no goals. I do not, I'm not dedicating myself or I'm not obligating myself to do anything in that space. Now the default setting for many of us when we start to experiment with spontaneity having that space is that we end up doing very, very little at all. Now it's not always true. In a space of spontaneity you could do something novel, right? And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I have found for a lot of people the best thing to do is to lean into laziness when you're starting off with spontaneity. That's because so many of us are completely overwhelmed and burnt out of this constant telling ourselves self-improvement, self-improvement is needed all the time. So when you begin with this you're probably going to, especially if you've had depression, anxiety, you've had a burnout of any kind you are probably going to be used in spontaneity. Spontaneity has a kind of a sibling or a twin brother or sister and it's called laziness. The two of them go together. I actually mentioned it in my book Forget Happiness where I talk about the five basic emotional needs we have. One of them is spontaneity slash laziness, right? Now sometimes spontaneity assuming that you're kind of recovering from depression or you're getting over that or you're getting over a burnout or something it can be a little bit more active but the default should be I'm probably going to do very little here. The only guiding principle for what you do during your space of spontaneity is it can't be anything self-improvement wise and it should be based on what I feel like I genuinely want to do rather than should, have to, must do, none of those. Now be very careful when you start to implement this because it is so subtle the way we find ways to fill up that space with obligations. I'll give you an example. A person might say to themselves well, okay I'm not going to work on my career I'm not going to work on my fitness goals because that's a goal, self-improvement I'm not going to work on learning I'm learning Spanish well that's a self-improvement goal so I can't do that in the space of spontaneity maybe I could catch up on some reading or something and okay that's to do that but then you see spontaneity time now starts to become associated with reading time and now there's already an agenda there there's something waiting in it as opposed to it being a kind of an open blank space for us to go into with no intentions whatsoever so try as best as you can to have absolutely no intentions for it there are no rules for what you do in spontaneity you could say to yourself okay I always take a shower I think I'm going to take a bath okay I'm going to take a bath and listen to some music I used to listen to years ago maybe I'm going to call an old friend maybe I'm just going to sit here and watch a movie it doesn't matter but as long as it's guided by guided by what I genuinely feel drawn to do and it has it is no hint of a goal outer space in your life for goals but this one is a space in which there are no goals okay we have been conditioned to constantly be in self-improvement mode self-improvement is fine but it needs it'll break down you may find that if spontaneity has been missing for you you probably struggled a little bit with self-improvement and gold this could be a big big piece in that for you if you can proactively deliberately consciously bring in a little bit of spontaneity you will find that all your nervous system is much more cooperative in moving forward towards your goals it also helps you set up a boundary with work and goals and things like this because you should always have a boundary it sends a very positive message that builds your self-esteem that you are actually in charge and you're more important than the goal so that's one thing watch out for filling up that space with things very subtly in subtle ways another thing is how long should you spend in spontaneity really that's an individual choice the only thing I would say would be once you ahead of time schedule it do not let obligation overcrowd it okay the main thing isn't how long you spend in spontaneity it's that you honour the commitment to spontaneity once you've said you're going to do that that's much more important than the overall length I would say one thing though because we've been so conditioned to be in self-improvement mode all the time challenge yourself to make that space of spontaneity a little longer than you think is maybe allowable okay push yourself to spend a little longer in it than you think you should now with this if you can bring in this spontaneity try this out you may feel a little bit uncomfortable for a while when you're doing this am I really allowed to do this am I supposed to do this I could do so many things I'm missing out I could do all of this work on my goals the point is if you meet the need for spontaneity you're meeting an emotional need that isn't going away the body needs this space to be switched off from gold and in doing so you're going to actually make it much more likely that you will meet your goals it's an issue of balance the other thing too is spontaneity is an innate emotional need we have so if we do continue to ignore it we don't really have a choice to do that it will there will be sort of the way I put it is if spontaneity is not met these are our five emotional needs if the need for spontaneity isn't met for instance if you want to know the other five I'm going to read my book it's free it's on my website if this need isn't met it sends emotions down into the body that will sort of sabotage your attempts to meet other emotional needs such as say responsibility or finding meaning purpose or creativity things like this spontaneity isn't even about creativity by the way sure you could potentially be creative in it but there should be no intention to be creative in spontaneity spontaneity is literally a space in which there are no goals, no agenda so the takeaway here and I think it's a new concept for a lot of people is that spontaneity is not a thing you do it's not an attitude you have spontaneity is a space you create for yourself in which maybe new novel things can happen because I hope that's a useful video today and thanks as always for being with me and let me know what you think and I'll talk to you again soon bye for now