Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, in their book The 12 Week Year, ask:
- Are you are being externally motivated to do things?
- How close is the alignment of your work and efforts to how you want your life to look?
- If the goal doesn’t align with your life vision, how inspired are you to work towards the goal?
- How quickly are you going to give up, or do something else, or find another distraction?[1]
The Outs of Disappointment and Despair invite us to ask whether our current change effort is truly aligned with our life.
How badly do you want your life to change?
Why do you want your life to change?
What are the non-negotiables in your life as you make this change? Are you clear on what those non-negotiables are?
If you are clear that you want this change, and your non-negotiables are unaffected, you also need to be clear that there will be discomfort.
You are sacrificing short-term comfort for your long-term vision.
You need to keep looking at that long-term vision – over and above the short-term discomfort.
By keeping an eye on our desired future, we are leveraging another portion of our brain – the pre-frontal cortex. This part of the brain that allows us to dream and encourages us to act on that dream.
The pre-frontal cortex lights up when we imagine greatness for ourselves. The more we think about our desired future, the more we are grooving the ability to imagine. If we don’t imagine our desired future, we are by default strengthening the part of our brain that resists change.
How do you want your brain to work?[2]
What do you want to practice? Successful change or staying the same?
[1] Moran and Lennington, The 12 Week Year, 79 – 85.
[2] Moran and Lennington, 12 Week Year, 23-24; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/gifted-ed-guru/201211/brain-basics-part-one-the-power-visualization
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