Personal Development Blueprint - Top 5 Feelings

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hey this is Leo for actualised org and this video is part of the blueprint series over 100 of the greatest personal development concepts of all time and this concept that we're covering today is what I call top 5 feelings so let's cover what this is and why it's important and then go into some of the details here because this is a really important concept so top 5 feelings what is that in a nutshell basically top 5 feelings means that you're gonna sit down and you are going to articulate the top 5 feelings that you want to consistently be feeling in your life on a our our minutes a minute day to day basis you're going to articulate that and then you're gonna look and ask yourself how you can set up your circumstances so that you're getting more of those feelings that's basically what this concept is it's pretty simple as for why it's important it's extremely important the reason it's important is because we as a society are always about chasing something and it's usually about chasing blame right we are out there and we're looking for something that we want so when we're setting goals for ourselves there's just this tendency to set a goal for material things and even if they're not material things they're still things and they're not feelings and what ends up happening is that if you are chasing things whether material or even spiritual you end up getting disappointed because you end up getting that thing but then you're still not fulfilled and that's because what you really care about is how you feel but what you're chasing is not a feeling and so there's a disconnect there because what happens is that you're implicitly going after feelings and you assume that the thing that you're going after is gonna give you that hit of feeling that you want but it doesn't so it's important to get that issue resolved right off the bat so you don't spend months and potentially years chasing after goals that ultimately are not going to make you feel the way you want to feel so let's go into the body of this concept and really talk about what I mean here so ultimately look people set goals for themselves right so what are some common goals that people said very common goal to look better to lose weight another common goal to start a business another common goal to have a million dollars in your bank account to have a nice car and a nice house to have a nice relationship to have cool friends to live in Hawaii whatever your goal is all those goals are great and you should be setting goals like that for yourself I have nothing against materialistic goals and there are even kind of s'more spiritual and abstract goals so maybe the goal of doing more meditation or the goal of doing keeping a gratitude journal or the goal of stopping negative thinking and stop being judging and criticizing other people so these are nice goals too I'd say that the spiritual goals are one step up above the purely materialistic goals but there is the next level and that is looking at how you actually want to feel so the key question is here how do you want to feel how do you want to feel consistently right now I want you to really get yourself to think about how you feel on a typical day you know you wake up in the morning you go through your routine you have breakfast you go to work you do that lunchtime comes by after lunchtime you do some more work then you come home you spend time with your family or whatever it is that you're doing whatever that routine is for you on a typical day I want you to look at it and see what are you feeling actually there and how happy are you with those feelings and then of course the next question is how do you want it to be right because if what you're feeling on a consistent basis every hour in your body I'm talking about how you actually feel in your body and in your mind if you're not getting the kind of emotions that you want then the question is why is that and what kind of emotions do you want to be getting and those external goals that you're setting for yourself that house that money that business that relationship is it ultimately going to get you what you want so when we're designing your goals I always want to track it back to what's core and what's core is how you want to feel and for me that's the top five feelings and what I have is I have a feeling survey that I kind of designed myself it's nothing fancy it's very simple just a couple of questions really four questions that you're gonna ask yourself that will help you identify this all right and I'm gonna list it down below in the article and I'm actually gonna have a little worksheet that you can download and go through this exercise but what I want here is I want for you to go through this survey and figure out what are the most important feelings for you because when I was going through this it was a real revelation for me to understand that if I want fulfillment and if I want my goals to match up with fulfillment that means that when I'm actually successful and I think that I'm successful I'm also going to actually be fulfilled which is a rare thing because a lot of times people will accomplish a goal but still be unfulfilled then I got to really understand how I want to feel and for me I sat down and I thought about it and the feelings that I came up with were really a list of few and I can't put about seven of them and I'm still trying to figure out which ones are the most important for me I'm gonna narrow them down to five that's what I want you to do for me my list of feelings are I want to feel optimistic I want to feel proud I want to feel energetic I want to feel conscious I want to feel I want to feel confident I want to feel strong and I want to feel tranquil so those are just some of the feelings personally that for me are important like when I imagine the ideal day for me if I could have all those feelings and I could