How to make your brain work for you
What your brain prioritises, why it needs specific goals, and what you want to BE, DO and HAVE in five years.
What influences your brain’s decisions and actions?
Your brain is born with basic survival instincts. Everything else (language, movement, problem-solving) develops through experiences, neuroplasticity (the ability to adapt and learn), and repetition (the more you practice, the stronger the neural pathways). You’ll leverage all three to accelerate your transformation.
What influences your brain’s decisions? Past experiences (reinforcement learning), emotions (fear, excitement, stress bias choices), cognitive biases (shortcuts affect perception of risk and reward), and context (social and environmental cues). Essentially, the brain predicts, evaluates, and selects the most rewarding or least risky action based on past experience and current needs.
What does the brain prioritise the most?
The brain defaults to the path of least resistance unless overridden by conscious effort. General order of priority:
- Life-sustaining functionsAutomatic, non-negotiable.
- Immediate threatsSurvival-driven, instinctive.
- Habitual actionsEnergy-saving, automatic.
- Reward-seeking actionsDopamine-driven.
- Goal-oriented actionsLogical, long-term.
- Social and moral decisionsComplex reasoning.
Unless we train our brain to prioritise long-term benefits, it defaults to what is safe, easy, and immediately rewarding. Associate your conscious goals with levels 3 and 4, and your brain will prioritise them more. Practicing something makes it familiar and automatic.
Do humans really need goals?
The short answer is yes, because your brain is fundamentally goal-oriented. Everything it does has a purpose: move you away from pain, towards pleasure, using the least energy possible, ensuring your survival. Unless you keep feeding it new experiences and intentions, it sticks to what is familiar and known.
And the more specific your goals are, the easier they are to achieve. Say your goal is “buy a car”. Your mind will find anything that is a car: a Hot Wheels car, a vintage car, a sports car. Make it “buy a white 5-seater to take two children to school” and your brain starts noticing and finding exactly that, filtering out the distractions.
And what if you don’t create goals for yourself? Then your brain will find goals for you, based on your environment, that keep you safe and alive. In practice that often means quietly adopting someone else’s goal…a boss’s, a partner’s, a well-intentioned parent’s idea of a good life for you. Over time that leads to compromise, people-pleasing, not feeling heard, and feeling unfulfilled.
- Intentional, chosen by you rather than inherited.
- Personal: selfish, you-focused, irrelevant to other people in your life. Your goals should be for you and only you.
- Which automatically makes them more engaging (and maybe a little scary, especially the big ones).
- And makes the journey, and the achieving, far more fulfilling.
Think, then write
Three questions about your Future You
- What do I want to BE in 5 years’ time? (attributes and values)
- What do I want to DO in 5 years’ time? (activities, habits, skills, actions)
- What do I want to HAVE in 5 years’ time? (tangible and intangible assets and liabilities)
Five minutes per question
Write without judgement, whatever comes to mind. Don’t worry if you repeat yourself, just keep writing. If you get stuck, ask “What else?” or “What would childhood me say?” or “What would older me say?”
Imagine your Next Version of Me: Exercise 1.0
Step into it
Reread everything you wrote about what you want to BE, DO and HAVE, sit with those words, then imagine for 5 minutes being who you want to be, doing what you want to do, having what you want to have.
Make it vivid and detailed. Use all your senses. Imagine the emotions. Play it like an epic movie trailer, flicking between seeing yourself with everything you want and experiencing it as yourself.
Repeat the exercise at least once more today.
Well done! See you tomorrow.
This course is educational and not a substitute for therapy or medical advice.