LONG AGO YOU decided that you were not extroverted enough to succeed in the world. So you created a winning recipe as a child to help you cope. As an adult the recipe allows you to hide inside a socially acceptable way to be – childish, curious, kind, neat, or risk-prone. Or any of the thousands of other ways introverts try to be to achieve safety and success. For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.
The last two posts discussed how to use a sense of opportunity and the achievement of small completions as ways to overcome a disaster. Here we will talk about a novel way to view the future. It can it pull you out of disaster mode into something positive and uplifting in the present.
In 1996 my wife Sandy and I took the Landmark Forum. It was a personal development course that counseled viewing the future in a fascinating way. Instead of seeing it as just an extension of the past, we began to see it as a place of possibility. One so inspiring that it could reach back into the present and inform who we were and what we did right then.
For someone as deeply embedded in a winning recipe as I was, this was revolutionary advice. Instead of creating a future using my well-worn recipe, I saw that I would do far better by stepping into the future. I could use it to yank myself out of the present.
That guidance was timely. A few years later I found myself on the street at age 61. I had virtually no prospects – despite my having graduated from the Harvard Business School.
How I Discovered The Possibility Solution
AFTER HURRICANE ANDREW destroyed our Miami house in 1992 (see Post #20) my wife Sandy and I moved 300 miles north to Gainesville, Florida. There I took a job as the Documentation Manager of a small medical software company.
The CEO soon hired Sandy as his executive assistant and over the years we both prospered. The company went public, and then was acquired by WebMD. During that time I built and ran a department of 20 technical writers. In 2002 I shifted to another division, where I hired and lead another 20 people.
But the very next year, the FBI and the IRS conducted a massive raid on our Gainesville-area office. They also raided our Tampa facility, and the WebMD headquarters in New Jersey. The charges were false, but it took until 2010 for a Federal court to unwind the case.
In the meantime the company suffered. I was downsized in 2004 and the following year the CEO resigned for the good of the company. Out of work at age 61, I had a winning recipe – being process-oriented. It counseled me to trade on my Harvard MBA and documentation experience, but nobody was interested. I was too old and did not have a distinguished enough career for someone of my age and education.
So I ignored my recipe’s advice, and instead focused on a future that inspired me: to provide what was wanted and needed right then in the marketplace – project management skills and training in a discipline called Six Sigma.
Within nine months I got certified in both fields, and immediately found a great job. The solution to my being let go was not my recipe, but creating a possible new future, one that turned me on in the present moment. That allowed a specific future to coalesce, and start fulfilling me right then.
Unpacking The Possible-New-Future Solution
IT IS ALL too easy to see yourself as the product of your past based on your education, family environment, job experience, and so on. Your winning recipe is likely to endorse that view, or at least to not dispute it.
Another interpretation, however, is that your past choices, including those you made based on your winning recipe, are what led you to where you are now.
If you accept that as accurate, then it suggests the possibility of using the future as a place you can consciously move into by making different choices now. If you can identify what inspires you about that future, it can motivate you to act now to achieve it.
That is what I did to get hired. It turned me on to see myself as a future certified project manager and Six Sigma Black Belt. That inspiration drove me to get qualified in both subjects in the present. A good job followed almost immediately.
How To Use A Potential New Future To Overcome A Disaster
Step 1. Adopt a new view of your past. Accept that you are much less of a product of your upbringing, experience, ethnicity and other demographics than you are a product of your former choices. This is crucial, because once you see that you are the results of your own decision-based process, it frees you to use new decisions today to overcome whatever disaster you are in.
Step 2. Adopt a new view of your future. See your future as a place of possibility, one where something that excites you is driving you to think outside of your winning recipe. Left to itself, the recipe will create a default future for you, and it is likely to look much like your past. If you lean in with passion, however, and see the future as a place that makes you keenly enthusiastic, the future you get can be entirely different.
Step 3. Adopt a new view of your present. Use the ardor for the future that you discovered in Step 2 above to rearrange your present. In other words, let the future as possibility determine what you do now. You may need to get new training, as I did. Or you may need to move to another city. Or take on a task you never thought you could embrace. The possibilities are endless – pick the best one and choose to have it define your present.
I Invite You To Use A Possible New Future To Overcome Your Disaster Today
- What was your disaster? How did it work for you to use a possible new future to overcome it? If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com
- How can I help you to use your future to restructure your present? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email, and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
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After a disaster, welcome to the passion that comes
from finding a future that inspires you, and
from the satisfaction of living in the
present based on that future
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