The Awareness in AWARE method needs some elaboration. So far, we have used journaling and slow living as the best ways to grow awareness, but it is time to expand to visualization as well.

Consider this: The captain of a ship calls the whole crew one morning in an alarming state and announces, “The ship is sinking! What went wrong?!” In a panic, everyone starts giving reasons why it must have happened.

But the secret is that that the ship is not really sinking. Then why did the captain put up this drama?

Such practice is called Negative Visualization and pushes the whole crew outside their comfort of blind optimism. It gets them thinking about what could go wrong with the current mode of operation and thus make the changes before it is too late.

Negative Visualization has been around for centuries, usually attributed to the Stoic thinkers Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Today, it is popularized in the corporate world as pre-mortem by psychologist Gary Klein, where managers must envision what can go wrong before starting any project.

We find instances of Negative Visualization in emperor Marcus Aurelius’s journal as he writes:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so, none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him.

Expecting the worst to happen every day and planning an appropriate response in advance was one of the secrets of his success. And this wisdom is applicable today as well, especially in your war on mediocrity.

To answer your higher-self’s call, you will have to overcome Resistance every day. But if you prepare for the worst in advance, especially by visualizing the way you might sabotage yourself and planning a suitable response for it, you increase the chances of success.

P.S.: Revisit the Kosmik Keys you created long back and expand the list with new Keys to overcome the different forms that your Resistance can take.

P.P.S: Practice Negative Visualization for Awareness in the AWARE method. The best time would be to do it early morning as a part of your Morning Rituals.