Remembering the Future…
This methodology is revolutionary… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves…
What future? What remembering? What can it do? What is self-trust? Is it the same as self-esteem?
Listening to an interview with Aldous Huxley was valuable in seeing that what he saw, in 1958 is spot on… it is already happening… He saw the future…
Probably the most valuable to me was research that couples disgust with certain personality… I am not ready to share what I see… until I see it clearly…
But for now, let’s see what remembering the future is about and how it can start straightening your life, how it can start empowering you, how it causes self-trust… and be prepared: it is counter-intuitive.
Remembering the future.
Sounds weird… how could you remember what hasn’t happened yet, but suppose that the theory is true that all past, present and future are happening all at once… but we only have perceptional access, through our perception organs, eyes, ears, touch, etc. to the present.
The past we store in the mind… and the future, as far as we are concerned, hasn’t happened yet.
But what if some part of the human brain can connect to that future and even get guidance from it, that are more useful than what you can hear from a teacher, from a guru, from a book, from anyone.
Why? Because that future self you connect to is you… and it has accomplished what you are yet to accomplish… success, health, happiness, fulfillment, a joyful life.
Is there such a future self? IS? you are asking… No is… but could be.
If you continue doing what you have been doing, the future is not going to be able to tell you how he or she got happy, fulfilled, accomplished… But that is the point. Unless you do different, the future is already written… and for most of us it is not a happy future.
Do… I said. Not believe, not imagine, not fantasize, not plan… DO. Action. Different action.
From where you are, in this very moment, there are infinite possible actions can take you to the next moment… And only some of those, followed by another lead to a future, where you are happy, fulfilled, etc.
We are going to pick, of all the possible futures, the one
- where you have what you really want…
- The future you really can have,
- what is REALLY possible for you…
- not the future you habitually imagine
- not the future you you cannot actually live, because life, however we try to lie about it, does have some restrictions, some more severe than others.
Here is an off the wall example: if you were born female, even if you have a sex change surgery, you can’t father a child… that future is not possible for you.
Clear?
OK, let’s continue.
An already existing program, Psycho-Cybernetics uses this method, wrongly… I say.
Psycho-cybernetics is is largely misunderstood by people who are ‘trained’ on mind movies and other imagination based programs, most people are disappointed with psycho-cybernetics, but the method works.
The main tool of Psycho-cybernetics is the theater of the mind method, where you see yourself having what you want to have, doing what you want to do, being who you want to be. But the mind is a pesky place: it is going to make you jump into impossibility. Or the mind will go to imagination that is as impoverished as your past has been. So you jump… leave the field of gravity, reality, and imagine yourself a mogul, a princess, a king, a president, a movie star, etc…
The mind will make you imagine a future that will make you miserable in the present. Why? How? because all it does is point out that you are weak, powerless, puny, cowardly, and stupid… What you really want to image is a future self that tells you what to do next so you can have a future that you’ll love.
If you want to get useful guidance from the future, from your future self, you need to enter an altered state… a state where the mind can’t interfere with what you see, what you experience.
We can call it a meditation, if you wish.
So how do you do the Remembering the Future meditation?
First: How you don’t…
In the Remembering the Future meditation you need to want something. An accomplishment. Something to accomplish. Something to do… NOT something to have.
You don’t want to do anything, you want to have? baaah… But that is what you have always done… and only actions create having… so give it up… pick some action.
You may see some action choices… but but, Sophie, an action will have a risk factor… wrong choice, doing it wrong, messing it up, loss of one sort or another.
You don’t want to make a mistake? You want to preserve your precious I self-image of… some pie in the sky image, not even well defined?
Here are a few examples for how not wanting to make a mistake stops you cold in your track:
- I am doing a project where I need to pick a product and test it with Facebook ads. $5 a day budget. One out of 10 should work. So wrong decisions are part and parcel of this type of project. And yet… I am getting all kinds of shoulder pain and upper arm pain… upper chest tightness… I don’t want to make a mistake…
- Another is from a student, it just came today: she wanted to try her hand on planting herbs… but even though she bought them, they just sat there… Had her mother not planted them in the soil, the plants would have died there, never planted.
- I used to teach internet marketing. The big stumbling block of beginners was picking a niche… and it was a big enough stumbling block to stop them cold… and die on the vine… so to say.
Second: how to do it: The remembering the future approach
You sit and close your eyes. You define, clearly, the step that gives you the trouble. And if you can, imagine the outcome that scares you. In all its glory… and then sit with it. And see that it is all a storm in a teacup. So it didn’t work… so? No big deal.
- –In my case, I will find out that the ten products I picked to advertise were the wrong product. Or I find out that I targeted them at the wrong crowd. Or I find out that I priced them wrong. I will lose $500 over a month. Next I tweak the ones that show some promise, and I make up for the loss… or don’t. Either way: it is not a big deal.It takes 10,000 hours to become masterful at something. These are the first hours of this quest for mastery. I am on my way.
