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Imagine and actively build your future through a simple exercise.
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The method invented by psychologist Laura King helps you value what is really important.
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Scale back anxiety, focus on the values that are most important to you, and bring out what you really want in the long run.
Yare holding – literally holding, in your hand! – a very powerful tool to improve your life: it’s called writing. You can use it no matter what style and what habit you have of using it. What matters is practicing it, at least for the time it takes to perform a small exercise. But first some necessary clarifications.
The relationship with the most important person in your life
We talk often about how a good part of your quality of life is determined by your relationships: your loved ones, your family, co-workers, friends and girlfriends or boyfriend. Relationships give substance to life and enrich it. On the contrary, loneliness-especially non-choice loneliness-is now regarded as a disease, not least because it worsens the quality of life to such an extent that it becomes harmful.
The relationship that is neglected more often than others, however, is the relationship with oneself. Of course, we are not talking about the constant inner dialogue that we practice every day. Let’s talk about something more complex and useful: like imagining yourself in the future, to actively build it.
It is used to say that “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” and we can do this through the stories we tell ourselves. Imagining our future history is one way to avoid being passive subjects of it and to build it, at least by laying the foundation for it well in advance.
After all, life is also the outcome of the story we tell ourselves: if it is the story of “I will never be able to run 10 kilometers in a row,” it is mathematical that we will never be able to do it, and so it is with everything else.
What really matters
This method, invented by psychologist Laura King, involves imagining that you are telling yourself a story, and it is that of your future self. You have to imagine it in the best possible version; that is the only rule. Everything has gone right, and the life you are living is far better than the one you are living now. Don’t let your pessimistic, realistic self get in the way. The purpose of this exercise is not to be reasonable but is to exercise the power of imagination and figure out what your real values are.
Values are the conditions you think are important: be honest, be loyal, don’t care too much about material things, think about the wellbeing of those you love, put in what you want. The future you imagine will necessarily take that shape. Read it right: not the future that will come true, but what you will imagine, that is, the story you will tell yourself.
The words we say to each other obviously do not have all that much power. It is not that by repeating or writing something 1,000 times, that thing then magically comes true, otherwise Bart would have become a thousand times the best student in the universe.
The purpose is to give a different priority to what really matters to you and above all to limit the power of anxiety with which you think about the future. Anxiety is in fact the perception of future danger, not present danger. It serves to prepare for the worst, and it has a fundamental evolutionary function for humankind: in ancient times it served to save your life, making you cautious and preparing you for any danger that might arise in a hostile environment where you could be prey to ferocious animals all the time. But that is no longer the case today, and unfortunately anxiety has not evolved as much and continues very forcefully to scare us. Anxiety ends up obscuring the image we have of our future self. That is why forcing oneself to think only in positive terms reduces the power of negative projections by downsizing them.
What you really want
There is one final aspect that makes this exercise particularly useful: by gently forcing yourself to think about what you really want (after all, you are wishing yourself the best possible future), it highlights what is really important to you in the long run. Did you write that you want to have a supercar in the garage? Good: that is a value to you. Did you write that you imagine that your whole family is well and happy? That is one of the values that you consider fundamental.
There is no right answer because the goal, you’ve probably figured out by now, is to focus on something else, to really bring out what you want and what you think is important.
You already know how to write: now you just have to do it.
(Via Psychology Today)