ESSAY OF Journal 7 Min 350 words

|07|knowing your why and PRACTICING COURAGE in the FACE of FEAR

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph

over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who

conquers that fear.”

Nelson Mandela

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Where We Have Been In Chapter 6, you learned all about finding exceptions to problem-saturated stories. Through the example of Angela’s unexamined personal narrative, you learned how the narrative process is engineered to discover these exceptions to problems. Following her process set the stage for you to reflect on your personal narrative to find the places where the problem did not achieve total domination. You were also invited to expand your non-cog vernacular, understanding that there are many words you can use to describe your strengths and that the Big 7 is just an instructive starting place. Lastly, you were taught how to creatively explore finding exceptions to your problems and learned how they represent the entry-way into updating your own personal narrative and a more empowered sense of self.

Where We Are Going In this chapter, we are going to focus on the importance of cultivating courage as a necessary component of creating a life that is aligned with your greatest gifts, values, and dreams. We will also be highlighting the fact that courage is, like Nelson Mandella said, “not the absence of fear.” This statement will be the founding principle under which we operate in this chapter and going forward. Furthermore, this principle will anchor your exploration of both fear and courage as you uncover and energize your personal “why”; it will connect you to your sense of purpose and your dreams that will occupy the cornerstone of your courage.

You will explore the astonishing power of your imagination’s ability to help you manage your fear as you engage it through visualization. Moreover you will learn a visualization technique that focuses on “feeling” yourself in your desired future instead of “seeing” yourself as is typically taught. This technique will allow you to mobilize your unconscious mind as it acts as your personal GPS, leading you toward your desired destination (Figure 1).

Gearing Up » To understand how courage is often most available when you’re out of your

comfort zone or experiencing fear

» To define and build the connection to your personal “why”

» To leverage the power of your imagination as you activate your unconscious mind to move you in the direction of your desired future

» To seek your courage compass and appreciate the way you uniquely embody courage

Figure 1. As you learn to “feel” yourself rather than “see” yourself,

you’ll have what you need to move

toward your destination.

Neuroscience is also discussed as it relates to self-talk; you’ll begin to understand the importance of speaking in the affirmative as you again activate the conscious and unconscious mind in increasing the chances that your goals become reality. Additionally, you will find your “courage compass.” Because things like listening to music or finding a powerful quote, poem, speech, or even a work of art can be such a powerful and emotionally motivating experience, we will be encouraging you to find something that gets your head in the right space and speaks to who you are and what you love.

PRACTICING COURAGE IN THE FACE OF FEAR | 118 Lastly, you will begin to define your own way of practicing courage in your life; in particular, we will be giving additional recommendations to those of you who consider yourselves to be introverts. Power and courage come in many shapes and forms; it is important to honor everyone’s voice, and only you get to define your own.

“Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I am doing what I need to do.”

Cheryl Strayed

Courage as the Route to Defining Your Why Courage is not about being heroic. It’s about being fully you… minus the lampshade. Real, everyday courage means many things to many people: It may mean moving forward during those times when all you want to do is stop and hide. It may mean risking looking or feeling vulnerable, exposed, and foolish. It may often involve feeling unprepared and sometimes like an imposter or an outsider. Real courage may mean speaking up when your heart is pounding and your tongue is tripping over your every word. It may mean doing the things that make you most nervous. For some, courage may mean sharing their creative, weird, or outside of the box thinking. It may mean being authentic, even when it would be easier to act like everybody else. Courage is working harder and seeing projects through, until they’re complete, even when all you want to do is quit; for some that might mean having the courage to ask for help. It may mean turning in an assignment that is not perfect, and then managing the feelings of self-doubt that flood in. Real courage may mean continuing to put forth effort in the face of academic insecurity and reaching out for social connection from others when fear is working overtime to convince them that isolation is safer.

What does courage mean to you? And, just as importantly, why? Why are you willing to practice a growth mindset, and why are you willing to be uncomfortable? What makes this all worth it?

Courage is about asking why: Why do you want to graduate? Why did you choose college as part of your route to live your best life? What will you most be serving and why does being in service to that pursuit, that value, that goal, or that community provide the most meaning for you?

