GIVING UP THE FUTURE

Since the first of the year I’ve been writing to specific how to use the NLP processes for setting effective goals. I then wrote about the more comprehensive level of the direction that you want your life to be going so you can use your intentionality more intelligently. As I’ve been writing about the art of creating your future meanings, the purpose is to make sure that you seek your objectives intelligently. If you’ve done all of that, then you are ready to let all of that go and release the futures you’ve created.

“Release my future? I thought I was creating my future with my well-formed outcomes in order to hold on it my direction and focus?! What gives?”

Do you also find this contradictory? Confusing? Good. Now that I’ve induced a good state of confusion, let me see if I can now pull apart another distinction that operates as one of the factors for personal success. The paradox here is that to effectively reach your goals you have to give up the future.

Why? The reason is that after you set your direction and goals, releasing those very goals is what allows you to come back to the now where you can perform the actions that will create your future. Releasing the future enables you to use the power of sensory awareness to be all there in the here-and-now. Otherwise you will miss the now— which is the only time you have for creating your future and reaching your goals.

Want an example? I will use the experience of listening to illustrate. One of the goals of any effective Coach and Professional Communicator is to be a good listener and to be an active and deep listener, to listen with a third ear. This is the first competency we train in Meta-Coach Training and the first competency that we benchmark. “Can you listen? Can you really listen?” If you can’t, that’s the first thing to work on. If you can’t listen, you won’t be able to coach yourself out of a paper sack!

So let’s say you set that as your goal: “I will become an active and deep listener to catch the specific words of the client, to see his or her gestures and bodily expression, and to listen for the meta-levels of belief, value, and other frames.”

Now after you define this goal and set this direction, and detail the specific processes by which you’ll train yourself for this goal, suppose you don’t release it. Suppose you don’t give up that future. What then happens is that when you are supposedly listening, you will actually be focused on your goal! Then while listening, you will be checking on yourself,

“Am I listening? How do I know? How well am I doing? Hey, I just repeated back with precise his specific words, Right on!”

You’ll be listening to yourself. You will not be listening to the other person! During all of this self-talk—you will not even be able to listen! To listen you have to give up the goal, release it, let it go ... and be in the moment actually doing what you set your goal to do—listening. Consciousness of the goal while engaging in the very activities that makes up the goal counter- acts the process for achieving the goal.

Maslow (1998 Maslow on Management) spoke to this when he wrote: “In order to be able to listen totally, in order to be able to immerse oneself, to be all there in the here-now, one must be able to give up the future in the sense of being able to enjoy, to loaf, to saunter, instead of purposefully walking, to take one’s ease, in a word— to play.” (220)

Now to give up your future—to release your goal or goals in the moment requires facing numerous fears and accessing a particular kind of courage. To achieve this will require the courage to trust yourself to the moment as you give up “control.” And what actually prevents you from releasing the need to control the future? The lack of trust in yourself. Conversely, the self-trust and courage that you can improvise when the future changes is what allows you to be more effective. Maslow spoke about this in terms of being “afraid of the future” and at the core of that is distrusting yourself. Then you become so obsessive and compulsive about following your plans that you end of trying to force the future—force your goal. Obsessively needing to reach your goal will precisely be what prevents you from reaching it!

The solution is flexibility. The solution is learning how to ride the whitewaters of change as the future keeps changing. And if the latest economic downturn teaches us anything, it is how fast and unpredictably the future can change. It can turn on a dime. Only a flexibly creative person who can change course as the situation changes and invent it as he or she goes—can adapt to changes and effectively face a continuously changing future.

So what does this require of you? It requires that you view your plans of goals and outcomes as heuristic scaffolding that you can then cast aside easily without regret or anxiety when things change. Again, this is why direction is a higher level than a goal and more important. Maslow wrote about people who do not do this — those obsessing about their goals.

“It’s as if they cannot change their minds, as if this throws them into anxiety, into a panic. Of course, this kind of scheduling of the future, of geometrizing the future, of making everything arithmetical, exact, predictable, controllable and so on, this is all a big set of defenses against the anxiety which comes to such people from having to meet something unexpected, something they are not prepared for.” (2000, p. 245)

So on to the future. In the next Meta Reflections I want to address the subject of the Coming Future and how you can develop a your future self that can resiliently and creatively handle that future.