Its now the middle of January and so I’m sure many of you will have made New Year’s Resolutions. The start of a new year is a great time to take stock of your life, what you have achieved over the last year and where you want to be at the end of this year. However, research shows that the majority of people don’t keep their resolutions and may end up feeling demoralized as a result.
There can be a different way of approaching setting your path for the coming year. This involves sitting down and creating a detailed picture of how you would like your life to be. Once the brain has created this picture it is much easier to move towards it.
To do this, make sure you set aside some time where you will not be interrupted. Choose an area of your life where you would like to make changes e.g. relationship, family, career, health, spiritual life etc, and ask yourself the following question:
- Suppose this area of your life is as good as it could possibly be, what would it look like?
After spending some time visualizing this, use the following questions to expand your picture so it is a very rich, detailed description.
- What would be happening?
- What would you be doing?
- What would other people be doing? (e.g. your partner, child, parent, friend, work colleagues….)
- What would people be noticing or saying about you?
- How would you be feeling?
- What would you be looking forward to?
- How would you know things were going well?
- How will you be maintaining these positive changes?
Make sure that for each answer, the picture is what you would be doing, rather than what you would not be doing. For example, if you find yourself answering ‘I wouldn’t be feeling depressed’ or ‘I wouldn’t be eating so much chocolate’ ask yourself what will you be doing instead? So…. ‘I would be feeling happy’ and ‘I would be eating fruit every day’.
To make the picture as personal as possible for each of your answers above, ask yourself this question:
- What difference would that make?
Make sure you write down all your answers, or you could even draw the picture you have created. You can repeat this exercise for each area of your life where you would like to make changes.
Over the next few months we will write a series of follow up articles to help you move forwards towards this wonderful picture you have created. So in preparation for next month’s article…
- On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the picture of how you would like your life to be, where are you now? What have you already done that has got you to this point on the scale?
We wish you a very happy 2018! Check back in mid-February for part 2……