We cannot anticipate the future. I start with this motion because I feel this is the most important statement I would have to make in this post. It is because of this that I would like to stress it’s importance.

You might think that it makes sense. We all know that we could not anticipate the future, but if we see how we react to certain things, we would realize that we don’t really understand this fact.


Uncertainty Of The Future

How many times do you feel unhappy when something didn’t go our way? Or when you expected someone to act a certain way? Have you felt a sense of insecurity before from not having enough money, in a relationship or in your future?

If we all know that the future cannot be anticipated, why do we even have a sense of insecurity or a sense of heavy expectation for something to happen? Would it actually help us be more productive? I don’t think so.

So, this post is going to focus on these mere fact that we could not anticipate the future and thus we should not create heavy expectations for things to happen. Most of the time, these expectations actually bring us down. It makes us unhappy, stressed, worried. If we try to control the future too much or spend too much time dwelling on it, we become individuals who aren’t fulfilled because we depend on things to go a certain way for us to be happy. If things don’t go our way, we get unhappy. There are many situations that illustrate this. It might be people who are after a promotion, parents who want their children to be a profession, people who expect their spouses to act in different ways or a sales target we want to achieve.

You see, we spend so much time in the future that it creates a lot of expectations. These expectations makes us fearful. We fear that if we do not achieve them or if things don’t go our way, we will get disappointed or we might not look good in front of other people. Since our society is such that whenever something don’t go according to what they want, we actually label them as failures.

That is why our society value those who hold on to their words/promises, those who are consistent, those whose personality doesn’t change much. We love these kind of consistency or what I would rather call as “PERMANENCE”. We love it deep down because of the security it brings. We don’t like things in which we couldn’t predict but like I said, we cannot predict the future.



Planning The Future

So if things are so uncertain and the people around us love the sense of security that it brings, why plan at the first place?

Why do we set up goals? and create action plans to make it happen? What is the use of it if things would not go our way?

We have to ask ourselves that. I have come out with my reason though and would happily share with the readers.

To me, goals and plans are just “tools” we use to give us a sense of direction. It shouldn’t be something to give us expectation. Unrealistic expectation. Many people when setting goals, expect things to go entirely their way. The would want to achieve things with some predictability. They want to know entirely what happen, all the time. But in actual fact, this is just totally impossible. It creates friction and stress if we expect things to go a certain way.

Whenever we set a goal, we should be vary that goals play a role to give us a sense of direction to where we are heading in life. It shouldn’t create expectations in the future. Goals are used to create possibilities, not expectations. Whenever we set a goal, always make sure to know the end result that we desire. We should later “drop” the goal whatsoever and just focus on the present (I would discuss this in the next post).

So many people in their desire to achieve their goals spend so much time dwelling in the future. We should be aware that the real essence of what we truly desire is not the achievement of a goal, but rather on fulfillment (Read my post here on the clarity of our inner drives).


Steps To Plan Our Future

You see, I am not someone who just totally disregards the future. From experience, I know that knowing what we want gives us better clarity as well as a deeper sense of purpose. I use to set goals myself. What I didn’t really like about it was the anticipation whenever I set those goals. It’s like my mind was totally on achieving that goal that happiness was only when I achieve the goal. I would work so hard, although I didn’t really like it. And when I finally achieve it, I realize how fleeting the success was.

I would give you steps on how to plan for your future, based upon what I know and experienced. Remember that these steps are not just for the achievement of those goals, but more of finding fulfillment and achievement of those goals subsequently.

  1. Set goals in all areas of your life. In spiritual/self development goals, material/financial goals, relationship goals, contribution goals. Or in any other area you could think of.
  2. Create a master plan for achieving those goals.
  3. Chunk it down into many small milestones.
  4. See what you would need to do to achieve those milestones.
  5. Once you identify those steps, take action and do it!!
  6. Stay in the present moment and just do it.

Note that the most important step is the final one. I am not discounting the other steps but I am just emphasizing on the importance of the last step if we are to be fulfilled. If you could just stay in the present without any anticipation of the future or worries from the past, there would be no negativity whatsoever. You would just do it and you would easily enjoy your day, everyday. Just disregard the end result. Just do. Don’t anticipate.

I would discuss more about embracing the present moment in the next post.


Handling A “Negative” Future Outlook

It is always good to have a positive outlook of the future. But what if we have a negative outlook of the future? How do we deal with it?

It emotionally terms, it is called as worry.

We worry because of our expectations of the future and the expectations created from the past. It arises because of our desire to control things. We want things to be in a certain way. We crave for things to be like we want to be. This causes a lot of suffering for us.

When we see things in the future that we do not like, we must learn to plan for it. We have to address what is not working and how we could work to change things.

Steps to change a negative outlook of the future:

  1. What is it that you are being negative about?
  2. Ask yourself why are you being negative about? Is it because of an unrealistic expectation? We might need to go back to the past to learn those lessons in order to stop worrying. It could also be that we just think too much.
  3. If the thing that you are being negative about doesn’t fall under the category of unrealistic expectation or that we think too much (which I believe almost always do), then we should learn how to deal with it. Start thinking of ways to change the future and the time is now.
  4. Create action plans to change the future.
  5. Think of the wonderful positive future that you would experience.
  6. Bring yourself back to the present.


Summary

  1. The future is uncertain.
  2. The future is uncontrollable. We might plan as much as we want, but things don’t exactly go our way. As the saying goes, “Man Proposes, God Disposes”.
  3. Planning helps us by giving us a sense of direction.
  4. Set a goal, create a plan and then just drop them.
  5. Create a positive outlook of the future you desire.
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