In light of the fact that many people will have made and stuck to (or not!) New Year resolutions, this article concerns itself with looking at what ‘we want’ in lives rather than what ‘we don’t want’.
There is a remarkable process that goes on in our brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). It works a bit like this… Let’s say you have decided you would like a new car, let’s say you have decided you would like a sliver Audi, it is highly likely that you will notice more silver Audis on the road than you noticed before. Your RAS is homing in on what you want. It will home in on (match to) what is in your line of focus, in other words what you are paying attention to.
How we see or what we focus on encourages the RAS to find things that are congruent (match) with that focus. We can use this to our advantage or disadvantage. It makes sense then, doesn’t it, to focus on what you DO WANT rather than what you DON’T WANT.
When you focus on what you want or how you would like things to be you are better able to fulfil your aims because your RAS will be helping you in this way. But what if you don’t know exactly what you want? A position I was in myself many years ago. This is the list I wrote:
I want more time for myself
I want more flexibility with my time
I want to make a difference to other peoples’ lives
And I want to live somewhere pretty
At the time, I had a nine to five job, five days a week, in marketing, in a corporate environment; and living in a less that salubrious part of a town.
I didn't know about the RAS back then however, every single one of the things I allowed myself to focus on and wrote down came to fruition gradually over a few short years. You may like to give it a go yourself – it’s important to write down what you would like without concerning yourself with ‘how’ it can happen.