Dim the Fear, Not the Light You can’t have a conversation about courage without including a conversation about fear. Throughout this course, we have repeatedly emphasized how necessary it is to continue to nudge yourself out of your comfort zone. This chapter will not stray from that message. You see, people are often mistaken about what goes into courage. Some have come to believe the notion that true bravery and strength of character are defined by an absence of fear. It’s all around us, especially in popular culture: just think of the last action and adventure movie you saw. Most likely the plot revolves around a hero who, when faced with imminent death or destruction, boldy swooped in and defeated the villain. Although it can be great fun to watch, it bears no resemblance to the actual practice of courage (Figure 2).

Figure 2. It can be fun to watch action heroes fearlessly prevail in the face of

danger, but this is not what courage is.

PRACTICING COURAGE IN THE FACE OF FEAR | 119 In our day to day lives, there are many stressful, anxiety provoking, and downright scary things to deal with. And, often in response to those things, we feel scared. This is exactly why this course exists, but it is not to say that by following the narrative coaching protocol you will eliminate fear. This simply is not the case. Fear will never completely die, nor should it. It actually serves some pretty major evolutionary needs (like legitimate physical safety, for one). But, as you know, it also has a tendency to completely take over. Fear, however, can be addressed and minimized so that it does not win to the extent that it immobilizes you or diminishes your own radiance—that light within you that tugs at you to live more courageously and fully, as you dreamed you would when you were just a child.

A fellow coach once asked a student who was edging closer to her fear, “Are you finally ready to take the lampshade off?” Each of us at one time or another wears a lampshade. In an effort to stay safe and hidden and to fit in, many of us dim the source of light that makes us most brilliant and unique. When choosing comfort over vulnerability, we fail to shine our light on a world that needs more of the best of us. We are going to be imagining a life without your lampshade, but we have to start by acknowledging fear (Figure 3).

Figure 3. When we focus too much on being safe, staying hidden, and fitting

in, we dim the light that makes us

brilliant and unique.

WATCH THIS:

Finding Your Authentic Voice, Even If It’s Soft After talking so much about courage, it feels necessary to address the fact that many of the adjectives used to describe courage may lean heavily in the direction of the extrovert over the introvert. But voices of courage come in all different forms and volumes.

The core of this course is about enabling you to find your authentic voice. It may express itself in the way you look, feel, and sound, and it may be very different from the voice of the person sitting next to you. Ultimately it is only you who can define what you look like, feel like, and sound like when you’re in power. So, it is for this reason we share this video:1

The Power of Introverts | Susan Cain

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Figure 4. Your courage compass energizes you and gives you strength

to face the challenges ahead.

Courage Compass a song, poem, or speech that

energizes and inspires you and gets your blood pumping

Finding Your Courage Compass As you begin the journey to becoming more clear about who you are and what you value, you will grow closer to defining what is most personally rewarding for you, and that will mirror what matters to you most. Between now and the day you graduate, you are going to be facing many obstacles; some will bring with them heavy and uncomfortable doses of fear and self-doubt. Should you find this happening, you may see your story growing ever more problem- saturated as fear attempts to derail you. What we’ve taught you so far will go a long way in supporting your ability to put fear in its place, but there’s one more tool you can add to your arsenal.

You have learned that in order to rewire your brain, it’s critical to both activate your imagination and invoke your emotions. Finding your personal courage compass—a song, poem, or speech that energizes and inspires you and gets your blood pumping—is a powerful way to support the process of discovering, celebrating, and claiming your why (Figure 4). Alternatively, a quote, movie scene, or even a work of art can be a powerful courage compass.

When fear attempts to steal your thunder, deprive you of joy, or cause you to slip that lampshade back on, having a go-to source of inspiration can be the difference between cowering out or giving it a try and totally nailing it. Find one song, poem, speech, or anything else that gets you pumped, or create a playlist or collection that shifts your mood and ignites your power, your passion, and your belief in yourself and what’s possible. Can you imagine Rocky without the theme song? Neither can we! What do you use as a compass when you need courage to keep you headed in the right direction?

Facing Angela’s Fears When Angela first arrived on campus, she was convinced that she simply didn’t fit the mold. In her mind, “the mold” was represented all around her by how other students behaved. It appeared to her that everyone else just naturally fit-in: They had plenty of friends, looked the part, and were well-prepared for college life. As she watched other students, a narrative ran through her mind—one that was deeply steeped in problems, with anxiety, fear, and self-doubt dominating her thoughts and her ability to see things clearly.

