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“Energy flows where attention goes.”
Choosing what to focus your time, energy, and resources on is one of the most impactful decisions you will make in your life.
It is a vote for what matters to you and a reflection of where your priorities are.
When you step back and think about where you are placing your attention at any given time, you are doing one of three things:
- Looking back.
- Looking inward.
- Looking forward.
One of the most common areas you may spend a lot of time on is the process of reflection.
With the benefit of hindsight being 20/20, this is where you process and analyze your accumulated life experiences to create a predictive model of behavior.
Your brain pattern-matches prior events — the good, the bad, and the ugly — to leverage lessons of the past to help you navigate the complexities of daily life.
This enables you to apply filters to your circumstances and minimizes the toll that complicated decision-making can have on your mental energy.
It’s not just what happened to you, but understanding the “Why” of what happened to you that you can make more informed judgements about the future.
Introspection literally means “to look inside.”
The process of introspection can be beneficial because it necessitates paying a high degree of attention to your own thoughts and feelings in the moment.
Doing so helps shine a light on your motivations, which in turn go a long way towards guiding your actions on a day to day basis.
By following this process, you can significantly advance your own understanding of how and why you react in certain ways.
That knowledge brings with it a sharpened sense of self-awareness that can serve you well as you navigate the challenges that you may face.
By knowing who you are at your internal core, you can show up in the external world in a more authentic manner.
A third form of processing outcomes is called prospection.
This is defined by your ability to generate and evaluate mental representations of possible futures, which research has shown to play an enormous role in the level of motivation that you have.
Many times, when you think about the uncertainty that comes with the future, it brings a degree of anxiety that may unsettle you.
With so many paths to choose and both inconsequential and life-changing decisions to be made, your mental models can become overwhelmed quite easily.
In the face of this overwhelm, your brain kicks into gear to try to solve for problem at hand. In doing so, it processes these alternative realities and determines which one may be the most appealing to pursue.
Since any investment of time, effort, and resources is done at the expense of everything else you could be spending your energy doing, this is a critical function.
Even more so, it is only limited by the breadth and depth of your imagination.
Your willingness to design a future life that is optimized to help us meet the majority of your big life goals triggers simple filters to be put in place.
These filters weed out many potential directions you can take and narrow your focus to a precious few that may seem more realistically attainable.
These are the ones most deserving of your attention.
As you leverage the power of prospection in your life, realize the value that can come from choosing to step into the shoes of “Future You.”
If you always think about what you would tell your past self, you miss the opportunity to project into that future state in order to listen to the words of wisdom that can guide you through the present.
Do not underestimate the mental leap this will allow you to take such that the paths in front of you become clearer and less scattered.
The road to a life worthy of the ambitions of today is ready to be paved.
Don’t shy away from exploring prospective visions that excite your mind and ignite your passions to get there.
Doing so will allow you to reap the many benefits of a life well-lived before you have a chance to even fully live it.
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