No goals, no problem: Self-improvement without a vision

As part of this whole idea of making decisions with incomplete information, choosing what to do even though we really don’t know what’s going on: that’s something that’s been very helpful for me in self-development, in improving my life.
Because, you know, when I’m in a bad mental state, you really can’t see the big picture, and that seems to be that’s that’s just part of being in a bad mental state: we don’t get a good picture of what our whole life is like.
I mean, you know, you’re in a bad mental state.
You have the feeling that you want to make changes to improve your life.
So then you try to decide, well, OK, how can I make my life better? And everything’s just kind of foggy, because in that bad mental state, we’re gonna be just kind of- it’s just everything is like it’s like a dark cloudy day, and we just can’t see what’s going on.
I mean, even like our feelings have become cloudy, so we can’t really get a picture of “Oh, here is the overall picture of my life.
Here is my life perspective.” Like standing on the mountaintop and surveying your life and saying “Ah, OK, this is the path.
This is where I need to go.”Bbut coming from a dark mental state, it’s more like being, you know, under a storm cloud, maybe even hiding with your head in a cave, and it’s very difficult to really have any idea of what is the best overall picture for life.
I mean, you hear you sometimes hear of this suggestion that, you know, in many ways it’s very reasonable that you start by deciding your goals, your vision for what you want in life.
“Where do you want to be in five years? What do you want your life to look like? Envision your ideal life.
Now, think about how you can get there, and then, starting with the first steps today, start to take steps taking you towards your overall life vision.” So it all sounds very reasonable, and it seems like maybe it’s even an ideal way to make your plan and move forward.
But I’ve found it very difficult when starting out to have some kind of idea of what my life vision should be like.
I mean, it just seems like it’s part of being in a bad state that I don’t have a clear vision.
Maybe if I had a clear vision, I wouldn’t be in such a negative state.
So the idea of working with incomplete information applies here too.
And what I’ve found to be helpful for me is it’s OK to not have the grand vision.
It’s OK to really not have a total life plan, you know, mountaintop picture of “Here’s my path out into the future, and now when I take my steps today, I can see how this is beginning on a path which is leading me towards my life goals.” Instead, working with the incomplete information, working inside the dark cloud, starting inside the dark cloud, if I can just make any kind of adjustments that make my life slightly better.
It’s like a bet.
It’s like a gamble that certain things that I do are likely to lead me to a better position tomorrow.
And maybe tomorrow, I’ll be able to better make a judgement of, you know, what is my bigger picture path.
But for today, just do the tiniest things.
And by setting up, by improving basic systems of living, even though they don’t really directly take me to some grand life vision or achieve some goal or even move me clearly towards achieving a goal, but they just slightly improve the situation, that then I can make my decision later.
I can make the big decisions later.
But just do things today that take me into a better place, or they likely take me to a better place, where I can then make better decisions tomorrow.
So even down, once again, to the very basic things of sleeping well, eating well, exercising, going for a walk, meditating, simply having a moment of silence, and the simple, simple things.
Even though it seems hard to imagine how they can connect to and move towards the big goal, starting from a place of not really knowing what the big goal is, it’s maybe just a matter of making a bet and making a guess that doing these basic good things will lead me to a slightly better position to make bigger decisions tomorrow.
So it’s like starting with the tiniest decisions, putting off the big decisions, but using those little adjustments to then be a setup for being able to make bigger decisions and bigger actions.
So it seems to me like this is one way to sort of navigate out of the dark cloud, starting with those little steps that we can see ahead on the ground.
So once again, I would be curious to hear your experience with this.

#nogoals #novision #startthechange

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