Is it the past or the future that guides you?
It should be an easy enough question to answer and I think most people probably think it is about where they want to be in the future that guides their current behaviour, but that is probably not the case. At least, not based on the excuses people have as to why they can't.
When training sales people to build their business case, one of the techniques is to work out some critical point in the future they are looking to accomplish, and then working backward from there. This creates a timeline and task list likely required to get there, and also gives a starting date that needs to be met to achieve the target.
But people don't tend to do this, even if they know where they want to be in the future. Instead, they want, but use their past experience to go forward, meaning they end up doing what they have already done, tied to what they were, rather than who they could be.
Sure, we can learn a lot from the past, but if we believe that our past dictates our future, we are severely limited. If we instead look to the future as our guide, we can take some of the experiential limitations off and introduce new behaviours and therefore, new results.
In the moment, we are what we do.
Not what we have done, not what we will do. Let's take an extreme example. You are in a car accident and the car catches on fire with you trapped inside, unable to do anything. A person who was on their way to work stops and risks their life to tech into the burning car, cutting you out and pulling you to safety, moments before it is engulfed in flames and explodes.
Is the person a hero?
Once the police and ambulance arrive, the good samaritan who risked their life to save yours, continues their journey to their workplace as a doctor at Auschwitz. It is 1944.
Still a hero?
Bad people can do good things in a moment. But if we think about ourselves in terms of our own behaviours, if we were "behaving badly" in the past and that is our guide for the future, our only action is to continue a similar journey forward, perhaps trying to be a bit better every day. But if our future dictates our actions and we work backwards to know what we need to do today, right now in the moment, and choose to perform that action rather than the default, in that moment, we are something other than what our past dictated. We are a different person, but the same person. What we are doing is creating ourselves based on who we want to be, not who we were.
This doesn't erase our past experience, so we can still learn from it and we are still responsible for what we have done previously, but it allows us to deviate from the default path, the one where we are limited by what we were born into, the opportunities we had available, and the way we were treated. We can take the lessons, without carrying the baggage. Which means that even though we were packed to go somewhere cold and snowy, we can choose to start repacking for a beach life instead.
What is required of me?
When I work on defaults, very little. Because the default behaviour, my intuition, is built on past experience and feels like this is the way I have to be. I can be thoughtless, unintentional, and still meet every goal, because the goals are limited by the default. However, if I choose new goals, work backward and become intentional with my actions toward that goal, it takes work. And yeah, everyone hates work - but imagine that it takes the same energy of work to have the life you have now and where that leads in the future, and having the kind of life you want. The same work to be who you are, and who you want to be. It is just that the actions required change, but so do the rewards.
Doesn't it make more sense working toward what you want, than working to stay as you are? Isn't the journey more rewarding also? A lot of people tie their future self to their past, because they are looking to improve on whatever flaws they had, which seems like it makes sense. "If I only stopped eating this and that, I would lose weight." But, that resistance means that it is a constant struggle, meaning that the problem always persists also. But, if instead I look at where I want to be, work out what I need to do, and then be that person daily, it is just who I am.
The becoming happens, because the being happens.
Be in the moment.
Putting aside that the moment the only place we can ever be, the moment more valuable when what we are doing has meaning for the kind of person we are. But we are that person in the moment, in every moment. While it doesn't wash away the past, perhaps that person who pulled you heroically from the burning car could become something different than what that past dictates. Maybe they could redeem themselves in the rest of their life, by behaving differently with every moment going forward. Yet, if we don't believe this is true, than we are also saying that we ourselves cannot be anything other than what we were. And that is just not true, because what we were is gone, and we cannot "be" in the past. We only have right now.
But, right now, we can think about the future and workout what kind of person we want to be, and then discover what we have to do, to starting being that person now. A tree on the shore will be twisted and shaped by the winds, but we are not trees. Our roots are experience, but we can uproot our behaviours and move into other environments that help us reshape our core, our branches, and how we interact with the world.
We can shape ourselves by the future, without being controlled by the past.
Taraz
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