Copyright: www.selfauthoring.com (Jordan B. Peterson et al.

1.1. One Thing You Could Do Better

If you could choose only one thing that you could do better, what would it be?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.

Deutsch: Eine Sache, die ich besser können möchte.

What would you like to learn more about, in the next six months? Two years? Five years?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.

Deutsch: Über was möchte ich mehr lernen? In den nächsten sechs Monaten? Zwei Jahren? Fünf

Jahren?
1.3. Improve Your Habits

What habits would you like to improve?

 At school?

 At work?

 With friends and family?

 For your health?

 With regards to smoking/alcohol/drug use?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.

Deutsch: Welche meiner Gewohnheiten möchte ich verbessern?

Friends and associates are an important part of a meaningful, productive life. Take a moment to

consider your social network. Think about the friends you might want to have, and the connections

you might want to make. It is perfectly reasonable to choose friends and associates who are good

for you. Describe your ideal social life.

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.
1.5. Your Leisure Activity in the Future

Take a moment to consider the activities you would like to pursue outside of obligations such as

work, family and school. The activities you choose should be worthwhile and personally

meaningful.

Without a plan, people often default to whatever is easiest, such as television watching, and waste

their private time. If you waste 4 hours a day, which is not uncommon, then you are wasting 1400

hours a year. That is equivalent to 35 40-hour work weeks, which is almost as much as the typical

individual spends at his or her job every year.

If your time is worth $25 per hour, then you are wasting time worth $35,000 per year. Over a 50-

year period, that is $1.8 million dollars, not counting interest or any increase in the value of your

time as you develop.

Describe what your leisure life would be like, if it was set up to be genuinely productive and

enjoyable.

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.
1.6. Your Family Life in the Future

Take a moment to consider your home and family life. Peaceful, harmonious family life provides

people with a sense of belonging, support for their ambitions, and reciprocal purpose. Describe

what your ideal family would be like. You can write about your parents and siblings, or about your

plans for your own partner, or about your children, if any – or about all of these. What kind of

partner would be good for you? How could you improve your relationship with your parents or

siblings?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.
1.7. Your Career in the Future

Much of what people find engaging in life is related to their careers. A good career provides

security, status, interest, and the possibility of contributing to the community. Take a moment to

consider your school or work careers, or both. Where do you want to be in six months? Two years?

Five years? Why? What are you trying to accomplish?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.
1.8. Qualities You Admire

People you automatically admire have qualities that you would like to possess or imitate.

Identifying those qualities can help you determine who it is that you want to be. Take a moment to

think about the two or three people you most admire. Who are they? Which qualities do they

possess that you wish you had?

Think and write for at least two minutes, then move on.
The Ideal Future: Complete Summary

Now you have written briefly about your future, and have had some time to consider more specific

issues. This step gives you the chance to integrate all the things that you have just thought and

wrote about.

Close your eyes. Daydream, if you can, and imagine your ideal future:

 Who do you want to be?

 What do you want to do?

 Where do you want to end up?

 Why do you want these things?

 How do you plan to achieve your goals?

 When will you put your plans into action?

Write about the ideal future that you have just imagined for 15 minutes. Write continuously and try

not to stop while you are writing. Don't worry about spelling or grammar. You will have an

opportunity to fix your mistakes later.

Dream while you write, and don't stop. Write at least until the 15 minutes have passed. Be

ambitious. Imagine a life that you would regard as honourable, exciting, productive, creative and

decent.

Remember, you are writing only for yourself. Choose goals that you want to pursue for your own

private reasons, not because someone else thinks that those goals are important. You don't want

to live someone else's life. Include your deepest thoughts and feelings about all your personal

goals.
 A Future to Avoid: Complete Summary

You have now written about the future you would like to have. Clearly defining your future can help

reduce the uncertainty in your life, and reduce the amount of negative emotion that you chronically

experience, in consequence. This is good for your confidence and for your health. Having well-

defined goals also increases your chances of experiencing positive emotion, as people experience

most of their hope and joy and curiosity and engagement as a consequence of pursuing valued

goals (and not, as people generally think, by attaining them).

