Tell me if you know this story…
You ask someone what they want. Then they proceed to tell you everything that they don’t want. They don’t want this, they don’t want that, they don’t want that other thing.
We are excellent at stating things in the negative.
This gives us a Swiss Army Knife of a tool if we know how to use it.
We will be pulling out two uses of this wonderful tool as we proceed.
It is tough to always seek the positive especially when we don’t know what the positive looks like.
So if you have ever struggled to find a vision or your purpose, or if you have ever struggled to keep to those positive actions you set for yourself. You are in the right place.
By the time you finish reading this, you will have a way to combat life when the positive fails you.
This works in all manner of situations when you know to reach for it.
Tool #1 The Anti-Vision
When you don’t know what the best possible future looks like for you. That you have no clue what you should be aspiring to. Put your frustrations back in the box and go the other way. Figure out what it would look like if you totally blew it. What would your life look like if you made all the wrong choices and took all the wrong actions? Now brainstorm some ways that you could make that a reality…
That brings us to.
Tool #2 The Not-To-Do List
You can easily undo all the hard work you did in the gym with a pizza and a tub of Hagen Das. All that sweat all that effort evaporated from a few mouthfuls of cold creamy strawberry cheesecake-flavored glory. All our good actions are run over by a few bad actions.
This is not just gym-related there is a list of bad actions that destroy all our good work. The “not-to-dos” murder our positive efforts all the time. So we are going to list them. List all the things we know that hurt us, that ruin all our positives, that throw a spanner in the works of our best efforts. List, List, List get all these nasty little monsters exposed to the cold light of day.
So what now?
We have our Anti-vision, and we have our Not-To-Do list. Simple, we just don’t do those things. We will of course still do some of them, but we will now be able to see ourselves doing them. We will be consciously aware of them and maybe just maybe we will know to course correct away from the negative. The better we get at avoiding the negative things that hurt us, the more positive things become.
