There are times in our lives when we reach the cross roads, or road ahead is foggy. There could be many factors leading to it, and it can potentially be demotivating issue for tasks at hand. People have various coping mechanisms, mine is getting deeply introspective and evaluating the facts. Self introspective and mental clarity would be key to clear up the vision and realign our priorities in life. I am having a better clarity that earlier, and I would like to share my experience. Following are few things, which might help:
- Identifying true north: It is one of the biggest mental clarity exercise. This and visualization that you have lived your life, and you are 90+ and on death bed. What kind of people would you like around. What you like to be your obituary? What you like to be remembered for? We must take death as positive, not negative. Its the ultimate truth, and we shouldn’t be scared away from fact. There is a difference between awareness and realization. Once we start counting down, the most important priorities in our lives appear. All unimportant things disappear. Vision will start clearing up.
- Understanding and differentiating between true limitations and mental limitation: Once vision is cleared and most important thing envisioned, next step would be to identify what is limiting us to reach our north star. As per my experience, many of limitations are self made. To describe that, we are total sum of experiences, self awareness, knowledge and cultural exposure. All these are set of beliefs, some of which have valid reasoning, and some of them don’t. Exercise for that would be list all of our beliefs, how trivial or major it may sound. All those characteristics, which define who you are behind your skin. Once you have your characteristics listed, you’ll identify how most of beliefs are just mental limitations. Conditioning over period of all of your life. Objective now is to get rid of all self imposed limitations.
- Mental re-run of journey so far: Once we have our north star and limitations identified, we must re-run our critical moments of lives. We should visualize situation as third person, how and why we reacted in particular situation. As mentioned, we are sum of our experiences, chances are high we will make decision on those experiences. If reasoning behind that judgment was flawed, most likely that experience will not be pleasant. We shouldn’t kill the messenger here, that think experience in itself is good, because it’s giving a chance for self improvement. It will allow us to contemplate about beliefs. Once that belief is worked on, decisions in future will be smoother and better. Belief like judgment shouldn’t be biased, it should be free of all the clutter and prejudices.
- List of possibilities out there: So far exercises, were internal. Now we know ourselves better, we should look outside. What it has to offer? How can we make it a better place? How can we contribute to world, shared among all of us. We all contribute in each others life, knowingly or unknowingly. More we are aware how our smallest of action affect other people (for better or worse) our contribution can be improved instantly. Now we must list all possibilities options, you’ll be surprised how many choices you have. Once you have all the choices, comparing with our true north star, our actual limitations, our experiences, beliefs; you should be able to make the best decision suitable not only to you, but society at large.
- Putting it all together: It won’t all come in a day or week. Critical self contemplation is one of most difficult things. Iterate the process over and again, until it runs like a finely tuned engine.
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years” – Abraham Lincoln
Advertisement
