How to create a brighter future for yourself

Where are you looking?

Are you so busy staring at the closed door from the past that you haven’t even noticed all the doors, windows, ramps, and escalators of opportunity that lie in front of you?

Where we put our attention and energy has a huge bearing on who we will be in the future, and what that future will look like. We can’t do much about the doors that closed in the past, but we can make intentional decisions about which opportunities we will pursue, to create the kind of future we want to live in.

Short-term thinking is natural for human beings, especially during tougher times, whether that’s simply the darker days of winter, or when we’re going through a personal ‘dark night of the soul’. And in times of ambiguity, we tend to prioritise certainty. Those tendencies can lead to us creating unhelpful stories that keep us stuck.

3Ps for a brighter future

One of the most impactful ways we can create a brighter future is to check our default stories, and edit them to be more empowering and supportive of our goals. That will help to energise us to persist through the tough, uncertain times, in pursuit of what is meaningful and important to us.

Martin Seligman identified three “Ps” which can help us recognise the impact of our stories and revise them to be more uplifting: pervasiveness, permanence, and personalisation.

If we tell ourselves:

• “Everything is bad” (pervasive)
• “Nothing will change” (permanent)
• “It’s all my fault” (personal)

Then we’re hitting ourselves over the head with a triple-whammy of unhelpful thinking that’s likely to keep us spiralling downward.

Flip the 3Ps on their head

But if we can revise that story to:

• “X is bad, but Y, Z, A, B, and C are ok, and D is actually really good” (not pervasive)
• “I’ve seen this sort of cycle before – nothing ever stays the same forever” (not permanent)
• “A lot of what is happening is nothing to do with me, it’s because of the economy/other people/the weather/Mercury in Gatorade (😉)” (not personal)

Then we set ourselves up for a glimmer of hope, and we keep our minds and hearts open to the possibility of change.

Yes, the door from the past is still closed, but what happens when you turn around and look at all the possibilities that lie in front of you? You already have everything you need to create the future you secretly dream of – all you need to do is take the first step.