feel that consistently 24/7 or at least the times that I'm awake then to me that's like the ideal life and so that's it for me and I had to sit down I had to go through a whole list of different feelings to find the ones that resonated the most with me and those might change you might get better a better sense of how to articulate that so I just want to throw that out there as an example so you know something concrete that you can you can use to then abstract away and get your specifics so another list that I'm gonna give you I'm you know I'm just gonna throw out some feelings so that you have a sense of what I mean by feelings so all those that I mentioned you might other mention other feelings you might want to be happy happiness might be important to you or you might want to feel fun maybe you want to feel adventurous you like feeling adventurous maybe you want to feel bold maybe you want to feel very present and in the moment maybe that's what what makes you really satisfied maybe you want to feel excited I know excitement is definitely a big one for me actually I think it is on my list and I might have forgotten to mention it but excitement is a big one you know for me also that feeling of high consciousness I love that I also love having the feeling of creative contribution so for me that dovetails with pride that feeling of pride that I get when I know that I've been I've been doing something good and I've been sharing that with others I've been making other people feel good and I've just been contributing that gives me a sense of pride or pride in the fact that I'm living my life well or I'm living in alignment with my values so that's another feeling so these are just some ideas you can probably go and make a really long list of of items and then come to go down and kind of cross out the ones that are not that important to you and circle the ones that are very important to you in fact maybe I'll create a worksheet like that where you can go through there and just pick off a list but you can also come up with your own and basically you want to winnow that down to a list of five right and this is how you want to consistently feel maybe you want to think back into the past about some of the best times in your life some of the best memories that you have because what that will trigger in you is memories of feelings back if you do it vividly enough you could probably rekindle those feelings at least a little bit within yourself you can get a taste for it you know what are the times when you were the happiest in your life what were you feeling then what were the circumstances was it you spending time with your family and you a certain sense of connection or maybe you were feeling loved in an intimate relationship or maybe you were at work and you were killing it and you were you were doing something bold and challenging and you were on your edge and you liked that sense of exhilaration or maybe you were skydiving and you had that sense of adventure and something doing something risky and crazy and you like that kind of feeling where you've got that adrenaline rush and that's what turns you on so this going to be different for everybody of course I want you to think back about your own best memories and think about what what triggers the most fond memories for you the most fond feelings and then jot down some notes on that but the survey so let's go into the feeling survey this appealing survey is gonna have really four questions the first question is what do you want to feel consistently and these are gonna be five things I really want you to be concise here and just say five give me five words right so it might be something like excitement I want if you look assignment I want to feel proud I want to feel adventurous and I want to feel calm and I want to feel strong something like that come up with a list if you can't decide quite on what you want to feel start somewhere start right now this is usually a process that requires some introspection and it's not going to just happen in one sitting you're gonna sit down you're gonna you're gonna massage this list but you want to start somewhere so you start with a rough draft and then you can get it to meet better in the future let's start with the rough draft the second question that you want to ask yourself and you should be running down these answers as you're asking these questions is what feelings don't you want to feel this one is probably pretty easy for you again go through your current day and ask yourself if you're not very fulfilled already then this will be very easy go through your typical day or typical week and ask yourself what kind of feelings give you the most stress and what kind of feelings do you really avoid the most and that you really hate right maybe you really don't like feeling alone maybe that one is one that you really don't like maybe you really don't like feeling stressed and overwhelmed maybe you don't like feeling angry maybe you don't like feeling sad maybe you don't like feeling what else is out there feeling other other feelings maybe you don't like feeling frustrated you know whatever it is for you so think about that that should be a pretty easy list come up with again i buyed say keep it to 5 5 short words for the feelings that you don't want that's going to be the second part of this feeling survey and then once you have this once you have the 5 that you do want and the 5 that you don't want then the third part of the survey is I want you to go through and I want you to rate yourself on on each of the positive 5 ones and the negative 5 ones so rate yourself on a scale of one to ten one being that you're not feeling this right now very consistently throughout your week and ten being that you're feeling this feeling all the time so as an example let's say you want to feel proud and that's one of your positive ones right how proud are you feeling throughout the week on a consistent basis and we're talking