The following is a guest contribution by one of the participants of the Designing your Work Life Workshop at Allianz:
The Best Possible Self is a Positive Psychology practice of mindfulness focused attention to create a vision of your best possible future. However, we will see, that it might be possible to go way beyond ...

The Best Possible Self practice would start at your current situation and would assume that from now on, everything will develop at it’s best. The task would then be to visualize this future and to imagine in detail that you have succeeded at accomplishing your life goals. In a next step you would describe these details and how this future would evolve out of the current conditions ...

Typically, the result of this exercise can be used as a positive affirmation for your own development and growth. Research has shown that it will boost people’s positive emotions, happiness levels, optimism, hope, improve coping skills, and elevate positive expectations about the future.

However, this approach might have a problem:
Based on our curreent situation, we might tend to describe our best possible future and self in a very narrow corridor of possibilities, based on our own expectations ... As a result, this might become only a poor vision without a real motivational drive.

Last week, I learned about a somewhat different approach in the course of a seminar called Design your (Work) Life. There, we did a very similar exercise, called Odyssey Planning, but the essential part was to plan for three different odysseys:
• The first one was the best possible self I shortly described above
• The second one should describe an alternative, where the current conditions would no longer be available
• And the third odyssey was, where the magic happened, because it intended to think outside of the box, where everything is possible 

And the magic really happened and within 10 minutes I sketched a vision which was so overwhelming that I could not believe it! And when we discussed this third odyssey afterwards in our breakout group, the feedback was outstanding. And, of course, you may combine your best possible self vision with your magic odyssey ...

Curious? Try out to sketch you magic or cracy odyssey and create a vision you have never dreamt of! Happy to hear about your experiences ...

written by Dr. Joachim Hofmann, Allianz
Head of Global Platform Compliance

Thanks for sharing your experience of your Designing your Work Life Workshop with +RASMUSSEN!