These 3 Questions Will Transform Your Productivity And Relationships
“KNOWING YOURSELF IS THE BEGINNING OF ALL WISDOM.” — Aristotle
Here’s a painful but liberating truth:
Whatever you see in the outside world is a reflection of you.
You can know who you are by what you’re seeing in the outside world.
The food in your pantry is a reflection of you.
The apps on your phone are a reflection of you.
The content in your newsfeed and on your social media is a reflection of you.
Becoming aware of these things, and then shifting them, will change your life.
Asking the hard questions of these things will enable you to make MASSIVE leaps and bounds in your life.
You’ll completely transform.
1. WHAT IS IN MY ENVIRONMENT?
“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.” — Dr. Marshall Goldsmith
“You become what you think about most of the time” — Brian Tracy
What’s in your environment?
Everything in your environment is something that you’re “continuing” to let into your life.
If you have certain friends, it’s because you have allowed those friends into your life.
If you have movies or TV shows you watch, it’s because you have allowed those shows into your life.
Everything in your life is based on what you’re committed to. If you uncommitted to it, it would not be in your life.
If you want the power to change your results, choose to become aware of absolutely all of your current results.
What do you spend time thinking about?
What is your financial situation?
How much money do you earn?
How much money do you spend?
What bills do you pay?
Do you save and invest money?
What’s on your calendar?
What situations are you saying yes to?
What situations are you saying no to?
What friends do you have?
What hobbies do you have?
Recognize and take note of whatever you see. These things reflect you.
These things reflect what you’re interested in and what you want to see more of.
These things are all a catalyst for what you are bringing in more of.
If you’re seeing something over and over, it’s because you’re actively bringing it into your life.
To change the things you see, be aware of what they even are.
2. WHAT DO I WANT TO SEE?
“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” — William James, father of American psychology
When you understand your environment, you understand your filters.
When you understand your filters, you can adjust them to your desired future self.
What do you want more of?
Filter for that.
Whatever you focus on, you create more of. In psychology, this is known as “selective attention.” The twin opposite concept is called “intentional blindness.” This is the concept that there are many going on around you which you don’t even notice, because you’re not filtering for them.
You need both principles to become successful.
Your brain is a filtering tool. Your can train your brain to see situations, opportunities, people, and opportunities that you didn’t see before, and you can also train your brain to ignore things that don’t meet the standard of your future.
“Your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for.” — Dan Sullivan
These factors come into play when you set a seemingly impossible goal.
Dr. Alan Bernard, one of the world’s leading experts on constraint theory, has discovered the following:
- There are two main benefits to setting impossible goals
- The first benefit is that you’ll be attracted to something exciting, intrinsically motivating, and something outside the scope of competition with anyone else.
- The second benefit is that if you don’t know how to do it, your brain will start filtering for the goal, and for ways to fill in that knowledge gap.
When you set impossible goals, the people, opportunities, information, and pathways will open up for you.
You’ll be able to become more aware that almost everything in your current life won’t get you to that impossible goal.
This is the 80/20 principle that Dan Sullivan and I taught in the book 10x is Easier Than 2x. When you go for a 10x-level goal, at least 80% of what you’re doing right now won’t get you to that goal.
As a real and practical example of this, in the book I share the example of my son Kaleb. He’s 15 years old, and he wants to play college tennis.
His coach recently asked him, “Kaleb, what’s your goal?”
Kaleb said, “My goal is to play college.”
His coach said, “Well, why isn’t your goal to play pro?”
Before that conversation, Kaleb honestly didn’t think that was a possibility, and so he had never even thought about it.
If you’re not thinking about it, you’re not filtering for it.
If you’re not filtering for it, you won’t find it.
If you’re not filtering for it, you won’t be able to find the needles in the haystack. You won’t be able to find the pathways, the people, and the process.
But if you do, everything changes.
Once Kaleb started to think about going pro, it suddenly became a real and tangible possibility.
