Creating Your New Future
It’s better to fail at achieving a new future than continue living below your potential.
Saying you’re wrong is the path to being right.
Saying you’re wrong isn’t saying you are lazy, insincere, or stupid. It’s acknowledging that your past isn’t creating the future you hope to build.
It took me half a life time to courageously embrace wrongness. Sincere tenacity coupled with my investment in methods that hadn’t worked established a treadmill of unsatisfying achievement.
If you try, you may fail. If you never try, you always fail.
Courage not fear builds your future.
Fearing what could happen congeals your past. Fear stalls progress by overstating difficulty and adversity. Fear is survival mode. Courage, on the other hand, creates opportunity mode.
Courageously naming your fears is the first step to overcoming them.
Honesty with yourself precedes honesty with others.
If you have no fears one of two things is true. You have reached enlightenment or you’re blind. I haven’t reached enlightenment, have you?
The second step is talking over your fears with someone who’ll listen.
Find someone who explores ideas; avoid fixers. At this stage awareness is the goal. Fixing too soon hinders self-awareness and masks pain. Identifying pain-points identifies untapped trust-points.
Courageously express faith in your ability to recreate and contribute.
I’ve been asked how I’m able to write an article every day. There are three basic reasons. First, I committed to write 5 days a week and I’m tenacious. Second, I trust myself. Courage springs from trust. Third, I put more in my cup than I pour out.
How are you creating your new future?
Good morning, Dan, another great post. I have to confess, the biggest hindrance for me is lack of trust in myself. I can dream big, and can even see what I need to do to achieve the dream, and often what needs doing is within my capability, but often I don’t really believe I’ll ever get it done. I have too many projects in my life that got started and then got overtaken by events. On the other hand, I can point to a handful of things that I committed to and stuck to over the years, so there’s hope.
Hi Greg,
Thanks for sharing a bit of your story.
I wonder if taking on too many things is a subtle way of creating an environment where we don’t have to achieve. I may have chased too many dreams and in the end didn’t achieve any.
Love your comment.
Best,
Dan
Thank you! It made me think.
To be courageous is not easy. I have to jump over the gulf – the gap between my comfort zone and crisp, fresh air and opportunities several times per day. Sometimes I’m too weak and sometimes I’m just to lazy and think I can get away with procrastination. Who cares? Well, the truth is that I care. It’s important for me and my integrety. Can I trust myself? Can I trust my self to be true to ME? Will I be there when I need me? If not; can anyone else trust me – to be true to them and be there when they need me??? Hmm.. this is tough. It’s so logical and simple: It has to be true.
Hi Anne,
I love the winding trail your comment creates. Thank you.
An honest comment encourages and enlightens everyone.
Best,
Dan
Good morning Dan. Very thought provoking post this Monday morning. It is difficult to tell what is going to happen as Yogi Berra always says especially when it is the future. Not sure what the future holds in store for us however there is nothing wrong with trying to create our future. Courage as Joe Tye says is a decision and fear is a reaction. I would like to think that after so many years fear becomes only a catalyst for us to be courageous and brave the new environment which is dynamic and constantly changing. I believe that as long as we stay true to our personal life vision and values and seek to give more and expect less that our future will always be bright. Happiness is a state of awareness that occurs when one delves passionately into doing the things that we care about. The satisfaction and gratification of navigating without fear knowing that any outcome good or bad will only strengthen our resolve to just keep going is reason enough to keep “reaching.” I hope the future has room for me to contribute whatever little I can to make the world better, safer, and yes even “happier.”
Courage and passion are well intertwined is my take away from your comments Al. Seems I still navigate with fear on my tail from time to time, can live with that as long as I continue to move forward. The great parts that you noted are the satisfaction and gratification that come as markers on the journey.
This was very timely since in my meditation this morning I asked to be relieved of fear and gain trust. Did not think about courage so reading the post this AM was a step forward was very helpful. And I have to say writing a piece every day is mind boggling.
Gail
Dan, great post. I wrote about fear in two blog posts two weeks ago. Fear HAS to be embraced to be conquered. The first blog post was about 3 ways to face your fears (http://bit.ly/jQhVfw). The second was about focusing on the right elephant – one of my favorite stories about handling fear (http://bit.ly/lUoqZu). Your posts are always succinct. Thanks!
It was very motivating post for me at this moment,because i was fired recently improbable…..
…doors will open Nikolay, hang in there.
I set clear goals of what I want to achieve with a timebox to realize it.
Once said, I write it down and start finding ideas about to get there.
I try to raise my knowledge of my environment and what may be useful to accomplish my tasks. I trust myself and I’m consistent in my efforts and regularly remind myself with my objectives.
On top of that, I try to keep an open mind and listen to others and work to improve my people skills and try to put in practice what I learned from my mentors, books, arcticles or videos.
Dear Dan,
I like the sentence ” It is better to fail at achieving a new future than continue living below your potential. This is courageous step and you have rightly mentioned that courage alleviates fear. I also like the sentence “courage springs from trust. I would like to add one more. Trust invites confidence and confidence overcomes fear.
