Our Vision Shapes Our Future

Many people gain a sense of who they are from the opinions, perceptions, and paradigms of the people around them. They allow circumstance, conditioning, and the social mirror to mould and form who they are and what they achieve.

The most effective people, however, shape their own future. Instead of letting other people or circumstances determine their destiny, they mentally plan and then physically create their own positive results. What they have in their mind shapes their future.

A study was undertaken at Yale University in 1953, which involved the graduating seniors of that year. The focus of the study was to establish if setting goals had a significant impact. Using interviews and questionnaires it appeared that approximately 85% of all graduating seniors had not prepared a plan for their lives, a future 12% had tried and made some effort by taking some of the key steps to setting goals.

However, only 3% of all the graduating seniors had prepared a plan for their life with clearly defined goals that were written down and for which they had a strong desire to accomplish.

Twenty years later, in 1973, the study concluded when the success of those graduating seniors was measured. The amazing discovery was that the 3% who had taken the time to prepare a detailed plan for their life had acquired more assets and generated more income than the 97% of the remaining students combined. The interviewers also discovered such as the level of happiness and joy that the graduates felt, were superior in the 3% with written goals.

This study demonstrates the power of a clear life vision and LIFE PLAN

A powerful document that expresses your dreams for life; how you wish to life the purpose and meaning in life. It acts as a governing constitution by which you evaluate decisions and choose behaviours.

The brain is essentially an information-processing unit. We are bombarded with about two million bits of information per second, which are coming in through all the sensory channels into the neurology of our human system. The human brain is capable of handling about 134 bits per second.

The brain deals with these impulses in the following ways:

• It filters out a lot of the information.
• It chooses and organises what is to our advantage. The brain is designed to recognize patterns. To handle the 134 bits of information, the brain tends to chunk or group the information into seven chunks of information, in other words, into manageable levels of information.

In perceiving the world around, us, we thus tend to firstly leave out a lot of information, and secondly chunk the information into manageable units (patterns). The important question is: How does the brain decide what to focus on in any situation? How does the brain decide what is to our ‘advantage’?

The human nervous system cannot attend to things outside the realms of its experience. We can therefore not see anything other than who we are. The mind is constantly distorting, deleting and generalizing information to ‘fit’ our current paradigms (mental frameworks).

The subconscious mind is processing information in such a way as to move us in a direction.

A clearly-defined vision, that is often reviewed, forms part of our mental framework, and directly impacts on what we become aware of in situations. It is therefore very important to know what you want. When the mind has a defined target, its energy is squandered.

Controlled focus is like a laser beam: It can cut through anything that seems to be stopping you. Most people fail in life because they ‘major in minor things’ – they never direct their focus.