Tell yourself a story
Recently, I've been reading Raw Nerve, a series of blog posts on how to get better at life by aaronsw. I read it pretty much every year as a refresher, with every read becoming more and more interesting since my outlook in life has changed drastically each year over the past few years, and every single time I have different takeaways when I finish the series.
Since Aaron is not around and can't inspire other people or myself anymore, unfortunately, I've been thinking of my own ways to get better at life. Of course, Raw Nerve is a great framework, but there are some things personal to each one of us, and some things might be different depending on the environment we were born in and how we were raised.
One of the things that consistently worked for me and works almost every time I want to change myself in some way is very simple:
I start by telling myself a story.
Picturing a better version of yourself is very difficult; usually it's very hard to see your own shortcomings, and when you do it is in a shallower way someone else would describe or analyze the same trait. That's because we, as humans, are very bad at understanding ourselves. There's a saying "I know you more than yourself" for good reason.
So most advice telling you to just "picture a better version of you and change into that" is bullshit, 99% of times. You can't just magically think of yourself but better, if we could do that we'd all be in a way nicer state than right now. It's also very difficult to grasp exactly what you need to do better to be more outgoing, better at X skill, [...] list goes on and on.
So what I'm going to tell you here is similar in the sense that you need to be able to imagine yourself changing, but you need to start by telling yourself a story. Your own "future biography".
By imagining the entire story and not the end goal, you have a better idea of what you can change, what you can't change and how you can approach both. You have a solid grasp of your personal relationships, desires, wants and needs, so based on that you can create a fake journey about yourself changing into the better.
It doesn't need to be complete right off the bat. You don't need to start right away, but you're not allowed to put it off either. Imagine the entire path, from start to finish, and try to apply the steps you learned by imagining life as you want to live. Do it and see how you fare.
Maybe what you wanted to change into wasn't what you wanted at all!
That's why creating a story about your future self and following through is like an adventure: it doesn't let you know in advance if it's true or not.
Maybe your parents will have a different reaction than you imagined when you try to speak up more, maybe your friends will think you're cool for that quirky hobby you have when you finally come out and say it instead of finding it weird and dragging you down, would you imagine? Maybe even your coworkers will finally listen to you and change the dogshit architecture they've come up with.
These surprises and differences between your imagination and reality are one of the things that make life so unpredictable, painful, and ultimately worth it.
I hope that made sense to you, and if you're reading this, future me or whatever random person happens to stumble on this web page, I want you to close your eyes and imagine a story.
A story about yourself that was able to change.