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How about taking your Futures personally?
Somewhere along the corridors of corporate diplomacy and polite disappointment lives a phrase we have all heard:
“It is not personal.”
In termination of relationships, after years of arguments leading nowhere or just surprisingly after silence:
"It´s not you, it´s me"
The emotional distancing floats in the air of our personal futures like emotional bubble wrap. Soft, protective, sterile. Somehow, it leaves you numb and powerless.
Who is it protecting - the ones making the decisions of cutting themselves from your futures or you? Is it merely supposed to avoid every one of the one thing we are worst at confronting - the emotions we have towards the loss of the life we expected to have, the part of our futures we lost?
In detachment, we are left alone to have the painful conversations. Making sense of what happened and how to move on. We are left alone to face our emotions, to cope with the wounds of detachment. Being left behind.
Sometimes distancing is useful. Detachment can be a shield. But over time, if you overuse that shield, you stop feeling the weight of your own sword. Especially if detachment is the only tool you have. Denial of processing the feelings involved may turn emotionally against yourself.
What if the real craft is not in distancing yourself from your experiences, but in learning how to take your futures personally? Constructively personally?
Not personally in the fragile, ego-bruised, unforgiving, eternally staying bitter way. Personally in the sculptor’s way. The composer’s way. The way someone stands before raw marble or an empty score and says: This piece will carry my fingerprints.
The Art of taking your Futures Personally might not change the life events you are facing, but it changes the way you prepare for them and how you participate in shaping your life through them.
It´s a shift from being a spectator of life around you to being the lead artist in your life. It is the creative dimension of your mind in sculpting you life, composing the symphony, mixing the colors or painting the canvas. Feeling your process.
The Detachment Trap
The modern world encourages strategic numbness.
Market shifts? Layoffs? Algorithm changes? Global turbulence? Deterioration of heath care? Not personal.
How other people behave and treat you? When you are left alone with unresolved questions? People confusing you with promises that never meet reality? Again, not personal.
Yet these are the forces that shape your time, your livelihood, your relationships, your energy, your health.
For your own sake, it is crucial to make the distinction: it is definitely not personal from the systems perspective and probably not personal from other peoples perspective either. Still, if it affects your future, it is definitely personal from your perspective.
If you accept to distance yourself from everything affecting your life labelled as “not personal,” you may end up becoming a spectator to your own trajectory. That is a dangerous and deceptive illusion to live by. At the core, it is you, choosing to outsource your agency in your decisions.
I´m not claiming this distinction is clear, or the balance is easy to find or maintain: systems are impersonal, but all the trajectories are personally lived and experienced by individuals. The change is constant, and your future demands your attention so you can steer it in the direction you want it to evolve.
The Art of Taking your Futures Personally bases on:
- You choose to open your eyes, mind, and horizons to explore the world around you.
- You decide that macro forces are not excuses; they are material for the growth of your understanding, your art of living.
- You will not accept other peoples behaviour and choises affecting you as an evidence of your self-worth, the value of your art.
- You guide these explorations by deepening the understanding of your own internal, creative landscape, you choose to create and recreate.
- You accept and embrace the personal nature of your futures, find the inspiration and motivation from within yourself and ambitions.
- You decide to take the courage to feel the emotions and let them guide the piece of creative art that your life will become.
Your mindset is a skillset - creatively applied in your life.
You already know that your mindset matters when it comes in how your personal futures unfold. You have heard and probably read tons of literature and motivational quotes about growth mindset, solutions-focused approach, self-love, antifragility, agency and positive psychology. These, among thousands of other approaches, contain very useful tools in sculpting your experience of life.
As such, they are merely frameworks.
They do have the power to become a form of art through your creative selection and application. In how you find your special combination of them to approach the events and forces affecting your futures.
What I´m saying here is that your mindset isn't a motivational poster or a single practise. It is holistic, it is your trained and constantly evolving set of instruments and sculpting tools for navigating the uncertainty of your life.
You can think your mindset as the artist in you, having at least six dimensions, you can constantly develop :
- Horizon scanning - openness and curiosity in viewing, researching and understanding the world around you. Detecting signals of change and playing with alternative development paths and their potential affects your futures.
- Futures literacy - the ways you understand and use time and change, and challenge the assumptions. Your ability to sense long arcs of development and emergence of new. The amount of variety and opportunities you are able to detect and build toward through transformative thinking.
- Emotional balance - perceiving, accepting and using your emotions towards your life and futures. Cultivating your relationship with yourself, fostering self-acceptance, care, love and trust. Confidence and accountability in choosing your path, steering your life.
- Energy and life-force resilience - finding your sustainable ways of using and restoring your life-force and energy through physical, mental and spiritual practises. Committing to not sacrifice your sources of energy.
- Narrative sovereignty - challenging the default stories of the society and developing your own approach in choosing the directions of your futures. Trusting in your own judgement in the pressures of discrepancies.
- Experimentation tolerance - treating your identity and even dreams, goals and ambitions as a prototype, not a prison. Accepting, respecting and honoring yourself as you are, simultaneously allowing the growth in terms of who you can become.
Now stretch these skills beyond the productivity culture we have been conditioned to live in. The culture which has left many of us behind, and even more feeling numb and burned out.
What if your mindset of growth were not about coping better or being more efficient?
What if your mindset of growth would allow you to look wider and direct deeper? Steer you toward a creative design of your own life? The art of designing your futures to become personal? To actually look and feel personal to you?
What kind of futures would you love to have? What are the personal futures that would fill your heart with joy and bring a smile to your face?
Personal Futures Journey: Develop your Mindset of Growth Beyond Futures
€790,00
"I have nothing to fear when it comes to my future, because I understand how the futures unfold. I embrace my agency in directing my future, promise myself to sustain my energy and trust myself to grow with change" Are you… read more
Taking your Futures personally leads toward Authenticity
We live in an era often blamed for being individualistic and self-centred, a charge that is often levelled at those who prioritise their own futures. On the other side of this equation, we have all experienced the constant demand to sacrifice our own needs to prove our value and maintain our position. Personal needs put aside for a greater good of a family, community or an organisation.
The Art of Taking Your Futures Personally does not direct toward selfishness, even though it prioritises your own personal futures. It acknowledges that futures are built collaboratively and places great importance on everyone's efforts to be aware of the kind of futures being built.
If anything, taking your futures personally is an art of steering your life towards the direction you want to grow. Choosing or building communities that align with your values. Acquiring understanding and skills to benefit those developments you hold important.
For most of us, turning our attention inwards and facing our real emotional honesty will lead to greater authenticity and interaction in balanced communities. This may present itself in many forms: less material, more meaning, less control, more accountability, less competition, more care, less noise, more thought, less speed, more presence.
This is also in the essence of the Art of Taking Your Futures Personally.
Taking your futures personally is not about feeding your ego. It is about embracing the responsibility of your own becoming. In a world accelerating in every direction, that may actually be the most radical act available.
Read more about Personal Futurist coaching priciples.
Explore Beyond Futures mindset / Online kickoff Wed. 25. Feb
€119,00
"I have nothing to fear when it comes to my future, because I understand how the futures unfold. I embrace my agency in directing my future, promise myself to sustain my energy and trust myself to grow with change" Are… read more
