I Have No Vision For My Future

Hi Will,

A good place to start is to think about your current reality and invert it.

So - think about your life as it is today, and ask yourself what you don't like about it. Chances are you'll have a few items in that list, but let's work through one item. Let's say it's:

"I have no social life".

Now invert it to become:

"I have a socal life".

- not quite rocket science yet, but we have just made a negative into a positive, and at least, it turns our attention from the problem to a goal.

But the goal isn't well-defined, so the next step is to polish your goal. What kind of a social life do you want?

Now then. People often stall here; they don't want to play because their pessimism swings in with something like:

"oh I can see what comes next, but really - what's the point? It isn't going to happen anyway, I mean, I'm X Y and Z ("bad things"), and I've spent this long in abject failure mode, so I can't really buy into the notion of change".

To quote Descarte:

Cogito ergo sum or I think therefore I am

For my coaching purposes, I'm bending that to:

I believe, therefore I do

- and by that I mean that our beliefs drive our behaviour, and that behaviour defines our lives.

If you believe a thing is pointless, you won't do it - or you'll do it poorly. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You did it poorly - it didn't work - it was pointless, and you were right all along. Hah!

The close personal support offered by coaching is what it usually takes to break out of that by constantly challenging beliefs and finding new better ways to think, to do, and to be. But if you're not ready for coaching, then try to press on and polish your goals yourself, setting the little voice in your head to one side.

Who do you want in your social life, where will it take place? How often? How many? fill in the details, and ignore "reality" because you'll be making a new one.

Do that for all the items on your inverted life list and then choose one to focus your work on first, and set about making it happen Again, you are your own worst enemy in this work, but you can probably bring about very worthwhile changes if you can keep the faith long enough to get some traction out there in the real world.

See if you can enjoy that process, then - when you have a great new vision for your life, set about turning that fantasy into reality.