2023 January 17 Goal setting, breaking limiting habits, and why envisionment works

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about your life reimagined. Thanks for joining me tonight for more on recreating our future. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a like and tell your friends or drop me a note.

We'll be carrying on with our goal setting, building upon the first steps, which we reviewed last week. If you missed it, check out the video for January 10th, 2023. Last week we covered what happens when we just come up with some dreams and try and plan all the way from start to finish, and how it's pretty easy to get derailed because we can never think of all the possible problems.

It often feels like we're failing because things come up that we weren't expecting. Then we covered an alternative method of envisioning the desired outcome and working our way back to the beginning. This technique, of starting at the end and working our way back, has a huge advantage because, when it's done correctly, we get early buy-in from our subconscious before we even start to work towards our goal.

The reason this is so important is that now when challenges arise, our brain is already confident it can work out a solution rather than starting from a place of unexpected difficulty and anticipating possible failure. Last week we left off at creating SMART goals, then narrowing them down to a very small number that we can prioritize. By small number, I mean like one or two goals max, as priorities. Now with some very specific targets, we can begin to envision them  in a totally immersive fashion. So we spoke a little about that, that our vision should be wonderfully rich and detailed, and that should include all our senses at once.

However, it goes beyond that. You also want to imagine the things that happened right before you reached your goal. It might be the problems that arose that you overcame, or things that went better than you expected. The point isn't to have an entirely good or bad mental history of how things went. Rather, it is to get your brain accustomed to thinking in a very proactive fashion and not just totally freaking out when the inevitable difficulties arise, which they likely will. Remember, our inner brain wants to keep us safe, not only physically, but emotionally.

It wants to save us from embarrassment or confrontational situations, and any other things that would cause us discomfort. Unfortunately, the one thing it's very bad at doing is keeping us safe from the discomfort of regret, from not trying to live our lives to the fullest. In math and in mountain climbing, there's a phenomenon called a local maxima, or false peak.

It's when you think you've found the best answer or reach the top of the mountain, but in reality, you just need to go a little further and you'll see that there's a much better solution, or the real top of the mountain becomes visible. This isn't to say that we always have to strive for ideal, but if you're feeling like there should be more to life or more in your life or in the world, you have many competing intuitions. Part of you knows your real limits are trying to tell you that you could find more out of your life.

It could be more meaning, more time for enjoyment, more time to relax, a better job; maybe a simpler life, and a less better job, more friends, maybe less friends. The important part though, is that we generally have the answer to our own happiness right inside us, but it's often hidden behind our subconscious, which is always trying to keep us safe.

Remember, anything new has this kind of inherent risk compared to the familiar. If we've done something before and we managed to survive it, then we automatically train ourselves to feel more comfortable with the familiar behavior. It happens constantly and in many little ways. 

First, there's a situation or a stimulus, then that creates a thought. We acknowledge that thought, and that creates an emotion. We remember that situation and the resulting emotion and  we automate that in our brain. So that is now that situation becomes hardwired into a belief  without the need for any further processing. Remember, we see many, many, many, many things, something like 50,000 thoughts a day or some number of that magnitude.

They just go through our lives. We see something. A bird goes by, we know it's a bird going by, yep, a bird going by, we don't even think about it. All those things are automated. So forming all these beliefs, these little automations is generally a pretty good system. It's served to keep us alive through all sorts of differing situations as we grew up, as our lives changed, even as the world has changed.

That's why it's so difficult to break habits, which are really just the manifestation of our own beliefs most of the time. In reality, they work pretty well. However, sometimes they can get off track - if, for example, we like sugar, and then we associate having some chocolate after a stressful time makes us feel a little calmer, and that eventually gets wired into a belief that chocolate is our cure for stress.

If we weren't happy about eating so much chocolate, then trying to diet or to force ourselves to change by willpower is very difficult to do because our subconscious has already pre-programmed this personal belief that the cure for stress is  chocolate. When we try to force ourselves to change, it's not just a behavior we're trying to modify, it's actually disagreeing with our subconscious that has formed a specific belief over time on how to keep us safe and happy. So it might be starting to become clear that, if we want to really create stretch goals, which almost always move us outside our comfort zone of familiarity, the place to start isn't by trying to force ourselves to follow a new behavior.

This is what most New Year's resolutions are. We're trying to force our behavior to follow our conscious wishes. Rather, the place to start is by examining our beliefs, which also help define our identity, and then see how they were. Then we can work to modify our beliefs into ones which support our goals instead of trying to protect us by keeping us from even trying to reach our goals. But that's all for a future episode.

However, just a quick glimpse into the future: modifying our beliefs, which is based upon modifying how our brain perceives our changes and what makes it such a powerful tool for change because if we're just trying to force ourselves to do something, we're fighting with our own brain. But when we create this immersive environment, then suddenly our brain is already on board and we're both working together for the same goal. A lot more to cover, but enough for tonight. We'll pick this up again next week. 

That's it for the evening. Please remember the war in Ukraine. If you're able and interested, the page for donation links is still up at UKR7.com, and there is a link to the World Central Kitchen WCK.org. They're still there, all the people working with them, providing food, it's not a good situation. They need as much aid as they can get right now in every way. The World Central Kitchen is humanitarian aid. There's links to lots of different types of aids.

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Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true  contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.