“My head’s full of what other people tell me I should do.”
“My brain’s bursting with information but I’m no closer to making a decision.”
Is either of these you? If yes, complete this sentence:
“If I hadn’t ______ this year, I’d really regret it.”
This is called a look-back. Looking back over life, your month, your year is ‘easier’ than looking forward. It helps you identify what’s most important – to you. It helps untangle your emotion from everyone else’s. I don’t mean looking back because that time has passed – I mean looking back at imaginary decisions, looking back and assessing before you make a decision.
Looking back reduces risk, creates clarity, and brings about more of what you’re angling for. Consider this: Can you predict the future – or reflect on the past?
I’ll be writing more about what looking back does in terms of your ability to assess risk – knowing this benefits you at work, and when making decisions about your and your family’s life. For now though, I’m going to share that our brain is fascinating – and does things like ‘tell’ us that ‘future you’ is someone else – here’s what I mean: when volunteers are asked to think of themselves in the future, the area of the brain that lights up is the part that processes thoughts about strangers. In other words, future you is a stranger to you – it’s believed that this is one of the reasons people don’t save enough for retirement – because they don’t ‘identify’ with their future-self; their future-self is a stranger.
Extrapolating this nugget, I put to you that thinking of future-you, your future life, is significantly more challenging than looking back over your life. Research tells us that more detail, and reasoning that is more specific and concrete, happens when people look back over imagined decisions in what’s called a pre-mortem, or look-back exercise. As I said, more on this in another post.
For now, I want you to simply think this:
A year from now…
Will you look back, a year from now, and regret something specific?
What is it. Figure it out. Write it down. Stare at it. Feel it. Feel being you – a year from now – if this thing didn’t happen.
Then come up with a plan. Make it happen.
A year from now, look back and know that you’ve done ‘it’.
Now figure this out: what can you do today, to make ‘it’ happen.
Better question: What will you do today, to make it happen?
Here are a couple of questions you can ask yourself to kickstart the process:
“Looking back, I’m so glad that I…”
or
“Looking back, one of the most important decisions I made this year was to …”
How about playing this out with your nearest and dearest over this weekend and discover a bit more about yourself and them 🙂
As for the ‘ultimate ninja assault course’ – it was cleared up without my asking ..!
Share your answers below 🙂