It can also be very useful to deeply imagine the future you would like to avoid. You probably know

people who have made very bad decisions, and who end up with a life that nobody would want.

You also likely have weaknesses yourself. If you let those get out of control, then you might also

end up with a miserable, painful life. Most people know how their life could go downhill if they let it.

Spend some time, now, thinking about what your life would be like if you failed to define or pursue

your goals, if you let your bad habits get out of control, and if you ended up miserable, resentful

and bitter. Imagine your life three to five years down the road, if you failed to stay on the path you

know you should be on. Use your imagination. Draw on your knowledge of the anxiety and pain

you have experienced in the past, when you have betrayed yourself.

Think about the people you know who have made bad decisions or remained indecisive, or who

chronically deceive themselves or other people, or who let cynicism and anger dominate their lives.

Where do you not want to be?

Dream while you write, and don't stop. Write at least until the 15 minutes have passed. Let

yourself form a very clear picture of the undesirable future.

Congratulations! You have now realized a vision of your ideal future, and outlined a future that is

best avoided. You can use the summary of this vision to help you complete Stage 2 of the Ideal

Future planning process.

In this stage, you will first be asked to define and personally title your overall future plan. Then,

you will be asked to take your general plans for the ideal future and break them up into more

specific goals. Each of these separate goals will also be given its own title. This step will help you

clarify your goals.

2.1. Title and Briefly Describe Your Ideal Future

Please specify a title and brief description for your ideal future as a whole. This can be as simple as

"My Ideal Future," in both fields, or, if you have something more personal in mind, you can specify

that. Imagine that you are both specifying and summarizing your ambitions with this title. This will

help you remember what you are aiming for.

Title:

Description

2.2. Specifying and Clarifying Your Goals

Please break down your ideal future into 8 goals. You can re-word, re-write and organize the

relevant material from Step 1 for your goal summaries, if you wish, or you can rely on your

memory. The exercise allows you to specify a minimum of 6 goals, but people who identify 8 have

better results with this exercise.

These specific goals can be from a number of different domains.

 A personal goal might be "I would like to be healthier."

 A career goal might be "I would like to be more interested in my job"

 A social goal might be "I would like to meet more people".

that each goal summary includes nothing but the most important information. You will have 10-15

minutes for this part of the exercise. Feel free to revise and edit.
2.3. Prioritizing Your Goals

Please organize your goals. Give your most important goal a rank of 1, your next most important

goal a rank of 2, and so on.

Now you will be asked about the following elements or feature for each of the specific goals you

have identified:

 Evaluating Your Motives

 Considering the Broad Personal and Social Impact of Goals

 Considering the Detailed Strategies for Goal Attainment

 Identifying Potential Obstacles and their Solutions

 Monitoring Progress towards Desired Goals

Thus, the five pages that contain these elements or features will repeat until all your goals have

been assessed.
2.4.1. Evaluating Your Motives

For this goal, you might want to consider issues such as the following:

 Do you truly believe that pursuing this goal is important?

 Would you feel ashamed, guilty or anxious if you didn't?

 Do you want to achieve this goal personally, or are you doing it to please someone else? (It

is often a good thing to do something for someone else, but you should know when you are

doing that.)

 Are you pursuing this goal because the situation that you find yourself in seems to demand

it?

 Is the pursuit of this goal enjoyable, stimulating or satisfying?

 Is this goal part of a deeply felt personal dream?

Please spend a minute or two writing down your reasons for pursuing this goal:
2.4.2. Considering the Broad Personal and Social Impact of Goals

Goals can have an impact beyond the obvious. Our specific personal goals are connected to larger,

more important life goals. These higher-order goals reflect our most important ideals. The specific

goal of spending more time studying or reading, for example, is a specific element of the more

important goal of being a well-educated person. Achieving other specific goals, such as becoming

more assertive, help us to move closer to our ideal self.

You will now be asked to write about what more globally important things might be affected by

your attainment of the goal listed below:

 How would disciplined success change the way that you see yourself?

 How would other parts of your personal life change, in consequence?

