Simulate your worst fears and gain clarity on what’s REALLY important

Wrong priorities, false assumptions, layers of fears are what prevent us from gaining clarity & getting to that which is REALLY important to us in our life. Often we hear stories of people who had a near death experience or serious life event that enabled them see through this and gain clarity on what’s ‘really’ important. How can we get to that which is really important, that which really matters to us, that which we care about deeply without actually going through such events ourselves? This is question that has been raised often & by many people and is what I will attempt to address in this post. I strongly believe that we do need major jolts to push us to gain such clarity. However, I do also believe that we have the right apparatus, in our mind to simulate our worst fears & experience the events in our minds to help gain clarity on what important. This is the key! Here are some tips on how we can do simulate over worst fear:

• Make a list of yours worst fears. Let take a example “The fear of dying”.
• Set aside a couple of hours in a day: I would recommend morning hours when usually the rest of your family is asleep and when you don’t need to rush to a meeting or run a errand.
• Sit quietly and contemplate about this fear: Here are examples questions you can ask yourself and try to chip away the stuff from the really important stuff. e.g., “If I only had 1 year to live” : “What would I do over the next year?”, “who are the people I want to spend my time with?”, “What are the experiences I will seek?” and more importantly “what stuff from my life will I stop doing?”. The key is to seriously ‘believe’  & ‘visualize’ the statement that you are contemplating on in your mind.
• Make notes: Write down key points that come-up from your contemplation of the fear 1) important stuff list 2) stop doing list
• Pare down : Most likely your list has the core elements that you think are important but it might be a little too long or not clear enough. Try to distill the key elements out of the list by clubbing things which are similar & dropping stuff that is redundant or not relevant.
• You have it! : You now have a decent set of things that REALLY matter to you that have just passed the “worst fear” test. This is something you can trust and look upto for clarity, direction & priority.

Changing your life and developing clarity needs commitment and hardwork. Tips like above are only useful if you make time and put in the effort to really try it. Have you tried something similar? What other tips & trick do you use to gain clarity in your own life?