I create my new future by learning, instilling confidence, understanding what works in new future. When you decide to create new future, there is always uncertainty. There is risk for success. You can predict your path but learning part is most critical. Since you are new in new future, you need to learn new things. Though you’re past experience, learning and exposure will be helpful to you. So, it is very crucial to leverage on you past experience in new future. When you do that, you core competence will be different from others and that is the edge over others and your colleagues in new future.
We often sabotage our self when we taken on too many things at the same time. It gives us a sense of business or should I say activity with no visible result. Broken focus creates a situation where we abandon projects and then doubt our ability to complete subsequent projects.
Courageously embrace wrongness—geez Dan that would be a, “Ka-Ching” back at cha!
Those three words pack a punch. Imagine an organization that regularly embraces wrongness and does it with courage. No finger pointing, no snickering, no ‘glad its not me’ but says…we were wrong, very glad this came to light now , what shall we do about it as we learn from it? Course we also could embellish the embracing with ‘courageously celebrate wrongness’. Such a paradigm shift for most leadership positions. Wow!
“To courageously celebrate wrongness” well that is a tall order Doc, and a huge paradigm shift as you say but one well worth trying. Thanks for the “encouragement!” 🙂
Hi Dan.
a great thoughtful post again,Thanks. although there were various point which hold my eyes but the one which really imprinted on my layer of brain was “it’s better to fail at achieving a new future than continue living below my potential”.
I found that I am not fearful about the future in terms of what it will and how it will be even I am quite an extent honest to self when it comes to accepting my faults & lacunae. But what I miss is having less trust in self & that of in my ability too, which i am trying hard to overcome. But its also true that just a boosting word from someone trustworthy & bit of encouragement removes all my doubt about self.
Past certainly holds me for sometime but just for remembering the leanings & promising to self “next time” I will do it better,might be some other ways.
Dear Richa,
I agree to your points. Your sentences reflect your true feelings and curiosity to learn. Your sicerety and honesty about someone is great sign of learning. Usually peope do not accept the facts. Let me share you something. We can not change our past but we can make our future better by learning from the past. What I mean to say that we should recall and recollect
our learning and apply to reinforce our capability to make our future better. Other thing is that we should make our sincere effort and ready to accept outcome in any form. Unrealistic expectation is evil and we should try hard to overcome that.
Some great comments on today’s post! (And good topic to start with.) A lot of creating the future for me, as apparently for other readers, is coming to terms with the part of me that whispers, “why try, you’ll probably fail.” But part of overcoming that is accepting that the aftershocks (even of failure instead of success) aren’t quite as drastic as we predict. I can be quite a perfectionist about the written word, which works well when people pay me to make their writing error-free, but can be problematic when I need to get one of my three (no, I’m not a five-day-a-weeker!!) posts out every week. In reality, if I misspell something I can go back in and correct it (and give whoever catches it the satisfaction of having caught the “Big Green Pen” in a boo-boo).
Thank you all. So many insightful comments.
I think it is Stephen Covey who say:
“If your past didnt serve you well in the past – what makes you think that your past will serve you now?”
It’s sad that we fear change. It holds so many of us back. Since change is the only way to get forward we should indeed embrace it. These pages are wonderful and encourage other people to be more bold and courageous. I hope tomorrow will be a “courageous day” and that people we meet will feel uplifted and enlightened!
I have found being able to admit your wrong is the path toward growing and learning. I think a lot of people have untamed pride which holds them back from admitting mistakes. Enjoyed the post
Admitting to be wrong is scary because it forces change over you, change needed to start to be right. And as I say often, here in your comments as well, fear of change is the biggest obstacle you can have towards success. It’s very rare to do things right at first shot.
Two thoughts on reading your blog & people’s comments…
the first related to ‘courageously embracing wrongness’ – I wonder if a step towards this might be to just suspend judgement, i.e. to observe rather than to label right or wrong. To ‘just notice’ what we do.
the second relating to “talking over your fears with someone who’ll listen. Find someone who explores ideas; avoid fixers. At this stage awareness is the goal. Fixing too soon hinders self-awareness and masks pain. Identifying pain-points identifies untapped trust-points.”…
it occured to me that’s exactly the role I play as a coach – I listen, I’m non judgemental, I don’t fix & I don’t encourage the person with the fears to jump to fixes, instead I help them explore & to raise their awareness.
Thanks for raising my awareness!
.
The second step is .
I do agree with you Jo about suspending judgement, often by unconditional positive regard for the situation and those in the situation.
Where I tend to lean in ’embracing’ or ‘celebrating wrongness’ is to actively recognize/appreciate the risk-taker whatever the outcome (of course risking with some degrees of wisdom and skill).
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Tell me what you think of that! I think we all should discuss it because it would be better for all I this days for us to help each other!
Cheers my friends!
J
“If you try, you may fail. If you never try, you always fail.” I find this the best sentence in the whole post. Growing up as a teenager, I see my father work as a businessman back in Malaysia. He was never afraid of failure. After reading your article, I hope I can be like your and my father, courageously pursuing your dreams!
Great post. By the way, it might be a nice idea to write a post on how to rebound back from a failure. It is certainly not easy trusting yourself after you failed once.