about consistency so the more consistently you feel this the more fulfilled you're going to be and basically happy you're gonna be with your life as a whole so do you feel proud every day do you feel proud only for five minutes a week you know if you only feel proud very very rarely then give yourself a one if you feel proud all the time basically multiple times throughout the day every single day if you're feeling that then give yourself a 9 or 10 that means you've got that one nailed down really well go through and do that with all your five positive ones and then go ahead and do the same with the negative ones so let's say that you don't like feeling stressed well how much stress do you have right now on a scale of one to ten you have a stress every single hour of every single day and then give yourself a really high score if you are not feeling stressed very often then give yourself a low score one or two or something in between and do that for the rest of the negative ones so this is going to be a check-in because right now you probably have not sat down quantified really what you're actually feeling in your life both the positive and the negative and until you do this I found with myself this can be very enlightening to do this because right now you're going through your day and you're not quite sure why you just have some sort of dissatisfaction you're not happy with your life you think that you have could have more but it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why that is you don't know the causes when you sit down and you look at the feelings all of a sudden it becomes pretty clear you get a start start picture you're like oh I'm stressed all the time at stress at a 10 and you know what I'm feeling lonely all the time - and beyond that I'm always angry - so yeah if you're feeling angry and stressed and lonely all the time and then on the flip side you're not feeling the feelings that you want you're not feeling tranquil you're not feeling proud you're not feeling excited the way you want then yeah you're going to be satisfied with your life and it's going to be obvious where exactly the dissatisfaction is happening so that's the third part of this survey and then of course the final part is really the solutions part and this is asking yourself the key question which is what changes now can you actually make in your life practical changes habitual changes that will increase the positive feelings and decrease the negative feelings what is that for you it's going to be totally different for everybody so you know pride if you want to feel proud for me personally pride is tied to my sense of work so for me I feel proud when I have a strong work day and I put in you know I give my work day the best that I can and I produce some good results and so for me for example when I found when I did this exercise that I wasn't getting enough sense of pride what I found was that that was happening on the days when I really wasn't putting in a good work effort and I wasn't really producing anything I wasn't creating anything for me being creative is very important it's tied to my sense of pride it's tied to my sense of fulfillment in life so that means that I need to go out now and try to rework my schedule a little bit so that I have more time to actually focus in and do the work personally find that when I have a frantic day and I have to do with million different things that I'm always multitasking I can't focus and actually produce something that day I don't feel proud I don't feel like I've accomplished anything and therefore I don't feel very fulfilled that day whereas on the flip side when I do have that moment where I can sit down and just focus and concentrate for a good five-hour stretch and get some something produced get an article written shoot a video read a nice book whatever do some journaling do some meditation when I can do some of that stuff then I feel like I've accomplished something I feel proud I feel fulfilled and so for me it became really obvious when I did this exercise that wow I need to spend more time focusing and not doing so much multitasking and that was one way that I could improve the point about pride and I did that for the rest of my feelings you know excitement how can I get more excitement in my life I felt like I wasn't getting that much excitement so for me that meant I have to do maybe some things that are a little bit out of the ordinary that are out of my routine maybe I should be taking more trips on the weekends I like taking trips but I usually don't have enough time to do them because I'm running through my routine I'm so busy with work and this and that and stuff that I need to be following up on sometimes it becomes a little too tedious and I feel like my life is just going down a very kind of straight-laced trajectory sometimes I need to switch that up and do something exciting something that's off my schedule and so I find that when I get that sense of excitement it's with something whoa and I'm doing something new so getting out there and doing more activities doing more new activities with my friends doing more activities by myself maybe going out there and doing things that are not at the top of my goals list because it's up that's up up top my goals list I do that all the time and I'm usually keeping up with it but there's also a little minor things at the bottom of my list like maybe cooking a new recipe or learning to play a new instrument or maybe reading a book that's not related to my work usually most of the books I read are personal development related but maybe reading a book that's like a biography or something more tangential something a bit more adventurous and different so for me those are a couple of examples of the positive ones and negative examples stuff that I don't like feeling you know I don't I definitely don't like feeling stressed I don't like feeling angry and so I'll look and I'll see in my in my weekly