Vision or habits? 🐔🤷🥚❓

Vision or habits?  🐔🤷🥚❓

If you want to build or achieve anything of note there is a process you must execute.  It’s simple.  Not easy, but simple.

You must have a sense of where you want to go, and then you must work to get there.

We typically call the sense of where to go “vision”, and the work “habits” or “disciplines”.

I suspect most people will tell you it happens in that order.

But I’m not so sure.

And I’m not even sure that you can discern a clear order.

That’s why I think of it as a chicken/egg question.

Sometimes it happens in that order.  You have a new vision of your life, you get inspired, and BOOM, new energy, habits and disciplines.  Great.  It’s awesome when that happens.

But, sometimes it happens the other way.  The things you keep doing, can’t stop doing, can’t resist doing, reveal your subconscious vision.  Does this ever happen to you?

As with all dynamics of thought and behavior, there is a highly nuanced interplay between vision and habits.

Sometimes the vision creates the habits.  Sometimes the habits reveal the vision.

And, as always (at least as far as I can tell), increasing your level of self-awareness is the key to discerning the subconscious flow of it all.  Remember, it’s like the detectives say: all thoughts and actions have some kind of motivation.

One final note about this that changed the way I think about the relationship between vision and habits…

One of my favorite mentors talked about what he called “D1/D2”.  D stands for “desire”.  The dynamic he described can be summarized thus:

“Many people will express desires for a goal of some kind.  Say, for example, they talk about wanting to write a book.  That’s D1.  But all they do is talk, and their actual behavior indicates that they don’t in fact want to write the book.  What they want instead is the desiring itself.  Subconsciously they are actually more attached to the thought of writing the book than actually writing the book. The desiring gives them something, a way to distract from the condition of their life. They actually desire this distraction more than the effort and outcome of a finished book.”

Get it?  I would say that he tends to fall into the “habits reveal the vision camp”.  I’m always looking for this as well.

After I heard him describe that dynamic I looked closely at what I said I wanted, what I thought I wanted, and what I was actually doing.  And I changed.  I dropped my stated desire and started moving toward my actual desire.  And my life improved.

It’s powerful stuff.  Watch your mind carefully.  Actions come from thoughts.  Thoughts come from…🤔  Tap into that miracle of human metacognition, which grants us, and us alone, that amazing ability to examine and think about our thoughts, and ask yourself what it reveals about your desires.  

Examine your habits, reveal your desires, and discern your vision.

Habits 🔄 Vision