She was in the process of change, though, and now as she watched other students she was able to practice all that she was learning about herself. She coveted the opportunity to apply all that she was learning as she sat and watched students moving about between her creative writing and math classes. As she was becoming more aware of her self-talk and cognitive frame, and she had started intentionally interrupting her negative self-talk, she noticed that she did, in fact, have a strong confirmation bias.

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Getting Closer to Your Why Getting to your why is an important process for you to explore as a college student. Along the journey, from where you are now to where you ultimately want to be, there will be many stumbling blocks that may cause you to question or doubt whether all the effort is worth it. A problem-saturated narrative may try to convince you that it is not, or that you are not. This is exactly why connecting to a powerful personal why and commiting to a practice of countering a disempowered narrative is so important. When stress, overwhelm, fear, and anxiety come knocking, know that it is through your ability to connect to and imagine your why that you can keep them at bay.

To be clear, you may not at this juncture in your life know exactly what your why is, in any sort of detailed way. This is okay. What’s more important is that you want the opportunity to cultivate a dream. College is a time for exploration; it’s a time for learning more thoroughly who you are in order to be able to confidently know what you want—and why.

“At our essence, we are most motivated by knowing why we do things.”

Simon Sinek

The more she purposely broadened her lens and pushed back on her distorted perceptions, the more she saw that other students were also alone and not always epitomizing the college mold. It was not as though she wanted other students to be struggling, but seeing that they also faced hardships normalized her feelings, which provided some welcome comfort to her.

When feelings of isolation or anxiety showed up, she would practice breathing and do some journaling to acknowledge and release them. When things were really rough, though, like when she would sit alone at a campus event or when she would struggle with her math homework, fear and self-doubt would once again take center stage. And even though she had been practicing all that she learned, she did not always see how earning a degree was the right path for her. Thoughts of dropping out were still lurking in the back of her mind.

She was, however, super excited to look for her courage compass. She played songs, read speeches, and collected so many powerful quotes that spoke to her that she decided to house them all in a folder on her desktop she labeled “Inspiration.” They all meant something to her, but it was when she was listening to and watching the video for the song “Brave,” by Sara Bareilles, that she felt something different: she felt her energy completely shift in a very positive way.2 She felt enlivened, and was pulled into a much better headspace—a headspace that reminded her that life is precious, fun, and begging to be lived at its most joyous and fullest. For her, the reminder to “be brave” was a reminder to risk moving away from the sidelines of her own life and instead step up and jump in!

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Walking Toward Your Purpose Recently, there has been a lot of collective conversation about the importance of everyone from CEOs to students to know their why. Knowing your why—in action—is a mighty thing, as you are about to see:

WATCH THIS:

Know Your Why

In this video, inspirational comedian Michael Jr. says, “When you know your why, you’re walking towards your purpose.”3 This is clearly evident in an audience member’s rendition of “Amazing Grace,” which is powerfully enhanced once he connects to his why. His second rendition is drawn from his passion, depth, and heart, and his connection to the lyrics. The song was transformed because he thought of something personal and breathed his imagination into it.

Knowing Who You Are Here’s the thing, there are few people for whom from a young age knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up. There is a reason there are about a billion books written on the subject, and it is precisely why we will not try to manufacture a process that promises to provide you the power to instantaneously discover your own purpose. It is often the process of inquiry that provides the most valuable and fertile ground for discovering your own path.

In discovering your personal why, a good place to start is to get to know yourself better, or knowing your “who.” You have spent the previous six chapters doing this, so you are now well prepared.

In order to better know your who, it may be helpful to look back at yourself when you were a child: What did you love to think about, tinker with, and explore? What activities did you love—the ones in which you’d lose all track of time? What musings and images filled your daydreams? Were you the kid who was most likely to be out on the field in the midst of all the action, or were you more likely to be at your uncle’s side in the garage, taking stuff apart and figuring out how to put it back together? This is not to say that if you played third base on your Little League team you should set your sights on being a professional baseball player. Maybe instead it helps you realize that you loved being part of a team, being outdoors, and the thrill of competition, or that you did well under pressure (Figure 5).

