Future Reality
Sunday, June 12, 2011 at 12:19 How to Make Your Dreams Come True suggests that once the vision has “taken” it’s sufficient to revise the Present and Future Realities once a week.
Different people will probably come up with different ways of doing this, but at the moment I am finding that it is very powerful to re-type and revise my Future Reality first thing every morning, and to re-type and revise my Present Reality every evening. This seems to provide the impetus to work towards the vision throughout the day. In fact this impetus is strong enough for me to no longer feel the need to ask the question “Is this what I want to be doing?”
My initial version of my Future Reality was written on 27 May. Since then it has expanded, contracted to one sentence and expanded again. Here are the two versions for comparison:
27 May
I am living a very well-ordered life in which the principles of “How To Make Your Dreams Come True” are put fully into practice. I love creating and everything I set my hands to comes to fruition effortlessly. I am extremely healthy and fit. I have a close circle of friends. All this makes me feel alive, full of energy and peaceful.
12 June
I am living a powerful, well-ordered and creative life in which everything gets done when it needs to be done. I’m supported in my work by a tidy and efficient office. The Dreams Manual has been a great success and I am teaching its principles through seminars, teleconferences and the internet, while living entirely by those principles myself. I am extremely fit and full of energy and enjoy long-distance walking, yoga and physical challenges (including passing the 100 push-ups challenge). I run a highly successful blog for ……. and this has resulted in a lot of new members. I speak and read French with fluency. I naturally attract people who share my enthusiasm for living and this is resulting in some amazing friendships. I love the sense of freedom and achievement that all this gives me.
Once I’ve written today’s Present Reality this evening, I’ll post a similar comparison.
Reader Comments (9)
Perhaps this is an example of your metaphor of "you can't eat everything on the menu." Perhaps if I climb a little higher up the hill I could find some common themes that would be more suited to the FR exercise. (I have started keeping a separate FR at work, one for each of my big projects, and then one 'bigger' one encompassing attitudes and habits.)
I LOVE the idea of writing the FR in the morning and the CR in the evening. That sounds like a great idea.
I agree Mike. I'm implementing this change today.
Mark:
So crazy - I'm getting excited reading your future vision!
That's interesting. The same applies to Catholic prayer, and I expect Seraphim will tell us that it applies to Othodox prayer as well (that's Orthodox as in Russian and Greek Orthodox, etc).
With respect to your current future vision, do you still hold to the 3-5 year plan?
What I don't know is whether in 3-5 years time I will write up my Present Reality one evening and it will be exactly the same as my Future Reality.
More likely I think the Future Reality will continue to evolve so it's always ahead of me.
Some mentors call it the Wheel of Life. Covey calls them roles. They usually list 5-12 areas. I don't know if Mark has somethings similar. As you do your review, focus on each area in turn.
A perfectly-balanced life has a perfectly-balance wheel, but in the short-term it's hardly ever balanced. In the mid- and long-term, over-doing an area is just as un-balancing as short-changing one.
Don't worry about finding the perfect list. As you do the exercise for a few months, you'll see areas that need to be split and ones that can be combined to meet your current life.
I did not have time to re-read all comments and articles, so I'm sorry if this has already been asked. Are you still doing your daily "What's better?"
Yes, currently I add to it throughout the day, but I'm still experimenting with the best times of day to do the various bits of the Dreams methods.