Recently I wrote about perspective and identifying your main drivers or fears. Knowing these tendencies and behavior’s helps us understand our internal habits when it comes to pain and pleasure. Knowing self helps in creating personal vision.
There are many scholarly publications on this topic and many people willing to help an individual identify their drivers and work through changing them if one chooses. I write about drivers to bring your awareness to them.
Many of these publications will tell you that people will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure or some variation on this theme.
Let’s take a closer look and reframe this conversation into something we can work with.
Alternatively learn about your drivers here first.
Create An Internal Focus On Your Positive Desired Outcome
Taking the time to create a vision for your desired outcome, motivating oneself to do the work to achieve this and preparing yourself along the way to exist in this new environment.
We are talking about vision and creativity. The seldom used human gifts that we all possess, and the world needs much more of.
This is a lot of work so we will break this into pieces. Today we discuss some concepts and tie together a few previous exercises.
We All Think Differently
We all have unique perspectives on life and filter the world through our value-based view of reality.
Our foundation for this is our values and beliefs. Do you know yours?
As children growing up, we are taught many things from our families, education system and peers. Some things are taught formally such the math classes you had to attend. Some things are taught informally such as definition of success.
In both cases these learned skills and tools are available to us and are used by each of us in adult life. Many of these learned behavior’s are operating in the subconscious of your mind helping you make minute by minute decisions in your personal and professional life.
These behaviors are not fixed and if you as an individual want to live a different life than your parents and grandparents lived you must make a conscious decision to change the patterns that affect your day to day behaviors.
Let us say for example that we live in a time when corporate leadership and governments are corrupt, and we all want this to be different. We have all been raised within and learned from this system and these people. In some cases our textbooks have been written based on these ‘success stories’.
Leaders of tomorrow must make a conscious decision to lead in a different way and to break the behaviors that created our current reality.
This Is Not That Difficult to Achieve
You see we are all equipped with a diverse view on the world. The most important step we can all take is to live our truth and our purpose. To share our view on important matters like the environment, privacy and politics.
All you need to do is know yourself and have a voice.
There is no better place to start with this than in our own life, our own home, our own backyard.
We will walk the talk.
In your life and home have you created that life that you always dreamed of? If you modelled the behavior’s of the world around you the answer is likely no.
Like most North Americans both parents work, kids are in daycare or after school care. You may have a brag worthy home, maybe a camper, a nice fat mortgage and a burning desire to put enough money away for that great escape next year.
Your bank is calling to offer you some great new retail products like an RRSP loan so you can be free from this rat race.
Is this really what you wanted?
Did you design this all by yourself?
So, you do want it to be different, possibly quite different but you are also quite stuck.
What Do We Do?
If you worked through my values exercise you are a step ahead already.
What we are doing is a little internal work to understand ourselves so we can take steps to set ourselves free. Maybe to get some control if that is important to you. (If you value security you may demonstrate behaviors of control.)
We are going to create our future and its up to you to determine how big that vision is. In the later years of life, once you finish climbing these rungs, you can always create a better ladder for future generations.
If you have not done the values exercise you can find it here, then come back.
It is beneficial to know your values. Granting I mean your values not your parents’ values. Nor the values the company you work for has posted on the wall. Nor values society placed on you.
I mean YOUR values. You can find more detail on my value exercise here.
I can not stress the importance of knowing your values enough. When you filter vision, goals and individual decisions through your values it will place you in healthier relationships. It will lead you to more fulfilling work. It may change your world much more than you could have imagined.
Create Clarity
The more clarity we have on what we value and armed with the knowledge of our drivers we can filter our decisions through this.
Initially you may need to consciously think about your values as you weigh a decision then ask did my fear push that decision or, am I creating a new path to a desired outcome?
Today let’s choose to step onto the new path to our desired outcome. We are trying to get past automatic behavior’s. Granting it may take a few tries to get right.
Personal Vision
Now you are Equipped with awareness of drivers and conscious focus on your values which you can apply to decision making today and tomorrow.
Taking these small steps will net significant reward over the months and years ahead of you.
Work on this for a while.
Next we will combine it with creating your personal vision and begin moving toward your desired life.
Additionally once you have started creating your vision it helps to move shorter term into goals. Find related content here.
Finally you can also find our content on Youtube.