Figure 5. What you found passion in during your childhood might reflect

who you are today.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Dolly Parton

PRACTICING COURAGE IN THE FACE OF FEAR | 123 In her TedTalk, “Golden Threads—Finding Purpose in Life,” Katherine Jackson talks about how hard it can be to know exactly what your ultimate purpose is.4 In exploring your golden threads, you can start to get curious about what most captivated you when you were young, and what still remains captivating today.

To help you identify your “golden thread,” we have broken the concept down into three categories:

» Joy: What both brings you joy and expresses your talents (it can be helpful to think back to when you were a child to guide this question)?

» Values: What are your core values (your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles)?

» Legacy: What do you want to be remembered for?

Golden Threads the joy and value in your life along

with the legacy you want to be remembered for that reveal your

purpose

» Dependability » Reliability » Loyalty » Commitment » Open-mindedness » Consistency » Honesty » Efficiency » Innovation » Creativity

» Good humor » Compassion » Adventure » Motivation » Positivity » Optimism » Passion » Respect » Fitness » Courage

I want to be remembered for...

» Animals » Children » Sports » Science » Literature » Helping others » Psychology » Teaching » Math » Health » Fitness » History » The outdoors

» Technology » Making forts » Playing with blocks » Baking » Cooking » Traveling » Making people laugh » Writing » Exploring » Learning » Reading » Acting » Dancing

» Singing » Meeting people » Gardening » Music » Making up stories » Telling stories » Medicine » Spirituality » Fashion » Religion » Philosophy » Fixing things

Following are examples for each of these categories:

» Education » Perseverance » Patriotism » Service to others » Environmentalism » Personal freedom » Autonomy » Financial wealth » Fame » Hard work

» being a kind and compassionate person.

» being a creative and innovative person.

» taking great risks that made a difference for my community, nation, or the world.

» being financially successful.

» being a leader.

» being a great parent.

» being a team player.

» being a good provider.

» being responsible.

» making people laugh.

» helping those less fortunate than myself.

» making art that changed the way people see the world.

» my music.

» tarting a business, or being part of starting a business.

» being an advocate for those less fortunate.

» my engagement in social justice.

» standing up to power.

» the things I built.

» my scholarly contributions.

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Finding Angela’s Why She wished that she was one of those people who always knew what they wanted to do—whether it was fly planes, be a teacher, or be a founder for a tech start-up. She had the pat answer she gave when talking to others, but it in her private moments, when the temptation to quit was at its greatest, that “why” didn’t do much to motivate her. She still felt lost. However, instead of allowing this lost feeling to embolden her anxiety and self- doubt, she would remember to pull out her journal.

Prior to writing in her journal, she knew that she needed to first feel more grounded, calm, and centered. To do this, she practiced the short meditations she learned earlier, and let the meditation guide’s voice lead her through the process. Once finished, she grabbed her pen and got down to work. Taking into account all that she had learned, here is what she wrote:

“The presence of fear is an important marker for an opportunity to practice courage. Sitting in the unknown and working to acknowledge and manage fear is pretty courageous. Own your courage, Angela.”

“There are a lot of things that I already know about myself and who I am becoming that can serve as a beacon to light my path forward—these are my golden threads.”

“Getting closer to discovering my ‘why’ will start with exploring what’s important to me, even if I do not yet have a clear sense of exactly what I will be doing in the future and what my future career will be.”

“Finding my courage compass will be both important and fun. I need to shake things up, move this energy, and lift my mood!”

Angela then considered her golden thread and copied this into her journal for ”joy”:

“What brings me joy and expresses my talents (think back to when I was a child)?”

“Helping people brings me joy and it is something I am good at. I am a good listener and I feel like when I am being there for other people, I am at my best. I don’t know if this is a talent, but it is something I care about. I was always that kid in class who looked after the kid who was hurt, or crying, or falling behind in some way.”

She wrote this in her journal for “values”:

“What are my core values (my fundamental beliefs and guiding principles)?”

“My core values are compassion, honesty, and service to others.”

Finally, she entered this for “legacy”:

“What do I want to be remembered for?”

“I want to be remembered for being kind, reliable, and helpful to those in need. I also want to be remembered for being a good provider, specifically for helping my family financially. What this means is that not only do I want to find meaningful work, I want to find work that pays well.”

