Your past is not the key to your future.

This morning I was chatting with a client who is deciding what her next steps are and was struggling to visualize it. 

We decided to do a creative brainstorming exercise where I asked her to imagine…if she could do anything as a business what would she want to do?

She started talking about a former job that she could potentially use the experience from but didn’t know how to make that a business. 

But that wasn't what I’d asked her. 

So I asked again. 

If you could do ANYTHING, what would you WANT to do? 

She started telling me about a different former job trying to figure out the same thing. 

And that is why she was so stuck. 

Often when we imagine our futures, when we want to make a change or when we think about what we want in our lives…

We think about now, but slightly better. 

We envision our futures based on what we already have.

Which means that our vision of what's possible is based on our past, and limited by it. Because we are telling ourselves that what is possible for us is something that's only a few steps forward from what we already have. 

Imagine if instead of “I want to be healthier than I am now”, we thought things like:

“I’m going to become a person who prioritizes their health and is in exceptional physical condition.” 

Or instead of, “I want to have a bigger house than I do now, thinking “I want to become someone who has enough financial assets that I can live anywhere I want.” 

Or even “I want a job that makes more money than I do now”, becoming, “I’m going to create a career shift that allows me complete control of how much money I can earn.”

If we limit the potential of our future by the experience of our past, we miss out on the vast possibilities that could be available to us. 

It makes me think about when people used horses for transport. Hundreds of years worth of selective breeding and trial and error went into trying to breed horses that were faster, stronger or had more endurance than the ones before them. The future of transportation was limited to simply improving what had been done in the past. 

And then someone said, “What if I created something that didn't require horses?”

And the engine was born paving the way for trains and cars. 

Imagine what might happen if you stopped looking at your past to decide what's possible for your future.