If you are in your 60’s and beyond, you have already experienced many changes in your life. You’ve gone through puberty, child-bearing years and finally menopause (does it ever end? Yes!)
Now, here you are, ready to take on the next phase of your life. Instead of relying on your “past programming” (ie, what you’ve always done), look ahead into your future. Decide how you want this next phase of your life to go.
In his TED talk “Why do we make decisions that our future selves often regret?”, Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist states “we tend to think that who we are today is the person we will always be.”
If you look back at any aspect of your life, you’ll see that you are not the same as you were before. Therefore, it makes sense that you won’t be the same person 1, 5, 10 years from now that you are today. But it’s difficult to imagine ourselves in the future. How can we, since we can’t know the future.
Even so, you can create the future you want by imaging who you DESIRE to be in the future. Start with a clear goal. When you have a clear goal, you also have to be a different person to achieve that future goal. When you are clear on who you need to be, you can work toward becoming that person, the one who can achieve the goal you set.
For example, I have been doing group coaching on life and health issues for several years. It wasn’t going as well as I wanted it to. A past thought kept running in my mind “this hasn’t worked before, it won’t work now.” Of course, this did everything to keep me locked into my past belief. However, I now have a vision for the future of where I want my group coaching to be. With many mistakes and dealing with roadblocks from the past, I am becoming the person I need to be in order to achieve my goal.
You see, if I don’t, I’ll keep repeating the cycle over and over and continue to believe the lies I was telling myself.
What do you think about this concept of creating your future? The truth is, if you don’t, you will “reactively” become what your life defaults to.
I am hosting a free, online conversation on Tuesday, March 18th to talk about this very issue – how our past, in many ways invisible to us, holds us back from moving forward and becoming the person we want to become to have the life we want. Click here to learn more and sign up.
Toward the future,
Elaine L Stewart, CHC
