Focus on the Future

Do you ever wish you could see the future? Do you wish you could know how things turn out,

whether the decisions you make today will lead to the results you want, or whether you are

wasting your time on another dead end road? Do you think the future is already determined, or

do you believe you have a hand in creating it?

Do you even have to ask what I believe? After all, this site is called A Decided Difference.

Your future is not determined by your past, and you are not defined by what you have done in

the past. I do not believe the future has already been determined. That’s why I think no one can

truly predict the future, because it hasn’t been decided yet. If that’s true, it is great news for

anyone who wants to have an active hand in creating a future that is better than either the past

or the present.

Let me illustrate with a little story. A few years ago, I was helping my daughter pack to move out of my house. As I helped her pack up her things, I noticed items that once belonged to me that I had passed on to her. Seeing those things reminded me of the past, and I started thinking about the things I had lost or left behind. It was easy to start to feel melancholy, because there have been many losses—people I have loved, homes I have loved, and possessions that were dear to me. I thought about how hard I had worked to build relationships and to build and furnish the homes that sheltered me and my loved ones. I thought about how much of that effort had led to nothing, and I started to feel a little sorry for myself.

Then, I remembered that my brain is a thinking machine, but I am the machine operator, and I

made the conscious choice to shift my focus forward instead of back. I thought about how the

most recent move had taken me to a beautiful apartment in a city I have loved since I was a

child. I thought about how free I am to write, to travel, and to try new things now that I have a

smaller space and fewer things to take care of.

Within moments of deciding to focus on gratitude and hope instead of loss and sadness, I received a text message from a new friend, someone I had met just a few weeks ago, reminding me that I have much to look forward to. Maybe that was just a coincidence, but maybe it wasn’t.

Stories We Tell

Our stories can help us create change, but they can also hold us back from change. As I so

often say, becoming aware of the stories in our personal and cultural narratives can help us take

charge of our own situations. Doing that can change your thinking, your actions, your attitudes,

and your results. Let’s look at some of the stories that create obstacles to change.

One of the most damaging stories our culture tells us has to do with changeability itself. Have

you ever heard that personality is fixed, completely solidified, by the time a human being is thirty

years old? That was a theory of William James, whose book about psychology was published

nearly a hundred and thirty years ago.

Although research has demonstrated otherwise, the story about personality becoming set and unchangeable persists. Guess what happens if you believe that story? Not only will you expect other people not to change, but you will believe you can’t change yourself. When you believe change is not possible, you will not even try to create change, either in yourself or in the outside world. If you don’t try, then nothing changes, which reinforce your belief that change is not possible.

Another story we tell is that change has to be dramatic or it doesn’t count. We even

have a saying to describe this idea: go big or go home. We love to see the before and after

pictures, whether they are of someone who lost fifty pounds of fat or the house that was

remodeled after years of neglect.

We fail to recognize, or we gloss over, the facts that the weight loss took two years of effort or the remodeling project involved eight subcontractors and cost two hundred thousand dollars. Somehow we think we SHOULD be able to do the same thing, do it ourselves, and do it practically overnight. If we can’t, then we consider ourselves failures.

Expanding Your Comfort Zone

We can also buy into the story that it takes superhuman effort to get out of our comfort zones.

You’ve heard of the successful business person who sold everything and bought a one-way

ticket to some exotic place and became spiritually enlightened. You’ve heard of stories like the

waitress who decided to put herself through school to try to be an astronaut or the successful

surgeon who decided to get a law degree, too. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find those

stories all that inspiring personally. I find them mostly exhausting.

When I think about my own comfort zone, I remember how I got to the one I have today. I did it

by doing things that were once unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but they became familiar and

routine because I just kept doing them. I believe this is the real story about the comfort zone: if

you want to change, you will have to leave it, but that doesn’t mean you will always feel

uncomfortable.

When you leave your comfort zone, whether in a large way or a small way, the choice you have

to make is not to stay uncomfortable or to go back to where you were before. Once you have

stepped outside it, you are already changed and therefore can’t go back to exactly the same

place. When you stay outside your original comfort zone for a while, your comfort zone grows. It

gets bigger when you decide to make it bigger.

This is just a minor example, but when I first moved to Nashville, I knew a few major thoroughfares and had a vague idea of how the city was laid out. At first, I depended on my phone’s navigation apps to take me everywhere. After a few months, I was proud to say I could get to lots of places without relying on that external guidance.

I made deliberate choices about learning my way around. One, I paid attention when I did use navigation, to try to memorize the routes to my gym, or to a friend’s house, or to the library. Second, when I am not in a rush, I let myself just drive around and see how the various neighborhoods melt into one another. I knew I was becoming a real Nashvillian when I heard myself differentiate between the midtown area of Broadway and “lower Broad.”

This is not earth-shattering stuff. Whether I can figure out the back way to Franklin from

Murfreesboro makes very little difference in my day to day life, especially because I do have

devices that will navigate for me. The point is that I can choose to learn. I can choose to grow

new neural connections as I explore the geography of my new area.

I can do this in any area of my life, and you can, too. If you want to learn a new skill, or improve one you already have, you can do it with deliberate practice. If you want to be more outgoing and sociable, you can do it with deliberate practice. If you want to be more empathetic, more supportive, more reliable, more prompt—you know what to do.

I am not saying that big, hairy, audacious goals are unrealistic or foolish. I don’t think they are. I

think you can do whatever you decide to do, in whatever way you decide to do it, until it is

proven otherwise. And I mean proven, people, not just that it gets a little scary out there and you

decide to duck back under the covers.

It’s up to you to decide what your future will be like and then to go about creating it. Ten years from now, you will not be in the same place you are now, whether you take an active role in getting to a different place or whether you just go along for the ride. So what will you decide to do?