Rear Death Experience
About the Exercise
The most important thing is to focus your life on the most important things. Focus, while important, only serves us well after we have worked out what it is that we should truly be focusing on. Focusing on the wrong thing, rather than being productive, at best is wasteful and at worst can be destructive.
The greatest inhibitor between our current reality and potential full(er) reality is not focus, but rather our inability to know what's truly most important.
For many of us working out what is really most important is actually quite hard. Amidst all the competing demands and voices speaking into our lives it's hard to sort out where to prioritize our time, and by extension our lives.
What follows is an exercise to help make this process a bit easier, by zooming out and stripping away the nonessential.
Step One
Imagine that just a moment ago, you died.
In a split second all the things you loved doing and hated doing are gone. Your life here on earth has ended in a very definitive way. The table of your life has been cleared off, in entirety. Try your best to really enter into this reality.
Step Two
Now imagine that you are granted the opportunity to come back to your life, but you can only add one action or activity back — some sort of "doing" that you've been granted the ability to continue. What activity would you add back in?
What is the one thing you'd put back on the table? It can be something ordinary or extraordinary, it is your life after all. Write down the activity below.
Step Three
After you've managed to establish the ability to continue doing the activity above, what would be the next action you would add-in?
Don't overthink it, whatever comes to mind as true for you is most likely very much true for you. And that is what we are driving at here.
Step Four
Continue with the exercise, adding in the next eight activities you would want to add in one by one.
Reflection
Looking over your list, what are the trends that you see?
Your Rear Death Experience
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