When I was 17, my friend wanted to be a pharmacist. His future wasn’t a dream, or even an ambition, it was more like a fact that hadn’t happened yet. Like an airline pilot planning a flight to Hawaii. He knew where it was, how to get there and how long it would take. I’m not sure why, pharmacy didn’t run in the family or anything, but that was definitely what he saw himself doing. He had a very clear picture of his future destination, which was real and immediate, not out there in the distance.

Mark’s now a very successful research chemist (in pharmacy), he’s exactly where he thought he would be, nearly forty years ago. I guess he’s had different aspirations along the way as well, but he’s achieved his lifetime career goal.

I admire Mark for his focus and vision (notice the visual words we use in English to talk about the Future). He’s very Future orientated.

Our time  perspectives drive how we all manage our time in the macro sense – managing our life time. They’re the dynamo that drives time management behaviour in the micro sense as well – how we manage our days and hours. Can we keep our eyes on the final destination, or are we more prone to deal with what’s appears right in front of us? This affects how and what we instinctively prioritise, regardless of what we think we should be doing, or what’s theoretically number one on our to-do list.

Mark’s goal  may have been way out in the future, but it had two essential qualities. Firstly, it was connected to the present by his sense of purpose. He was highly motivated in the here and now to work towards it. Secondly, the goal was more than just a vision, it was a fully realised thing that he could touch, smell, taste and hear, as well as see. When those two qualities are present, the destination is a real place, worth going to, worth spending time getting there.

So, if you can make your goal real for yourself and other people, and if you can connect it to your inner motivations, you will be propelled towards it, and it will get more real as you draw closer.

Let us know if that’s interesting to you.

Stuck in the Past

Last time we examined the power of a Positive Past. A Negative Past can have an equally powerful effect. When we talk of people being “stuck in the past” – it’s a negative past that we’re thinking about. Incidentally, I think people can also be stuck in the Present and stuck in the Future – but that’s the subject of another blog.

In terms of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, someone with a negative past will strongly agree with statements like “I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past” and “It’s hard for me to forget unpleasant images of my youth”. In other words, they ruminate.

Just because someone has a high Past Negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be negative. Different people respond in different ways. We often see a high Past Negative linked to a high Future, where the subject is using the past as a motivating force to create a better future.  Sometimes it can be linked to high Present Hedonist behaviour – where perhaps the subject is blotting out the bad memories by having a good time, maybe too much of a good time.

So how do we deal with someone who can’t escape a negative past? Coaching often tends to focus on the present and the future and leaves difficult issues in the past to therapists or psychoanalysis. If indicated, we would refer a client to such a professional. However, there are simple techniques which we can use as interventions.

Using these techniques, it is possible to change our beliefs about the past, the stories we tell ourself about what happened, and the meaning we attribute to those stories. This doesn’t have to be done by reliving the past, it’s about rebalancing and re-framing the past, the present and the future, and not investing so much energy in ruminating on the past.

We use NLP for these kind of re-frame exercises, to write yourself a new story, one with a better ending (or even a better beginning), because our interpretation of events can change over time. Another favourite is the ABCD method. Adversity. Beliefs. Consequences. Disputation. When we meet a bad situation we come at it with a stock set of beliefs, which lead to an outcome. You can learn to reconfigure those beliefs by using Disputation – so you argue against your habitual self-talk. It needs a bit of help, but it’s a great new habit to form, if you want to escape that cycle of self-recrimination and regret, stop ruminating, and get yourself a new outcome.