A Call to Find Friends that Explode Your Mind

I want you to pick a number between one and ten that represents how well you’re currently showing up in the world. Once you have your number, you can move on to the next paragraph. 

This is an exercise I make many of my mentees and consulting clients do in our work together. Most pick 5, 6, or 7. The point is that there is an assumed gap between your self-evaluation score and a perfect ten. 

The mental magic comes next.. 

Let’s just say that with the wave of my magic wand, you’ll wake up tomorrow as a full blown ten out of ten! As you wake up to this Perfect 10 score, I want you to make three lists and fill them out as a new ten out of ten-type person. 

1. What would you obviously start doing as a ten?
2. What would you obviously stop doing as a ten?
3. What would the new results you have in your life be as a ten?

We could stop the drill here and you’d have plenty of value and direction to carry on with your next week, month, and year. But, let’s not stop there, shall we?

Visualize yourself as this “ten” and don’t move on to the next sentence until you can embody this person..

Now, keeping this “ten” mentality, I want you to make a new scale. Your perfect ten is now a two out of ten. All the same habits, characteristics, and results your envisioned for a ten are now only a two out of ten in terms of possibility. 

This can be jarring to imagine, but I want you to try. 

The idea of this part of the drill isn’t to accomplish things a ten could on this new scale. Instead, the goal is to take your mind to a place it hasn’t been before. This expansive thinking is difficult and important for us to break cycles of thinking that prevent a growth oriented life. 

If you’re still reading, I commend you. I hope you’ll do the drill and take it seriously, but what inspired me to write this article was more pedestrian. If I’m a betting man, I’d offer that now is a great time to evaluate who is in your circle. If the people, their ideas, and their trajectories are extremely expected, obvious, and uninteresting, you’ll likely benefit greatly from surrounding yourself with people that expand your mind rather than solidify it. 

Good luck.