Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? This post is the second part of the Second Evolution of finding your genius, Future Visioning.

The same is true for being authentic and choosing your direction in life. If the clarity with which you see your future self (your self-direction) is fuzzy and unclear than the drive, motivation, confidence and certainty you would normally get from knowing where you are going will be lacking. You will become that racecar driver who doesn’t know the course, and all of the same effects of such uncertainty will occur in your life. You will not commit 100%, you will hesitate more, you will become indecisive and your actual ability to succeed will go down. Basically, if you don’t create an image in your head of where you want to go, and if it isn’t sufficiently vivid enough, detailed enough, you actually inhibit your ability to be successful in life.

To help focus your drive, motivation and all of your natural talents you need to have a crystal clear vision in your head for where you are going. You need to create a vision for yourself that is so real that you can not only see it, but you can actually feel it, smell it, taste it and almost remember it as if it has already been experienced.

This is the level of clarity you must have for your direction in life, your point B on your life map if you will. And one way we’ve found to help people do this is to take our clients through an exercise Jay created, which Jay calls Future Visioning. The goal is to develop a vision of yourself in the future that is so clear and real that your mind can’t tell the difference, and as a result, it commits itself and its resources to this vision just as if it were real. When this happens your certainty goes way up, your conviction increases and you start to see any indecisiveness you had go away. You truly will believe that this future vision is as much a reality as anything you can remember from the past.

When it comes to creating this future vision, the past can actually help. Outside of the fact that your past actually happened and was real, the reason it seems real to you is because of the level of detail. When you remember a past event there are millions of little pieces to that memory that you probably didn’t even notice (e.g., the shadowing of a light on a table, the small cracks on the wall, the dust in the corner, the countless objects in the room which you never consciously acknowledged). The level of detail for things remembered is what makes that memory so real and it is your subconscious mind that provides most of this sense of reality, as it is the one capable of recognizing so much detail. Think of the difference in detail between a photograph and a painting. The problem is that many people fail to create a vision for where they are going that is sufficiently detailed or real enough to actually win their mind over and enlist all of their strengths and talents. They create fuzzy goals, or an incomplete vision. The result is that they achieve fuzzy or incomplete results. To create a vision of your future that will be real enough to focus your talents, release your doubts, gain your commitment and drive you towards achieving it, you must create a similar level of detail – a level approaching that of a past remember event or time.

The Future Visioning exercise is simply a process of using your past to help ensure a similar level of detail for where you see yourself in the future. To begin, start by answering the following questions for Future Visioning. Remember to make it as focused and specialized as possible. To develop your Future Visioning, go to http://www.whatsyourgenius.com and select Workbook from the Resources menu. Create an account if necessary. You will see the Future Visioning exercise in the menu. Have Fun!

What will you specialize in?

What will you master, and what will you not?

Once you have completed your Future Visioning exercise print it out and refer to it regularly, make changes to it and reprint it as things change in your life and plans. I recommend making it part of a quarterly life review, just like any good business person reviews their goals and objectives on a regular basis, and it’s equally as effective for any individual to do the same thing with their personal goals and objectives. And remember, no level of detail is too small. Just like the picture, the higher the resolution, the greater the level of detail and the greater the detail, the more your subconscious mind will believe in and chase after your vision. You want to create the highest resolution image for your future self that you possibly can.

Note: This exercise may take you several hours, even days, to complete as you will want to give it careful consideration. This is your future you are creating so take your time and trust that the effort you put in will return much greater results. No long “X’s” here.

Now that you have completed your Future Visioning exercise, and you have a more defined idea of where you want to be in the future, let’s work on how you can get there in the most authentic way.