Live powerfully into your future

How about taking the power back and choosing how we want to feel first, then living into that chosen future?

Things happen to us in our lives that affect the way we feel. But, if we begin with an intention of “how we wish to be”, it can be easier to maintain our perspective and own our emotions, without feeling buffeted around by the people and situations we encounter.

We might be at work and feel uncomfortable or anxious when a colleague asks an unexpected question that we don’t know the answer to. We can feel overwhelmed and distracted when there are a lot of tasks to be done and we don’t know where to start. Maybe we have a whole weekend ahead of us with no plans, and our desire to “not waste time” is strong.

Research suggests that people often make choices based on perceived outcomes and the feelings attached to those outcomes. We may take action either to move towards pleasure or to avoid pain.

The desire to avoid pain is often the stronger and more insistent of the two. Our anticipation that something may damage us in some way can hold us back from really going for something. We may believe that we won’t be “safe” if we truly aim for the pleasurable things in life.

Even though the action we want to take isn’t actually life-threatening, it can feel very unsafe when we haven’t done it before. So the drive to keep ourselves safe can shout the loudest, and we may avoid striving for the life we truly desire.

So, how can we guide our feelings?

How can we forecast the internal weather of our emotional experience of life?

Try end day thinking

Let’s choose a destination. How do you want to feel?

It’s a simple question, and yet we often forget to ask ourselves.

If you answer “happy”, that might be a little too general. While we are practising, it is easier to set an intention towards a more specific feeling.

For example, some mornings I start my working day with lots of things I could do. I may feel motivated, yet very quickly go into distraction mode: checking emails, checking social media or browsing online.

So instead, I use a method called end day thinking.

I step away from my desk for a moment and put the list of possible tasks for the day out of my mind. I then imagine myself sitting in front of my evening meal that day and focus my attention on how I want to feel at that point.

For me to feel like I have made the most of my time, and that I have had a “good” day, I visualise the feeling I want to achieve.

Today, I am going to choose the feelings of calm and satisfaction.

Now, I spend a little time making that visualisation clear. I imagine myself sitting down about to eat my meal and sensing the calm and satisfied feelings in my body. It feels attainable.

I then go back to my desk with a clear destination for the day.

I write a list of the tasks that I want to address, and the order in which I want to approach them. All the tasks I choose are somehow associated with attaining a sense of calm and satisfaction later, when I have achieved them.

It is then clear for me to see which activities I want to avoid; those I know from previous experience have not taken me to the calm and satisfied feelings. For example, surfing aimlessly online, or spending hours making the evening meal as an elaborate distraction from the work I know I want to achieve.

So I make a plan, and I bring some of the feelings that I visualised into the now. I choose to approach the work feeling calm.

End day thinking can be used for any chosen time frame. It is self-coaching at its best.

How often have you come back from a holiday feeling like you didn’t get what you had hoped from your time away? Did you set an intention for what you wanted to experience in the first place?

You might not be psychic, but you can approach situations with a desire to achieve something, instead of feeling like life simply happens to you and you are just making the best of what is thrown your way.

You can choose. It only takes a couple of minutes to tune in to what you truly want, and then go for it.

Live powerfully.

You are powerful beyond measure. Have fun with it.