A short personal-development talk by Brian Johnson presenting three practical thought exercises to develop intuition and access inner wisdom: the '110-year-old you' visualization (from Tal Ben-Shahar), creating an imaginary board of advisors composed of admired figures, and advising a loved one (e.g., your child) as a surrogate for self-advice. Johnson frames these as journaling/meditation practices to help people trust their own judgment and begin living in accordance with their deepest values without waiting for a crisis.
Chapters
Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. We've got another video. This morning's is on how to develop your intuition and tap into your inner wisdom. This is based on the fact that nearly all the time we already know the answer to the question we might have. The question is, do we have the courage to trust ourselves and follow our own wisdom? So with that in mind, I'm going to offer a few thought exercises and then a few questions. The 110-year-old you exercise your imaginary board of advisors and what advice would you give to your son or daughter or friend? So these are all practices that I've picked up and that I use and I want to share them with you quickly to help you develop your intuition and tap into your inner wisdom more often. So first, the 110-year-old you. This is from a guy named Tal Ben Shahar, who we talk about often, who taught the most popular class in Harvard's history on positive psychology. He's extraordinary. Written some books called Happier and the Pursuit of Perfect. He has this exercise and his basic point is that again, we already know. And he looks at people who have life threatening illnesses or a near death experience and suddenly and remarkably, they change their lives permanently. They start living more in accordance with their truths and their ultimate values. And his point is, look, they already had all the wisdom. It wasn't about reading an extra book or taking an extra seminar. It was about life. Shaking them up to a point where they finally realized, now is the time for me to live with deep integrity to my highest truths. And he says, let's not wait until a life threatening illness arrives or some other scary situation. Let's live our truths now. And one way we can do it is to go through this exercise and these other couple things that I'm going to suggest. But his Exercise is the 110-year-old you. So imagine that NASA or whoever invents this remarkable time traveling machine and you can travel from today to visit the 110-year-old version of you. Imagine that for a moment you can go from where you are right now and you can be face to face with the 110-year-old version of you. You might want to press pause and just feel into that. It's a pretty cool thing to imagine. Now you're sitting face to face with the 110-year-old version of you. What do you tell yourself? If you had 30 minutes to hang out and chat, what would you say? What would your 1 1, year old version of you say? Say to the current version of yourself? What if you only had five minutes? What if you only had 30 seconds to impart the most important wisdom that you've picked up in this long, beautiful life of yours? What would you share with the current version of yourself? That's profound wisdom. It's worth tapping into as a journaling exercise, contemplating it, meditating on it, whatever 110 year old you try that out, it's a great way to develop your intuition and tap into your inner wisdom and, and have the courage to start following your own inner truths. So that's the first exercise I give to you. The second one is imagine that you had an imaginary board of advisors. So boards of advisors are awesome, but they're real people. And there's a good thing about that and a not so good thing about that. Ultimately, we want our truths to come from within. And it's great. We can go outside and we can ask people technical questions about certain things, maybe tap into their life experience. But ultimately we really want to tap into our own inner wisdom as much as we can. And one way to do that is to create an imaginary board of advisors where you imagine people you really, really admire, heroes of yours. And the reality is you only admire them because they have expressed the potential that's still latent within you. So if you imagine a leader that you really admire, or an entrepreneur that you really admire, or a poet that you really admire, whatever it is, they really are in many ways an expression of the highest potential of that part of you. So it's really cool when you put them on your own little board of advisors and then you can imagine, okay, well, how would this person approach it? What would they advise me right now as I'm going through this? What about this person? And different heroes of yours would have different perspectives and different facets of wisdom. Well, that's a really cool thought exercise to again, develop your own intuition and tap into your own inner wisdom. That's the second exercise. The third one is something that I just started doing. As many of you know, we just had a baby. His name is Emerson. And I was going through some questions as we were kind of evolving our business and looking at different things that are going on. And I was wondering what I should do. And I imagined my son, who's now 7 weeks old, in my exact position. And I imagine, well, what would I tell him if he was asking these questions and he was going through these challenges and situations and had these things to determine what he was going to do, how would I advise him? What would I tell him? And it was just amazingly profound and impossible to articulate in words. But it was just, it was so clear. Oh, this is how I would advise him. And of course I'd support him in this way and I'd suggest this. And there you go. Boom. That's exactly what I needed to do. It's just amazing. So imagine giving that advice to your son or your daughter or your friend. And rather than it being about you, imagine how you would advise someone you care about deeply and how you would support them in the process of whatever it is you're going through. Really, really cool way to develop your intuition and tap into your inner wisdom. This one's actually my current go to and I'm just loving it. It just makes it so clear and it makes me so excited to continue to practice this stuff so that I truly can give great advice to our son as he grows up and all that good stuff. So there you go. Those are three quick exercises. 110-year-old you, your imaginary board of advisors. And what advice would you give to your son now when you first try these, he may not feel very competent at it, but try it, give it a shot. Cultivate your ability to pull up the 110-year-old version of you in your mind to imagine your board of advisors to give yourself advice via a surrogate son or daughter or friend or whatever. So really, really powerful stuff. And then here are a couple questions. Oftentimes when we're struggling in life, we're making things way harder than they need to be. What if it was easy? What if life was a lot easier than we've told ourselves and we've trained ourselves to believe. And what if you did know? A lot of times you're like, well, I don't know. Well, what if you did know? Because you know what we do know. And again, we don't want a life threatening illness or something else traumatic to have to come in into our lives before we start living our ultimate truth. So what if you did know? What if it was easy? What advice would you give to a loved one? Imagine that board of advisors and tap into the wisdom of your 110 year old you. And there you go. Few quick ways to develop your intuition and tap into your inner wisdom. Hope you dug it. Let me know what you think and what else you'd like to see. Have another awesome day. See ya.
