By now, I hope you’re fired up and ready to make a lasting difference in your life. The question now is, how? It might seem like an easy question at first, but let’s face it; it’s pretty hard to know how you’re going to make that change. There are so many things to do, and so many different pieces of conflicting advice out there for making changes, which makes my head spin just thinking about them.
Raise your hand if you’ve been there. I know I have. Kinda makes you want to just forget about this whole participating in your own becoming, huh?
But what if there was a way to clear the bullshit and know exactly what change you’re going to make? What if you could start achieving those dreams while others continue wandering around, not sure of what they want to do? Could you imagine the sheer joy of doing what you know you are meant to do, and have people congratulating you for doing such an awesome job of it?
Guess what?
It is possible. Just by tweaking the way we think, we can know the change we want to make and get right to it. Excited? Me too. Let’s get started.
Asking the Right Questions
When I first knew I was moving to New York for a few months, I was so excited. Aptly thought of as the city where dreams come true, I couldn’t help but think of all the different possibilities for learning, traveling, personal growth etc. Yet two months in, as much as I’ve enjoyed living in NYC, somehow I’m feeling slightly unsatisfied. Even though I’ve managed to do quite a few things including traveling to new places like Philadelphia and Vermont, gaining 7-8 lbs of muscle and achieving some of my goals, I couldn’t help but feel like I should be doing more.
When I first moved to NYC, I was prompted by a whole barrage of questions like, what do I want to in NYC? Where do I want to go? Who do I want to meet?
As excited as I was, with all these questions I became more confused, because as it turns out, whenever we make a change, we are entering into the unknown, which naturally prompts a lot of questions and raises a lot of our insecurities. Herein lies the biggest problem most people (including myself) face when making a change, we don’t know how to begin. With so many questions bouncing around in my head, I kept putting off answering them because I knew answering them would require a lot of work. After all, with that many questions there, which one should I answer first?
However, that question in itself is asking the wrong question. In order to successfully make positive change, the first step we must take isn’t answering the first question, but instead identifying the right question to ask. When we focus on answering the right question rather than trying to answer all the random questions, then we can truly start to solve the problems we are facing, and achieve what we want to and start making permanent change.
Beginning with the End in Mind
So how do we find the right question? Given so many different situations, it seems logical that there might be different questions for each situation. But that’s not true. There is only one. What is your end objective? Beginning with the end in mind is essential because like a driver who doesn’t know his end destination, unless you know yours, you’ll never get there. Let’s continue my own NYC example from above. My issue was even though I had goals; I did not identify what my end objective, so I felt like I had no purpose. Therefore, no matter what I did, it would have been very difficult to feel like I accomplished anything of note. Instead of haphazardly working on a few things without an end in mind, I should have first established only one or two “ends” and worked hard to achieve those, which would have then given me a sense of accomplishment.
Now that we understand the importance of beginning with the end in mind, given we’re all here trying to improve ourselves, let’s put this into a “participate in your own becoming” context. When we choose to participate in our own becoming it’s because we believe we have not yet reached our full potential, and want to become the best we can be. Thus, our end objective is to become who we want to be.
Defining the Essence of the End
However, simply knowing the end is not enough, we must understand the end. This can be achieved by defining the essence of this “end.” In the previous article, we established the essence of who we are as what we know and what we do, therefore by the same logic, the essence of who we want to be is what we want to know and what we want to do. By recognizing the importance of acquiring new knowledge and applying it, we then truly understand the essence of our end.
Although we only applied it to once example here, we can really apply the “beginning with the end in mind” concept to any situation. Whether you are creating a blog, running a business, or trying to make an everyday change, by applying this concept to your situation you can rid yourself of all the non-essential tasks and truly focus on what matters. So, what’s one of the ends you want to achieve? In the next article, we’ll be discussing how to achieve the essence of your end, so prove that you know your own ends to yourself by writing it down and leaving a comment below!
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