Checklist: Never Be Defined by A Personality Test Again
Checklist: Never Be Defined by A Personality Test Again
SELF
CHECKLIST
NEVER BE DEFINED BY A PERSONALITY TEST AGAIN
BENJAMIN HARDY PHD
The Future Self
Checklist
“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last
year probably isn't learning enough.”—Alain de Botton
Here’s the fact: one of the core findings in psychology is that the
best way to predict a person’s future behavior is by looking at their
past. What does this mean? It means that for most people, their
behavior is coming from their past.
This checklist will teach you why that is, and more importantly, how
you can do the opposite of what most people are doing. Rather than
having your past dictate your behavior, you can have your desired
future dictate your behavior. When this is the case, you’ll be living
powerfully, presently, and intentionally on a daily-basis.
The philosopher Colin Wilson has said, “If you want a positive
reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is
by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind.
Depression is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak
experience is the outcome of a
intentional attitude.”
Here’s the challenge for most people: They are “searching” for their
purpose, just like many people are “searching” for their passion and
even “searching” for themselves. You don’t “find” yourself. You
create yourself through your choices. As Frankl further explained:
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the
striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
Your “purpose” is a freely chosen task. It’s what you decide to invest yourself
into and what you decide to give meaning to.
Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach has said, “The only
way to make your present better is by making your future bigger.”
You get to choose how big your future is. As stated before, the
only way to be “intentional” and “purposeful” in the present is by
having a clear and chosen future in mind. Dr. Hal Hershfield, a
psychologist at UCLA has found this in his research. What’s he’s
found is that, if you view your future self as a different person,
you can then make decisions here-and-now based on what your
future self would want, rather than what you want solely in the
moment.