How Your Relationship to the Future Profoundly Impacts Your Work and the Fulfillment of Your Intentions & Goals
I’ve found that enormous opportunity, creativity, and new levels of performance happen when a team or organization comes together to invent a new future - a new kind of future - for their work and projects.
What you envision for the future shapes everything about your time, effort, and your sense of yourself. What you choose to have your future be about is arguably the most important choice you make.
However, without realizing it, we are almost always creating a future largely informed by the past.
To go deeper into this and how it impacts us in our work (and our life) it helps to understand our relationship to the future from a few different perspectives: evolution, the Aristotelian theory of time, and the Heideggarian theory of time.
Evolution and Your Brain
Brain science now tells us that the fundamental, evolutionary purpose of our brain is to predict the future. Why? To survive. What better way to survive than to be able to predict what will happen next! Where does our brain look in order to attempt to predict the future? Our past.
Moreover, the brain is always looking for ways to save energy so it can process the vast amounts of information we take in and make predictions about our future to make decisions about what to do next (mostly from the lens of survival). Thus, when we already “know” something, it gets moved to the unconscious mind.
Think about driving a car. At one point in your life, probably when you were learning to drive for the first time, it took great focus and concentration to drive a car. You had to consciously choose to push on the gas or the brakes, you had to think hard about signaling and moving the steering wheel during a turn. And now, I would guess, there are times when you arrive at your destination and don’t remember the last 20 minutes of driving. It has been moved to the unconscious mind.
This has great benefits for us - not having to consciously think about many of the things we do each day saves cognitive energy. Brushing your teeth, walking, driving to work, accepting meetings, and even sending quick emails is done with very little brain power.
However, there is an insidious side to this reality as well. Without much consciousness or reflection, what inevitably happens due to this future-prediction and energy-saving mechanism is we make decisions automatically and put things into the “I already know this - I do not have to think about it” category.
For example, if you are someone I already know or have worked with before, as soon as I hear your voice my brain starts predicting what’s coming, i.e. I “know” what you’re going to say. Since I already know you and what you’re going to say, I don’t actually have to fully listen.
Furthermore, if I have projected past experience about marketing and selling, for example, into the future that takes the form of “I’m not good at selling” or “It’s hard to get new clients” how likely am I to procrastinate or avoid taking action in this arena? Or if I have a meeting scheduled next week with a “difficult” client, it is likely that I will experience anxiety or fear or stress now as a result of my predicted future of the meeting next week.
Map these phenomena onto your industry, meetings with your boss, thinking about marketing, hiring a new employee, your clients, etc. We have an already-existing-future in front of us that pre-determines our actions and what options we have. We already know how things are and how things are going to go, based on the data and experiences our brain has collected and put into the “I know this already” category. As Heidegger would say, our future is colored with “Pastness.”
Aristotelian vs. Heideggarian Theory of Time
Aristotle proposed the future is the not-yet-now, the past is the no-longer-now, and the present is the now. That is to say, time is linear. We have come from the past, we are in the present, and we are headed to the future.
Heidegger was the one who came along and suggested that we human beings, in reality, have a much different relationship with time. He proposed that our relationship with time isn’t linear. According to Heideggerean ontological inquiry you are ALWAYS existing in relationship to the future. And, it’s this relationship to the future - our view of the future “that is likely to happen” - that gives us our experience of the present. Moreover, what we call and see as the future is mostly a series of projections from our past.
As a result of projecting our past into the future without realizing it, we are very often limiting and constraining opportunities and what is possible for us in the present.
Reflecting on a Pathway Forward
In order to open up new opportunities and to have the autonomy to chart a chosen direction forward, we must generate the honesty, courage, and commitment to see how we’ve projected the past into our future. By acknowledging where and in what way our past colors our view of the future, and our vision, we can free ourselves from those confines.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
What failures, disappointments, heartbreaks, or losses are influencing and limiting what I see is possible?
Where do I still have resentments or slights from the past that I am holding on to?
Where is there distrust of myself or my colleagues based on things that have happened in the past?
What decisions have I made about business, my industry, colleagues, potential customers, et. al. that exist for me as “the truth” or “the way it is”?
In what areas of my work or my life am I experiencing a mood of resignation, doubt, or fear? What’s my assessment of the future in those areas?
Creating a New Kind of Future
We propose that doing the work to take the past out of the future allows you to invent a future that is sourced from your heart and your soul - from your Calling. This is a new kind of future. This new kind of future has the potential to be life-changing and to create the opportunity and environment for you and your team to do the best work of your life. After all, we are always fulfilling a future - do you want it to be an invented one or one inherited from the past?