Una's Blog

by Una Hearne.

How does any human being make anything happen?

How do you get to work in the morning? How do people get married and have children? How do you operate your mobile phone? How did you eat your last meal? How do you put your socks on? How do you figure out what you want to do with your life?

Believe it or not the unconscious process by which you make anything happen works in the same way for every one of these things:

1. You decide what you want
2. You plan how you will make it happen
3. You take action – dealing with obstacles as they arise

The decision or choice of what to do is what I often refer to as the ‘vision’ part of the process. You have some sort of representation in your mind of what you want. You have feelings about it. It might be clear or vague, conscious or unconscious, important or trivial. You might call it a goal/ intention/ need/idea/dream etc. The representation or concept in your mind is always created before we plan or do anything.

Next step, we either dismiss the idea or we figure out how we are going to make it happen. We might do various things as part of planning – research, evaluate, contact, present, approach, purchase, browse, etc.

Finally we will either shelve the whole idea or we actually go and take the action to make it happen.

These steps may happen very rapidly and unconsciously (like when you get out of bed and go have breakfast) or they may take agonisingly long periods of time and wreck our heads (like trying to figure out what to do with your life).

Ironically when we think consciously about what we want it is usually because it is important to us, and our conscious thinking often derails us by getting caught up focusing on the wrong thing. For example, we want to progress in our life or career, we have vague ideas and multiple opportunities to move forward. Instead of focusing on step 1 (above)- deciding what we want, clearly and specifically, we get all caught up in thinking about our current situation. Ruminating on what we don’t like about where we are, worrying about losing things that we do like about where we are, fearing the uncertain and various scenarios we can imagine. If we manage to get beyond this we will jump into the ‘how’ and think about all the obstacles and problems we may face in trying to move forward in any of the directions we are vaguely thinking about. We have a tendency to talk ourselves out of moving forward from this position.

And if we don’t talk ourselves out of it, we go and talk to our friends and families about our possibilities and they will obligingly shoot down any ideas we haven’t manage to dispose of ourselves!

However, here’s the secret – IF we start with the vision (goal/aim/outcome/dream…) and spend time getting really clear and specific about this, we give ourselves an immeasurably greater chance of achieving that vision. Once the vision is clear, the plan of how to get there from where we are now is just a series of logical steps (I didn’t say easy I said logical!).  If we work with our brains the way they are designed to work we become far more successful, far more easily.

Don’t take my word for it. Try it out!

 

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