Describing Your Best Possible Future
Posted by Sietse on 9/17/09 • Categorized as Achieving goals,Happiness •
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Take a moment today to sit down and briefly describe your best possible future. Imagine everything goes exactly the way you want, realistically. Also make sure it’s brief enough to put it in your pocket or wallet, so you can carry it around.
Researcher Laura King from the Southern Methodist University found out, in a study called The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals, that those who described their best possible future ended up significantly happier after three months than people who were asked to do the same with a traumatic experience, or even by just writing down their plans for the day.
Describing your best possible future will not only be likely to make you a happier person, it also challenges you to actually think about what you want your life to look like and makes you consciously thinking about how to achieve that state.
Photo by asifthebes
P.S. to my last point: the thing about dreams worth remembering ))
Good point. Can become sort of a fascinating game, however, with the outcome of much more than mere entertainment.
And again, another forgotten lesson from our childhood where we were free to fantasize about what we want to become, not focusing on any limitations. It’s just that, at some point, we tend to dream less – meaning both the amount of time spent on that and the ‘size’ of dreams.
There’s a funny thing about it. When trying to imagine your most wonderful future, it’s so much easier to slip to the negative track and think about what you don’t want or fear than about your true desire – as if it is something more ‘natural’ for us than happiness… Wonder why is that… Therefore it would be of use if you suggested here some simple tricks helping to drive one’s mind off these tracks. And one of them, I guess, is just reminding yourself that you have no limits here, trying to feel this through and truly enjoy it – like a game indeed :)
Any more ideas?