It is impossible to change and keep lasting change going, if you do not have a clear vision in your head of, who you want to be and what you want you daily life to look like on there other side of breaking addiction.

Without vision the people perish, so it says even in The Bible.

Whenever someone is stuck and feel stagnant, like they can't move, yet they may say they want to, they often don't have a clear vision on where they are heading. How are you going to get there, if you don't even know where you are going?

How are you going to get there if you don't even know where you are going?

Basically, there are many reasons to this. Many of us might feel that even though we want a better life, or we want to lose weight, or we want to stop binging or starving or drinking or doing drugs or whatever our self-destruction of choice is, we just don't think we can do it.

We are afraid we will not make it. We are afraid that if we dare believe in that life can be different, that it will let us down.

We are afraid that life will let us down, so we let ourselves down instead.

We do this because we have this constant brainwashing and self-sabotaging behavior going on telling ourselves, that we are not good enough, not lovable, not smart enough, not beautiful enough, just... not enough.

The way to break this pattern is to write down a clear vision of what you want you ideal self to be in your ideal life - involving as many senses as possible. I.e. How do you wake up? What are the sounds around you? What are you wearing? Where do you go and eat and who are you with? What does a day look like in your ideal life - not perfect, but ideal.

Quite a few of my clients are so stubborn about not doing this exercise, because it goes against their brainwashing trash talk of self: that they are not worthy.

Rather I encourage you to imagine yourself as a chameleon.

You can be whatever you want to be. Imagine this story as a fairytale. And then just write it as you would write a fairytale of happiness. This is your fairytale of happiness. IT can change later. The point is not to make it perfect, it is to open yourself to the possibility that life can be different. That you are not a stagnant being without any muscles to move around. You can move as you wish - you can change anytime and however little at a time you are comfortable with.

Big changes rarely happens over night if they are to last.

This exercise is also there to help you to understand what matters to you, beyond your addiction - and that whenever you don't know what to do, then you ask your ideal self in your ideal story: what would he/she do? And then you try as best as you can to copy that in your life as it is.

The more you copy the behavior of your ideal self, the closer you get to that place and state of being.

Why do you think athletes visualize daily of winning and how to get where they want to be?

Because they know that the secret to getting there is to imagine it clearly. And the more they can feel every single sense involved in that future image, they can copy it right where they are to get them closer to that place.

There is no point of asking yourself in the state of miserable addiction, that you might be in now. That is not going to give you a clear direction of where to go, rather it keeps us stuck. Always ask someone smarter - and that person would be you in your ideal story. How did he/she get there? How does he/she navigate in different situations. Emulate. It is simple, easy, pretty painless and it works.

Yet most of us make everything so complicated, and we choose time and time again to remain stuck in why we can't do it - the truth rather being why we won't do it. Yet we don't like to admit that. What is your excuse?