schedule I'll just see where am I feeling angry what's causing me to feel like you're you what's causing me to feel stressed and therefore from this list by asking that key final question on the survey you know what changes can actually make to increase the positive and decrease the negative feelings that is where you get your action plan because you're gonna get one you can you can get I recommend just doing one point of action that you can take on each one of these one point on each positive feeling so you could have five points there and then five action points on each negative feeling and then that's your list that basically tells you what your goals should be now look at how the goals that were generated with this process are different than the goals that would have been generated if I if you just sat down I said you know what it would are one of the ten dream things that you want your life you're probably gonna say an Icehouse certain amount of money in your bank account etc etc right but here it's gonna be different these goals are gonna be a little bit more abstract but they're also going to really connect with your fulfillment this process guarantees that the connection is there because you know what now I know that if I spend more time focusing on work I'm gonna feel proud that's gonna increase my fulfillment directly it's not going to be some indirect relationship and also I know that if I go out and I take a road trip during the weekend and do something new do something a little bit of adventurous that's going to make me feel excited and therefore that's gonna directly impact my fulfillment direct relationship and same thing with the negative ones so that's exactly what I want for you is I want you to generate this list of goals and see how they compare see if there are any surprises on this list I know when I did this exercise they're definitely a couple of surprises and I immediately saw that oh if I just focus and just pick one point I don't even need to implement all ten points if I just pick one of these action items and I go out and I shift my the following week and I do things just a little bit differently so that I'm looking and at one point that I can already see how much better I'm gonna feel about myself and therefore I'm gonna be happier so this is a process really of increasing happiness in your life pretty cool huh it's a powerful process very simple don't underestimate its impact so go through do this feeling survey once you do it you're gonna have the top 5 feelings and what I want you to do if you're following along with the blueprint and you have a personal mission statement as of course you should write down these top five feelings in your personal mission statement because this is something that's gonna stick with you really for the rest of your life you want to keep reminding yourself every morning for a few minutes just what it is that you want to be feeling and there are multiple ways that you can use this first of all you can use this to see if the goals that you're pursuing are actually in alignment with the feelings that you want because sometimes they'll be out of alignment right maybe right now what you're pursuing is you're pursuing a new business and you think that what you really want is a new business and so you're working really hard at it and it's stressing you out you're spending a lot of time doing that but really the top feeling that you want to be feeling is maybe something like love or the top feeling that you want to be feeling is you want to be feeling something like adventure and maybe your business is not really giving you much adventure maybe there's a more direct route to adventure than starting a business maybe the more direct route is taking road trips with your spouse on the weekends and therefore you satisfy both the love and the adventure feelings and you're not spending so much time building a business which is getting you what it might be getting money you might be getting you other things which could be good but maybe they're just not that important to you right now maybe they're not a priority so this is a way to look at the tangible goals that you set your for yourself and seeing if they really align so that's a really powerful way to use this another way to use this that I talked about in other blueprint videos is to kind of force your mood I have this idea that I took from Brendon Burchard and he talked about the idea that mood is not something that should be happening to you but something that you should be enforcing on yourself and on the external world so these top five feelings are a way to do that because now you have targets for what you want your mood to be right when I wake up in the morning I can tell myself I want to feel proud I want to feel excited I want to feel tranquil and I can force those moods on myself just by thinking about certain things and using various mental techniques that we talked about in other videos so that can be another powerful way to use it I want you to be very familiar with the feelings that you want to feel because all the goals that are going to be doing and all the goals are gonna be setting for years and years to come should really be coming through and you should be filtering first through your filter of feelings and then you can have the external goals that you have and those are great but anyways this is going to wrap it up here go ahead and share your comments do this exercise should be quick and easy one I'm gonna have worksheets down below and the article that you can you can download makes things even easier for you and then go ahead and share your comments what are your top five feelings the positive ones and then also the negative ones how consistently are you following up on those and then of course if you find this valuable and you do this exercise share with a friend send them here so that they can also benefit from from this exercise alright this is Leo signing off you