- –In the student’s case, the student who killed the herbs, in spite of her desire to have herbs to harvest. So she can go out and purchase another set, until she succeeds. Or god forbid, ask her mother to instruct her… gasp… lol. No, not my mother!
- –Or in my marketing students’ case, they find out that they picked a crowd they don’t ever want to do business with. Now they know. Hallelujah.
The crucial capacity is seeing yourself as someone who can deal with failure…
who can deal with the result of a mistake. That you are not taken out by a mistake… or two, or ten.
To become a winner, like Winston Churchill said: going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
It’s the DNA capacity of self-trust (self-trust=being a match to what life throws at you, being a match for life, being big enough for life) that you need to need… need to stimulate.
The Imagining the Future method stimulates self-trust.
Winners are people who are not afraid of failures, they know they can handle it.
You’ll never become a winner if you avoid failure.
This whole visualization should take no longer than a minute or two at a time.
Repeat it as often as you need to: it stimulates the capacity, the capacity that separates winners from those who never try.
Warning: the visualization methods stupid gurus teach is that you should go as far as you can go into the future, where you are successful, and you are celebrating the well-deserved rewards.
Don’t do it. It creates the desire trap that is the hallmark of a life wasted, in addition to it being really unpleasant.
What happens when you imagine the huge success (with mind movies, vision boards and other harmful fantasizing) you just created a disconnect between now and then. No process, no plan, no steps, no chance for success. Your vision has no legs.
I have listened to testimonials of people who claimed that the visualization techniques worked for them. But all the ‘results’ were happy accidents.
You don’t want to base your life on happy accidents, do you? You don’t want to drink the cool aid!
If you do… get off my site. Please. Now.
The prayer people, and the fans of angels, and the law of attraction enthusiasts… go away. Please.
This site is for people who are willing to work for what they want.
No miracles, no magic, no voodoo, none of it works.
Learning to do things through doing them, developing skills, overcoming obstacles, purposeful action, deliberate practice. These are what make winners.
PS: Maxwell Maltz calls it self-esteem. But self-esteem is an effect, not a cause. We always want to go and handle the root level, the cause, not the symptom.
On the root level we have actions, and capacities. The capacity that is directly causing inaction is low self-trust. Or stupid action… a bunch of capacities, seeing the big picture, seeing the consequences of your actions, long range vision just among many capacities that are needed. Accuracy of the self-esteem is more like a worldview issue…
But in this meditation, we are most interested in seeing yourself making the mistake you are afraid making, and seeing that no big deal happens, is what is triggering the activation of the DNA capacity of self-trust…
It won’t help you make the right decision… but it will help you getting closer to making it through fearless experimentation…
Learn to build self-trustI now have the self-trust capacity open in some areas and not that much in others.
You even need self-trust when you want to learn something new. Even to sign up to one of my classes. Being able to trust yourself not to fall apart when I call on you, not to melt like a snowflake when I don’t like what you say.
I have recently paid to learn how to create software as a service that people would pay for. My self-trust in that area was enough to pay for the course, but wasn’t even enough to stay awake during its delivery.
I found myself going in and out of falling asleep… totally unexpected. It is something new, and I surely will make an ass of myself come tomorrow, when the part of the course comes where I have to share what I am doing.
So if this meditation, Remembering the Future works, and it has worked for me before, then what I need to imagine is sharing my inane, probably stupid ideas tomorrow and still get some help from the teacher… and still be able to respect myself.
The other students laugh? Good, I am glad to cheer you all up! No big deal looking stupid… I’ll figure it out when I do.
The same is with the book chapter that is due tomorrow: I’ll do the final edit and submit it. If the editor says: it is stupid, or bad, or unpublishable, I’ll say thank you, and ask for some time to rewrite it… No big deal. I can take the beating… Writing a book chapter is different from writing an article to readers I know… No problem.
So you see, I’ll meditate over the mistake, not the success. I imagine it going wrong, and myself being undaunted… impervious to failure… I’ll just do better when I do the action again.
If you are someone who when you find something difficult, something that can go wrong, something that if you do it poorly it will make you look bad… what you do automatically is move sideways to avoid the challenge then this meditation is what the doctor ordered for you.- If instead of writing the children’s book you have been wanting to write forever, you instead starve yourself to lose weight… if instead of getting on youtube and doing funny videos that you can fail at you decide to instead re-learn the piano, or any version of the above… this is the meditation for you.
Imagine doing it badly… and doing it again… badly… but eventually getting the hang of it… Build your self-trust.
Learn to Remember the FuturePPPS: Self confidence is an attitude that is based on reality, based on your track record.
Surprisingly imagining and seeing clearly, enough times, that as you make a mistake you get up and dust yourself off, and do it again, Seeing that enough times builds self-confidence.
This is how I’ve done it… especially in areas where I had no track-record of successes… which, in the beginning, was every area… lol.
So learning and practicing this method can make more difference in your life than anything else I am able to teach, anything else I know of. So do it… You’ll see the result.
