And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself? ~Rumi
Have you ever heard of the streetlight effect? There are variations of this parable that gets told to demonstrate the streetlight effect.
Imagine you are walking down the street on a beautiful spring evening and you run into a friend who seems to be looking for something under the streetlight. You ask, what are you looking for? He tells you that he lost his keys and he’s trying to find them. Being the helpful person you are, you start looking for them too. After sometime you ask him, where did you lose your keys? He tells you that he lost them in his house. You exclaim, so, what makes you think you will find them here? He responds, “there’s better light here.”
While you might think you would never do something so naive. We seem to do this often. We look in the places where there is light. We look in the familiar places thinking we may find what we are looking for. It might be that we are afraid to look in the dark places or we just don’t know where to look.
I am fascinated by navigation systems and I think they make an interesting metaphor for life. Usually a navigation system (or your favorite navigation app) asks you two main questions: Where are you NOW? and Where do you want to go? Once you provide those two answers, it will show you multiple routes to get where you want to go. These days you don’t even need to enter where you are, your phone app will usually locate where you are!
While this metaphor seems to offer the first two questions most of us want to know: Where am I NOW? and Where do I want to go or be? When it comes to our life, it doesn’t seem that simple! There are tools that could help us locate where we are now if we only start looking!
The challenge usually lies in the busy lives we lead coupled with so many distractions and an attention span that gets shorter by the day. It is like a spinning wheel that prevents us from being curious! It prevents us from paying attention, taking a closer look at our life and getting courageously curious.
We once were courageously curious. As kids, we have this vast imagination and the curiosity to discover, explore and pay attention. Our children reminds us of the curious beings we once were. My 2 year old favorite word is Why?!
As we get older, we lose our sense of curiosity or our curiosity muscle gets weaker. We stop asking questions as we are too busy finding answers. We sometimes hear this voice in the back of our heads saying, “don’t rock the boat!” or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” so we end up settling for this idea that things are the way they are and there’s nothing we can do to change them. And the most dangerous idea is this idea that we are just the way we are and there’s nothing we can do to change ourselves. There are many more voices (or saboteurs) that tell us “curiosity killed the cat!”.
Have you ever watched a wheel spinning at full speed? It gets harder and harder to see the patterns. It’s hypnotizing! The wheel is just like your life spinning at full speed. It gets harder to notice when it’s going at full speed. Only when you slow down and be still that you realize where you are now. And like your navigation system or your phone app that need to locate where you are, you need to locate where you are now!
Don’t you wish there were a “locate me” tool or app for life that could help you find out where you are now?
Here are a couple of tools to make you more aware of where you are now:
1. Wheel of Life:
The Wheel of Life is a simple tool to evaluate different areas of your life and where you want to focus. It’s a self evaluation tool to find where we think/feel we are NOW and where we want to be.
a. Draw a circle and divide it up into different areas of your life. Keep it to no more than 8 areas. What areas do you choose? (Ex: Health, Family, Career, Finance, etc.)
b. Rank your level of satisfaction for each area on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 for Not Satisfied and 10 for Very Satisfied. Remember you are looking for awareness not accuracy. Go ahead and rank your level of satisfaction.
c. Be honest with yourself. This is a self evaluation tool to understand where you are NOW in different areas of your life.
d. After you rank each area of your life, take a look at the wheel. What do you notice? Imagine you have a flashlight, where do you want to look? What area do you want to focus on? (it could be the ones of your choosing or most important to you)
e. Let’s say you picked health and career for example as areas of your life that you want to focus on. Where do you want to be? What’s the level of satisfaction you want it to be? (For example, you scored the level of satisfaction for health as a 5. Where do you want to be? Maybe an 8 or a 10?)
**Optional: You could also rank the importance of each area on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 for Not Important right now to 10 Very Important right now). All areas of your life are important but what’s important right now?
**Optional: You could use the 4 quadrants by Stephen Covey. The 4 quadrants are urgent and important, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, not urgent and not important.
The last two steps are optional as you don’t need to overthink this. It’s a quick and simple tool to get started and focus on the area that needs your attention right now. Again, think where are you NOW? Also, don’t try to come up with ideas on how to improve your level of satisfaction at this point. You are only scoring your level of satisfaction based on your own self evaluation.
2. Journey lines
This is a self reflection tool where you reflect back on your journey and look for patterns to inform the future.
a. Use a blank sheet of A4 paper and draw a horizontal line across page.
b. The horizontal line represents a timeline (or your journey).
**Imagine you are holding the flashlight, how far back do you want to look? What were the proudest moments in your life? You may choose to add personal or professional events or a combination of the two. This also can be a good tool to reflect on your career for example. What has happened to get to where you are today?
Congratulations! You have now taken the first step to make a change. You are more aware of where you are now and where you want to be. Awareness is the first step.
Part of #flashlight published on leanpub.
