February e-news
Dr Suzy Green & Associates
Welcome back and hope you enjoyed my first e-news. I received some wonderful feedback that has provided great inspiration to continue!
Last month I suggested you spend
some time in self-reflection to crystallise and prioritise your core life
values. I
am assuming you have identified 5 core values and they are now explicit and
highly visible in your daily life (you
might also like to make an acronym/mnemonic to help remember them easily!).
You might also now be more mindful of the decisions you are making and whether
they are in fact aligned with these core values. It will also be
useful to monitor how well you are living these values and to continue to
monitor your rating out of 5.
Month 2 - Somewhere Over the Rainbow!
Just like the lyrics of that famous song, this
month I am encouraging you to dare to dream.
Once you are clear on
your values, it's important that you start to develop a fuzzy vision of
your future.
There are a number of reasons
why this is important, not only in terms of enhancing your chances of creating
the future you desire, but also in
terms of enhancing your psychological
well-being.
In the book The Present by Spencer Johnson (the same guy that wrote Who Moved My Cheese), he suggests that by creating a vision of the future it gives our brain something to work with and as such allows it to reduce the what if's. My professional and personal experience has also been that if we can create this fuzzy vision it can help reduce any anxiety or worries about the future - knowing that we have a plan even if it is fuzzy!
The other benefit is that
by being less in the past or in the future, it allows us to be more in
the present. There have been a huge number
of recent scientific papers that provided evidence of the benefits of mindfulness
particularly in regard to mental
health. This is something the Buddhists have known for centuries!
Additionally, by creating a fuzzy vision it primes our brain to find
opportunities to create that vision.
Opportunities we may otherwise not have identified become clear to us and
we find and develop pathways to our
fuzzy vision.
This Month's Action Plan - Develop a Fuzzy Vision of Your Future
This month spend some time developing your fuzzy
vision. In my coaching work I utilise a tool called Letter from
the Future (Grant & Greene, 2001). This is an automatic writing task
designed specifically for this purpose. It
involves your future self (5-10 years time) describing the developments in
your life and how it is that you are
leading a flourishing life! It's important to keep it fuzzy and to write
about how you are living your values. I am
happy to email you instructions for writing this upon request. Alternatively,
some people like to create a treasure
map which is a more visual and artistic expression of their fuzzy vision.
The important thing is that you give
yourself permission to dream. I often suggest to clients that I would far
prefer to reach 80 or 90 years of age and
know that I have "had a go" than to get there and regret that I didn't at
least try!
Next month...
I will be discussing a positive psychology technique that has recently been investigated and found to boost positive emotions instantly! Better than chocolate with longer-lasting effects! Hope you have a great month. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Dr Suzy Green & Associates
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