In this article I’m taking another look at one of my quote images – it’s a point I’ve made before, and it’s a point I’ll be making again in the future…
I took that photo on a sunrise photo trip, December 2016 – I had been meaning to try that particular spot here in Kent, in the South East of Britain, for a while, and eventually just decided to do it when I spotted the weather was scheduled to be a nice clear sky.
It’s always a balancing act with sunrise/sunset pics, because in winter you don’t have to get up so early to get the sunrise, but the downside of that is that it’s a whole lot colder before the sun appears! This was one of those winter sunrises, and I’d definitely describe it as ‘more than chilly’.
There’s a certain something about seeing the increasing glow in the sky and then the sun itself appear over the horizon – a certain feeling of ‘newness’, of another start, of ‘potential’. Because it’s the start of another day, it could be seen as the arrival of the future.
Obviously this is something that happens everyday. Tomorrow becomes today. That future we created becomes our present, and it a future we created.
That’s the key point – it’s a future we created.
Our circumstances around us in the present, are a result of the actions we took in the past. So it follows that the actions we take today will create our future.
Those actions are driven by our choices, our words, our thoughts, and just as the sun appears everyday, we carry on creating our futures whether we know it or not, or whether we accept that fact or not.
This is why I write about creating that future with a bit more intention…
Many people, and I’d say *too* many people, bring hardly any intention, or even none at all, to this process of shaping their future. They either think they have little control, or they just leave the future to life’s random currents, to the agendas of others.
Either of these choices still sets the foundation for our future. The non choice still has a result.
Jim Rohn said “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
So, if I’m saying we should bring more intention to the process, how is this to be done?
Well, I have two main angles I like to come at it from…
The first angle is the proactive goal achievement process. I’ve written about this many times but in a nutshell you set your goal as precisely defined as possible, you work out the steps to get there, you find out the knowledge you need to have, you work out the very next step, and then you take that step.
It’s clear that even those few words, if acted on, will set a course of actions which create the future with intention. There is huge power of change and direction in this goal achievement formula.
Some people get scared at the prospect of such a proactive plan. I understand that, and this fear usually comes down to either never having actually tried it before, or being afraid of failure, or people laughing at them, or possible difficulties along the way.
Maybe they think they’ll do it ‘sometime’, which of course ends up with just more days of an unintentional future.
These are mindset issues, which can be overcome, and when it comes to mindset, this leans towards the second of those two angles I mentioned about how to bring intention to the process of creating our future….
As well as the direct plan of goal achievement formulas, there is a more indirect way. It might be seen as more subtle, less full on, so might be more appealing to someone new to this idea of setting intention.
It’s to do with how we view things.
When I say ‘things’, I mean how we view the world around us, and our place in it.
If we view the world from a negative standpoint, and/or view our place in a similar light, then over time we build up internal models in our brain based on that view.
We then process the input from the world in that negative view, which leads to our thoughts, actions and results being, yes you guessed it, in line with that negative view!
If follows then, that if you view the world in a positive view, and your place in it, your internal models have that positive base, and your thoughts, actions, and results have a positive flavour.
It may sound overly glib, and in fact I do get people telling me exactly that, but it’s not just happy clappy nonsense, there is brain science in it. It may take time and practice to change the internal models, but it most certainly can be done.
So, by simply changing our view of our present, we are setting a different intention about our futures, and this will bring different results. It’s a great starting point for anyone who considers ‘goal achievement’ as a bit too much.
It’s a great starting point because it’s a kind of goal achievement by the back door! Once the internal model moves from the negative to the positive, this will ripple out to words and actions more in line with the positive, and this in turn leads to the same steps we find in the ‘goal achievement’ process.
I get excited by this (as you can probably tell!), because the potential we can tap into by bringing more intention to our futures is huge!
The sunrise will come again tomorrow, as it always does. Our future will arrive again tomorrow, as it always does. Look to your current circumstances – in the key areas of health, wealth, career, relationships, lifestyle – is your present how you’d like it to be?
If so, then great, and what are you doing to keep it that way? If not, then the question changes to what are you going to do to change it? Doing the same as before will create a future that’s likely to be the same as before, and it’s a future you will have created by your actions in the todays.
I go back to the words I put over my photo of the sun coming up, and suggest that since we create our future every day, shouldn’t we do it with a bit more intention?
Ok, as ever, do let me know what you think!
‘Til Next Time,
Health & happiness,
Gordon