Imagining Who You Want to Be Activating your imagination as you envision your future self will give you the opportunity to inquire into how you feel when you’re expressing your joy and talents. You’ll be able to envision yourself living in alignment with your values, and living a life you can be proud of and that you most want to be remembered for.

It may be very difficult to know what you want to do careerwise, and to create specific goals to that end. If you find that to be the case for yourself, it will be important to focus less on visualizing exactly what you will be doing in the future, and more on your values and what you want to be remembered for—as in, who you want to be. For instance, you may not be able to forecast the job you want, but you may feel certain about a value you want to promote, embody, and experience, like freedom, creative expression, equity, or abundance.

Your values and principles are a critical starting place for this process. If knowing more details in greater clarity is overwhelming, knowing these will represent important guide posts along your journey; they will represent “where you want to go.”

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Ikigai: A Reason for Being Some people find that the Ikigai is a powerful tool for helping them move closer to knowing their why and preparing for their future (Figure 6). Ikigai is a Japanese word which roughly translates to “a reason for being.” From Ikigai, we get a sense of purpose and meaning and a feeling of well-being.

Figure 6. The Ikigai can be a powerful tool for helping you discover your

purpose.

WATCH THIS:

How to Ikigai | Tim Tamashiro | TEDxYYC

Ikigai a tool that helps you discover your sense of purpose and meaning and

gives you a feeling of well-being; Japanese for a reason for being

In the following video, author Tim Tamashiro provides an overview of Ikigai and how to create your own:5

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Connecting Values to Your Why Breaking down your why into three stages can help you visualize your future self by creating smaller, more manageable goals that work toward your ultimate goal:

Figure 7. Imagining the value may reveal what kind of work you want to do.

With all three stages, you do not need to know exactly what you will be doing, where you will be living, or what your career will be. However, you will need enough imagination to connect to the experience of joy, the expression of your talents, and/or the feeling of doing something that rewards you enough financially while being something you will be proud to be remembered for. Again, throughout this course we have continually emphasized the importance of cultivating a deep sense of who you are. Knowing your why is also founded on this because you can only know your why, when it starts with a greater sense of knowing your “who.” As stated earlier, “where you want to go” may be less about the exact role you want to occupy or your exact physical address, and more about bringing detail and nuance even if where you want to go is founded more on a value or principle that matters to you—like freedom—than on a title.

Bringing detail and nuance may be about connecting to a picture in your mind that represents the value. For example, if you want to do humanitarian work, maybe you’re imagining the smile of a child, or the embrace of a family (Figure 7). If you want to do creative work, imagine holding your paintbrush, or walking into a gallery. Perhaps being financially rewarded for your hard work or talents is important to you; in this case, imagine going to the bank and depositing a check, with the sum you hope to make, to clarify that the service you provided was highly valued.

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Angela’s Ikigai Angela liked the idea of using the Ikigai as it seemed to encompass and integrate all the necessary questions she needed to consider. It would help guide her toward a future that enlisted so much of who she was and who she was hoping to become. It was both profound yet straight forward. Figure 8 is her initial stab at this novel framework.

Figure 8. Angela’s Ikigai will help guide her to her future.

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Visualizing Yourself Embodying Your Why When engaging in visualization it is important to choose an event, activity, or moment you plan to achieve that represents success to you, however you uniquely define it. It may be accepting a job offer, maybe it’s receiving notification that you have made the Dean’s list, or maybe it’s walking across the stage to receive your diploma. Most importantly, make sure that the event is emotionally powerful and rewarding to you and represents a moment in time that highlights the character traits that you have worked hard to cultivate and for which you will be most proud to embody. Here is why: When things get hard (as anything worthwhile always does) we want to run away from the struggle—it’s uncomfortable and unpleasant. Our brains are wired to seek pleasure, so when we are out of our comfort zone, the thought of quitting activates the reward centers in our brain and gives us pleasure. The idea of quitting in the short run can be way more tempting than the idea of pushing through, especially when that pushing through does not activate reward or pleasure. Your “why” needs to replace the “pleasure” that the idea of giving up provides; it needs to provide something that is seriously and personally emotionally rewarding.

