Self-Control Is A Conversation With Who You Wish To Be

Situations happen, more often than we are comfortable admitting, where we wish we’d done something other than what we did. We may attempt to pass the behavior off as a result of hunger, lack of sleep, another person’s actions towards us, or a mental diagnosis, but all of these are simply pointers to some version of the common phrase: “that wasn’t who I really am.” In other words, we are quite comfortable with imaginatively projecting a version of ourselves who acted other than what actually happened. We empathize with, and perhaps even envy, a version of ourselves that exists only in our mind. Self-control becomes a conversation about who we wish to be.

Explore Your Future Self

Thankfully imagination is not tied only to a past of recrimination and self-doubt. It can move into the future as well and bring with it versions of yourself that indeed do exactly what you desire to do. The same mechanism can be a tool for leaving us stuck in a past of impossibility, where we get caught up in a world that now never could be, or allow us to explore a future that we in fact do want to live in.

The nature of the present rarely allows us to consciously select what we supposedly find most important. Only in contemplating what we wish we’d done differently or in looking to how we’d like to be, does what we Value come into focus. That Value is used to color an entire situation in what has become fixated as being most important.