In our recent article we had you tell us your whole life story. No literally, we did. If you missed that article, find it here and be sure to do the exercise before coming to this one. After you told yourself your self narrative and analyzed it, you should have a pretty good idea on where you stand in your mindset department. Chances are, you are looking to improve your mindset and self narrative, or you wouldn't be going further in these articles, so the next stop is to decide what type of narrative you want to have. Of course we can not change our pasts. History and what actually happened to us are just truths, but how we use these events to create are narratives we can alter and help create for ourselves a more positive life story and hence mindset.
The next step is to decide what type of mindset you want and we are going to do this by deciding what type of life you want. If you have been following us for a while, you probably already have a very clear idea of the future you want and a true assessment of your goals. If you are new though, I encourage you to go back on some of our goal setting exercises and be sure you have realistic goals set for yourself. Note: that by realistic I do not mean toning down your goals but making sure your goals are for creating true fulfillment and happiness in your life and not just keeping up with trends or chasing wealth for the sake of it.
Take out your goal for your future and put it out in front of you. Now ask yourself, what type of person would you need to be to have this life? When would you wake up, go to bed, what would you eat, how would you exercise, what would your house look like, all of that. Once you have an idea of the type of person you would need to be, ask yourself how would that person explain their life to a new friend or at a cocktail party? Go through the whole line of questioning again in the previous article only answering as the future you who has achieved their goals. Compare the two narratives and see how they have shifted. What stories do you consider integral to your development now, have they changed? If you aren't getting much insight here then start answering these lines of questions. You can do the same method as before with transcription software if you like.
1- What was the moment in your life when you realized you had started to achieve the life you wanted? Describe the moment exactly.
2- What was the scariest or lowest moment in the development of your life? This could be leaving a long term partner that wasn't good for you, quitting a stable job for the road less traveled, moving to another country and so on.
3- What do you do for work and how does it make you feel? If it doesn't fulfill you then how do you fulfill yourself in other ways?
Once you have created an image of yourself with your goals being reached, sit with this person for a moment and start thinking about them. How would they react to a stressful day or a bad argument? What language would they use with themselves when they made a mistake or were struggling with something they didn't quite understand? How does their internal dialog mirror yours, how does it differ? Keep these observations close by and let yourself ponder the differences and similarities over the coming days until you are ready to move on to the next part of the exercise. What we are hoping to accomplish here is to create a self dialog that is more understanding and uplifting than what you currently are giving yourself at the moment. This means that not all the observations will happen at once, you may find your subconscious working on this for several days or even weeks, creating new points of interest. Simply keep track of these observations as they come up either on your phone or in a notebook if you are the old fashioned type like I am. When you feel ready to move on, head to our next exercise. Find our past exercises and more articles on our blog https://www.bullionite.com/blog-index and reach out to us with your comments and questions at info@bullionite.com.