The Power Is in Feeling, Not Seeing When most of us think about visualization, we are apt to imagine an exercise wherein we see ourselves from the outside, achieving something positive or important to us. The latest research in brain science, however, tells us that perhaps we have been practicing visualization all wrong. In imagining ourselves in the third person (outside of ourselves) instead of in the first person (inside of ourselves), we are limiting our brain’s ability to access the unconscious mind (Figure 9). Dr. Srini Pillay put it this way:6

“Imagining activates brain regions that can unconsciously map your path to success. Not knowing ‘how’ doesn’t actually matter, since the brain will figure this out once you let it know where you want to go.”

In practice, what this means is that instead of seeing yourself as if you’re on a movie screen, what if you actually saw the movie as you were moving through it, from your very own unique and embodied perspective? In real time, we do not view ourselves in the third person; we experience ourselves from the first person. Most critically, this is how our brain experiences visualization.

Figure 9. We need to visualize ourselves in the first person if we want

to maximize our unconscious mind.

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Our Imaginations to the Rescue We’ve talked a lot about the role of stress and fear in this course, and for good reason. When we are chronically living in a state of stress and anxiety, fear has gone from being an evolutionary savior to a personal foe. As you learned in the previous chapter, chronic stress and fear can literally change the way our brain works in destructive ways that have the effect of compounding the effects of stress in a vicious cycle.7 The good news is that neuroplasticity exists and you can purposefully make choices each day about your mindset and behavior that can help.

One such choice is to activate your imagination, particularly as you explore and get closer to discovering your personal why. The following video illustrates the role of imagination, specifically how visualization can be practiced as a dynamic tool.8 When combined with a compelling personal why, imagination may provide the fuel as you move toward your higher purpose with more courage. Whether you actually do something or imagine doing something, you brain does not register the difference—this is why visualization is so powerful. This scientific insight can go a long way in manifesting what you want into what you actually achieve.

Practicing Visualization Ideally, in the first two weeks of practicing visualization, you should make time to do so five to 10 times to activate your brain to properly support visualization. Practice in the first person, and use your 90 day, 1 year, or 5 year goal. Following are some additional suggestions for getting the most out of visualization:

Use all of your senses: As you envision and feel yourself in the moment, enacting the steps that lead up to your “why,” what do you feel, hear, see, smell, and touch? It’s important to put this process into a logical bodily sequence. For example, if you were preparing to run a race, you might first experience yourself tying your shoelaces, then warming up and stretching, then moving up to the start line and taking your position. The next experience you would have would be hearing the loud explosion of the starting-gun going off as you propel your body forward, and so on. Whatever the moment, invest in making it as realistic as possible. Then sequence what you would be experiencing moment by moment as you transition through the visualization.

WATCH THIS:

The Scientific Power of Thought

PRACTICING COURAGE IN THE FACE OF FEAR | 130 Activate your emotions: This is important. Choose emotions that are in response to something meaningful and positive for you. Maybe you’re receiving an award or being offered a job or promotion, maybe you’re surrounded by friends and family, or maybe you’re publishing a book (Figure 10). The point is, the emotion should be in response to something that matters to you and that is possible to achieve in the amount of time you’ve selected for the exercise. Make it personal and emotionally compelling in a positive way.

Connect yourself physically: By imagining and experiencing your physical response, you are activating your brain’s propensity to believe what your imagination is feeding it. Are you celebrating or throwing your fists into the air? Are you shaking someone’s hand? Are you clinking a champagne glass? Are you hugging someone? Take the time to feel yourself enacting those behaviors. This, along with your emotions, activates your unconscious mind’s ability to support your visualization. It replaces the reward of giving up with the reward of something that is of equal or greater pleasure.

All this hard work always begins with your thoughts and your feelings, which are very much embedded in your self- talk. You will find that you get better at visualization as you practice.

Figure 10. When practicing visualization, choose something

important to you that will draw out

your emotions.

Peaceful Visualization It’s important to remember that visualization works best when you are completely relaxed. If you are feeling tense or distracted, or you are managing a lot of thoughts or emotions, visualization is less likely to be effective. For this reason, refer back to Chapter 4 and review the breathing techniques or guided meditations. Practice one of these methods so that you are completely present to the experience and are able to optimize visualization.