 How would this affect the way that others perceive you? (You might also consider fears of

being successful. Sometimes people are afraid to succeed because of the responsibility this

would entail. Sometimes they are afraid of even becoming conscious of their true goals,

because then they would be aware when they fail. These are not good strategies.)

 How would attaining this goal affect the lives of the people around you?

 What broader beneficial social impact might your success have?

Please write a short description of how attaining this goal would change additional important

aspects of your life, and the lives of others.

Goals are related to lesser, smaller sub-goals and behaviors, as well as connected to higher-order,

more important abstract goals. Sub-goals are easier to achieve, but are still fundamental to

reaching our greater aspirations. Sub-goals can thus be thought of as strategies for greater goal

achievement. Thinking about what specific things need to be done in order to achieve your goals

allows you to create practical strategies for realizing your dreams. Please take some time to write

about the concrete daily or weekly things you might do to further your goal. Deeply consider what

particular behaviors this goal is built upon.

 Should you spend more time planning at school or at work?

 Do you need to spend more time with your friends, or your children?

 Do you need to discuss household chores with your roommates, partner or spouse?

Specify when you are going to work on your goal. Specify how often. Specify where. Think hard

about how you are going to implement your plans. Make your plans concrete.

Write down those concrete weekly or daily things you might do to further this goal.
2.4.4. Identifying Potential Obstacles and their Solutions

Thinking about achieving a goal is obviously easier than going out and getting it done. Many things

related to the natural environment, the social group and the self can stand in your way. It is useful

to anticipate these difficulties, so that you can plan to overcome them.

Consider your goal, once again. Write down all the potential obstacles you can think up. Write

down ways to overcome these obstacles.

How might you interfere with your own plans? How can you ensure this won't happen? Sometimes

change is threatening to people we know and love. Will the people you know help you, or interfere?

How can you communicate with them, so that they will support you? Think of realistic and worst-

case scenarios. What are your options? What are your alternative plans?

Write down potential obstacles to this goal, and specify the ways you might overcome them.
2.4.5. Monitoring Progress towards Desired Goals

We need to know, concretely, whether or not we are progressing towards the attainment of valued

goals. Of course, this is not an easy task. When we want to complete very specific tasks, feedback

on our performance is relatively easy to monitor. However, if our goals are less short-term, this

becomes a little more difficult.

You are now being asked to identify personal benchmarks that will allow you to evaluate your own

performance.

 When would you like to achieve this goal? Be specific. Even if you have to revise a deadline

later, it is still better to set one.

 What sorts of things will you accept as evidence that you are progressing towards your

stated goal?

 How often are you going to monitor your own behavior?

 How will things in your life have to change, measurably, for you to feel satisfied in your

progress?

 How can you ensure that you are neither pushing yourself too hard, and ensuring failure,

or being too easy on yourself, and risking boredom and cynicism?

Your benchmarks should be personal indicators of success. It doesn't matter what others may think

defines progress towards your goal. Write down those accomplishments that would truly indicate

positive movement on your part. Feel free to write as much as you feel is necessary.

Write down how you might monitor your progress with regards to this goal.
2.5. Future Steps

People often worry themselves unproductively by constantly revisiting their goals, instead of

concentrating on their attainment. It is easy to undermine yourself, by always questioning your

aims and intentions. Am I doing the right thing? Have I chosen the correct goals? This leads to

chronic worry, unproductive behavior, and lack of opportunity to learn.

 Now that you have set goals, it is best to concentrate on a daily or weekly basis on

implementing the strategies you have devised for their attainment, instead of worrying

about the goals themselves. It is just as important to stick to a plan, as it is to make a

plan.

 If you implement your goals, even if they are not perfect, you will learn enough during the

implementation phase to make better goals next time. As you continue to repeat the

process, you will get wiser and wiser.

 Set aside some time every week or two - no more than ten or twenty minutes - to mentally

review your performance. You will gather all sorts of useful information that you can use to

reconsider your plans, down the road.

Researchers have found that if someone performs goal-setting tasks multiple times over a long

period, there is a greater chance of health and productivity improvements.

As a result, you might wish to engage in this sort of exercise on a regular basis, every four, six, or

twelve months, as your situation changes.