This is why your future self is so important. It is the lens through which you bring things into your life. As that future and as that lens changes, so does your life.
When you set a seemingly impossible future self, your brain recognizes all of the current things in your life that simply aren’t in alignment with who that person is.
These are the 80% of things that got you here but won’t get you there.
Here’s a litmus test:
You can know you’re making progress when you stop seeing things that you used to see in your life.
- When there are things in your newsfeed that you used to see, but now you don’t.
- When there are workouts you used to do, but now you don’t.
- When there are people who influenced you negatively, whom you no longer spend time with.
When you filter out things that are no longer congruent with your future self, they no longer become a part of your life.
Then, because they’re no longer a part of your life, you stop attracting them into your life.
Instead, you’re thinking about your future self. You’re seeing and creating things that are powerful evidences of your future self.
As you evaluate your life, you can see if you want to let something go, and learn a lesson in the process, or keep expanding something.
3. WHAT SHOULD I FILTER OUT?
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” — John C. Maxwell
Do you see smoke in your life?
If you see smoke in your life now, you will see fire in the future, unless you put out the smoke and remove it from your life.
This happens when you set much higher goals. All of a sudden, most of your life just became incongruent with your future. Because of this, you’ll have to become aware of the smoke.
See the red flags, and fix them NOW rather than kicking the can down the road until things get much, much worse.
The smoke is in your life for a reason. Become aware of that reason. Then, get rid of it, filter it out, let it go, or change it.
Look in your life for people, situations, and places where you seem to repeat the same cycles. This is typically an evidence that you’re kicking something down the road and accidentally repeating it rather than learning from it.
If you’re not learning a lesson, you’ll continue to repeat the experience until the lesson is learned. You’re going to create more and more problems but at higher doses in the future until you fully acknowledge the smoke, appreciate it, and say, “I’m the one creating this.”
For example, certain people play the victim over and over and over in their relationships or in their work.
They’re not actually the victim, but rather it’s a role they chose to put themselves into.
Where do you keep creating a similar pattern, and what is that trying to teach you?
Again, lessons are repeated until they’re learned.
In psychology, you either approach or avoid your challenges. If you’re willing to approach your challenges, you can let them go as soon as you learn from and are transformed by them.
Then, it’s no longer a part of your reality, and your future self dictates your reality.
There’s no need, by the way, to have anger or frustration when you’re letting things go.
Everything is a beautiful tool. Life is beautiful. Everything right now in your life is happening for you, not to you.
Write down all the ways you’ve transformed over the past year.
How are you different from who you were a week ago?
How about 90 days?
How are you different from who you were a year ago?
When you write down ways in which you’re no longer the same person you were before, you train the outside world to create more of that. You train your subconscious mind that change is acceptable, tolerable, and even desirable.
When things seem to be falling apart on the way to your bigger goal, (at times they will), ask yourself: “Why is this EXACTLY what I need right now to learn a crucial lesson? What is this doing for me?”
The faster you can do this, the faster you close what psychologists called the refractory period, or the amount of time it takes to emotionally recover from, reframe, and transform an experience.
You’ll start to have an anti-fragile mindset as you weed things out.
You’ll start to see obstacles and say, “This is exactly what I need. Obviously, it’s in my life. I’m aware of it because I need it. It’s exactly what I need. I’m going to use it. How can I use this to benefit me? How can I learn from this? How can I be grateful for this?”
And then, you’ll let it go.
Conclusion
You can filter out things that are no longer congruent with your future self.
You can change the creation of what you’re doing and who you’re becoming.
You can raise the bar.
You can change your character.
You can stop being aware of so many things that previously consumed your life.
You can look forward to the future.
You can see more and more of your future self.
You can see more and more peak experiences.
You can have more and more incredible opportunities.
It’s a beautiful process.
What do you see?
What do you want to see?
What should you no longer see?
Go write down the answers to these. It’ll change your life.
Ready To Upgrade?
(These tools are based on my book Be Your Future Self now, which was recently the #1 book in Korea.)