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Visualizing Angela’s Future Angela scheduled time in the evening to start practicing visualizing her why. She knew that before she could do this she would need to imagine herself in the future. For now, she simply started by imagining herself five years from now buying her parents the luxury recliners they had always wanted but never expected to ever have. She knew this would not be a dream for everyone, but she thought back to how her mom and dad would always collapse after work into their old, dusty recliners and watch their favorite shows together. They had sacrificed so much for her, and all she wanted to do was provide them comfort and make them happy, and she knew that those chairs would mean a lot at the end of a long work day. She hoped that this would represent the first of many comforts she would be able to provide for her parents, once she was earning a good paycheck. Imagining this made her happy and motivated her to stick things out when fear, anxiety, and self-doubt tried to convince her to give up.

Before getting too deep into her visualization, she led herself through a short breathing exercise. She knew that if she had any chance of really optimizing the visualization, she would need to rid herself of the stress of her day. After the breathing exercise, she got started. She began to visualize telling her parents that she had a surprise for them, and then, in sequence, she visualized herself moving through the following steps, as if she were experiencing it in real time:

1. She could see the look of confusion on her parent’s faces as she told them she wanted to drive them somewhere but that it was a surprise. She could feel the excitement.

2. She could see and feel herself driving them to the furniture store, refusing to answer their questions and saying that they would have to wait and see.

3. She then experienced herself getting out of the car once they had arrived, seeing her parents still confused at the sight of a store they typically wouldn’t have money to shop at.

4. She felt herself holding the store’s big glass door for her parents. She felt the weight of the door and the wind from the store’s air conditioning hit her face.

5. She experienced herself leading her parents to the recliner section and the feeling of anticipation and happiness as her parents began to figure out what she was up to.

6. Finally, she experienced herself telling her parents that she had saved up enough money to buy them new recliners.

7. She felt them hug her, and she felt the tears welling up in her eyes.

Angela still was not sure exactly what career she would choose that would enable her to afford two nice recliners on top of all the other expenses she would have, but she knew that by activating her unconscious mind like this she was going to trust that she would stay the course, even when things got hard. She was also growing more confident because of her self awareness; she was in touch with what she cared about and what brought her joy, and she knew her core values and the non-cognitive competencies she needed to continue to develop to make this dream a reality.

With this new knowledge, she decided that it couldn’t hurt to visit the Career Services department at her college. She wondered what industries might be a good fit for her. She thought maybe a nurse or a counselor, but she wanted to talk with someone so that she could start to do some research.

What she was really learning, though, was how to start connecting her current actions, beliefs and behaviors to her longer term goals. For example, whenever she struggled with math, she would visualize the look on her parent’s faces and hugging them. This helped her to persevere and move past the temporary discomfort, practicing self-control instead of throwing her text book across the room.

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References 1 Cain, Susan (2012). “The Power of Introverts.” TED Talks. Retrieved from https://www.

youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4

2 Bareilles, Sara (2013). “Brave.” From The Blessed Unrest. Epic Records. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUQsqBqxoR4

3 Michael Jr. (2017). “Know Your Why.” Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1ytFB8TrkTo

4 Jackson, Katherine (2014). “Golden Threads—Finding Purpose in Life.” TEDx Talks. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvxvpe5meQw

5 Tamashiro, Tim (2018). “How to Ikigai.” TEDxYYC. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pk-PcJS2QaU

6 Pillay, Srini (2014). “To Reach Your Goals, Make a Mental Movie.” The Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/03/to-reach-your-goals-make-a-mental-movie

7 Bergland, Christopher (2014). “Chronic Stress Can Damage Brain Structure and Connectivity.” Psychology Today.

8 “The Scientific Power of Thought.” AsapSCIENCE. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-v-IMSKOtoE

Expanding Your Future Self You matter and your dreams matter. Connecting your daily actions, beliefs and habits to a larger vision—whatever that may be—is critically important, especially when the demands of life and the feelings that accompany them grow daunting. Even though Angela’s personal “why” does not currently represent something as huge as, say, curing cancer or ruling the world, it is significant and personally compelling to her; compelling enough that each time she is tempted to give up, she is willing and motivated to push through. We encourage you do do the same. Her why did not only represent what she wants, but who she is. She is learning at great depth what brings her joy and meaning, what her core values are, and what she wants to be remembered for. She, like you, will learn more along the way, and as she continues to deepen and expand her vision for her future self, she can continue to update her why and return to visualization when fear threatens her ability to do so. Remember Angela’s courage compass: Sara Bareilles does not sing about not being afraid, she sings about being brave.

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