SECTION 1 FIRST STEPS TO UNDERSTANDING YOU

Building a stronger more focused you

LUKE LEE TET

Wheel of Life

Self-assessment is very important when making a change of any kind. Who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we think the world sees us is vital to the results we get. So we need to be absolutely honest with ourselves about where we are in our life and what we need to enhance.

By allowing yourself to be the best version of yourself, you can have the ability to help others understand and strive for their dreams as well.

A really solid place to start is with the Wheel of Life, a simple but useful tool for self-assessment. Following is an example.

When creating your own Wheel of Life, use the illustration as a guide. If the centre point was zero, no success in this area, and the outer edge was ten out of ten, that couldn't be better.

Fill out the Wheel of Life by putting a line through each triangle at the point of where you believe you are at in this particular area of your life. For example, if you were to put a line through the centre of the triangle titled Family, this would indicate that there is room for growth and improvement, although you see it as having average results. The Wheel of Life also suggests which areas of your life you have been focusing on and where you have not.

We Get What We Focus On

This seems so simple, but there may be some things you may not know about this statement.

To paraphrase Carl Jung, "We can't see anything outside of us that isn't us." Which means we see things as we are, not as they are. So the world as we see it is filtered by the makeup of who we are. No two people will ever see anything in the exact same way because both will look at the same thing from two very different points of view. Personality, life experiences, and what they expect to see, hear, and feel about something is individualised, as no two people are the same.

A perfect example of this is when you hear of a story of a family in poverty, with a drunken father who beats up his two children. Their upbringing was hard, and from the outside the same experience as each other, but they end up worlds apart when they grow up and leave the family home. One child ends up living the same life in the same area and repeats the same experience on his or her family, while the other ends up living a very successful life. The successful child saw what he or she didn't want to be, and the other saw no other option. One focused on moving forward and how to be better, and the other focused on what had happened, not on what could be done about it.

Our life is like this in every aspect. Imagine being in a dark room where you can't see your hand in front of your face. All you have is a flashlight to see by. How much of the room can you see? You can only see what is in its beam, right? Our lives and the way we experience the world is the same. We will simply not be aware of the things beyond our focus.

So as you can see in the Wheel of Life, where you have the most success is where you have put the most focus.

The Map Is Not the Territory

This subject relates largely to the previous section. Understanding this will change your mind-set and how you will forever communicate with others. The best map of any city can only ever be a map or guide; it can never be the city itself. The map can only be a representation of the city. Based on our thoughts, values, beliefs, experiences, and stories, we create our own maps of reality, rather than reality itself. This is how your map is very unique and how nobody can have the same map. Everything is perception.

When we look at how our maps are made, understand this fact: There are two million bits of information coming at us every second. Unfortunately, we can only process 132 bits, or 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information. What this tells us is that we are constantly deleting, distorting, and generalising this information so that we can allow the information that we consider relevant in, and leave out what we consider irrelevant.

What we let in and what we leave out depends on our map of the world.

If we believe the world is a harsh place and that people are mean, we will delete evidence of kindness as irrelevant, or "not really counting," and will distort kindness as "they didn't really mean it" or "they were just saying that" and will generalise evidence of hurt as, "All people are like that."

So if we are constantly deleting, distorting, and generalising to make sense of the world, and our map of the world is made up this way, is your map...