Your Life Vision… Take Two of Many

If you did the exercises highlighted in last week’s post and didn’t get much clarity about the life you want to live, you might be stressing about your utter failure at figuring out what you want. The drive for success is so ingrained in us that we ironically try to succeed at taking a step back from the achievement mentality we’ve adopted.

If this is you, I hope you are starting to see how this mindset seeps into everything you do (I’m a recovering pro). But just being aware of that creates enough distance for you to observe how ridiculous that can be and shift your mind to more productive avenues.

Now back to “not seeing”. If you’ve read every self-help book on “finding purpose” ever published as I have, you know they all offer the same two approaches: “Visualize” / “imagine” exercises along the lines of those I previously described, and “think back to what you loved to do in your childhood” - this is the best clue to what you’re “destined” to do.

What exercises of the first kind often fail to mention is that people have different ways of sensing things - some visualize, but some hear things, feel things or even smell things and get intuitive hits about what’s happening or what they should do. If you’re not a visual person, try to adjust these exercises to your own ways of “seeing” (e.g. can you hear someone speaking?). 

If you’re imagining some things but still have a gaping hole in certain areas, try to read the clues you do have. Before I did the visualization of a typical day 10 years out, I was 100% sure I was going to start a technology startup - I just had to find the right idea. When I did the exercise, I couldn’t see anything about the kind of work I was doing in my imaginary future life, but I did see myself meeting with my team in a beautiful office. To my surprise, it felt like a relatively small team, certainly not the size you’d have in a hugely successful startup, which 10 years out would have at least hundreds if not thousands of people. The office felt more suitable for a creative agency than a large tech company.

It took me a long time to let go of the notion that I had to start a tech company, but this was the first nudge. Maybe for you the clues are in other areas - the person you’re living with in the future doesn’t seem like the person you’re currently with, or there’s a lot of greenery around you when you think you’re a city person.

Speaking of nudges, it is worth trying the second approach so many experts suggest - thinking back to what you loved to do in your childhood and/or teenage years. To me that was the easiest question on the planet - all I did was read books and draw on every available surface. My notebooks had more doodles than text, and my desk was always covered in drawings (all pencil, I wasn’t a total vandal). But the next thought was “obviously that’s useless - I hate writing and artists starve” and I was back to considering tech startup ideas. Well, guess what, I now like writing enough to publish this blog, and my “About” page says I’m a visual artist. It took several years to translate my childhood obsessions into something I want to do now, but this exercise was the first clue.

So - don’t despair. Your inner being / soul / higher self / whatever-you-want-to-call-it knows the essence of what you want in life. Either your mind isn’t ready to see it, or it’s so far from where you are that you can’t see the way to get there and therefore it’s easy to dismiss offhand (the mortgage won’t pay itself after all). Well, there is a reason this is a blog and not an essay - it’s a process.

The key is to keep growing and experimenting so the path is revealed slowly but surely.

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