Are you Past Focused or Future Focused?

Don't look back, you aren't going that way.

Are you looking to your past for evidence of what you can create or are you looking to the future to see your possibilities?

OUR BELIEFS COME FROM OUR PAST

Science shows that what you currently believe about yourself is based on thoughts from your past.

Beliefs are nothing more than thoughts you’ve thought over and over until they become beliefs. Throughout your lives, you have learned thoughts and beliefs indirectly and directly, and most of those thoughts are now so ingrained that you are not aware of them.

Just like a fish is unaware of the water it lives in, we are often unaware of the thoughts we are thinking.

Likewise, for us, we must develop the skill of becoming a Watcher of our thoughts. We must learn to watch our brain think so we can recognize thoughts and beliefs that are not serving us.

Often, we think we are observing facts when we are actually making judgments based on what we have learned in our past.

For example, we will think, “That is a pretty flower.”  We won’t question that and see it as a fact. The same goes for thoughts such as, “He’s being rude,” “She’s not nice,” “It’s difficult for me to lose weight,” or “I’m not an athletic person.” These beliefs are so deeply ingrained that we don’t see them as beliefs.

WHAT WE WANT IS BASED ON OUR FUTURE

Often, we look to our past for validation that we are capable of something. This only works if we are looking to accomplish something we’ve already accomplished in the past.

Imagine if a baby who was learning to walk refused to try because he’d never been successful at walking before. With this mindset, the baby would never learn to walk.  Fortunately, when we were babies, we didn’t look to our past for evidence that we would be successful or we’d still be crawling.

But somewhere, typically in early adulthood, we stop focusing on our future and focus instead on our past to help us decide what we’re capable of. We begin choosing thoughts like, “I’ve never done it before so I’m not sure I can do it now,” or “I’ve always been overweight; it’s just who I am,” or “I’ve never been able to lose weight and keep it off.”

We limit our potential based on who we’ve been in the past and what we’ve already accomplished.

Focusing on the future means we should recognize our limiting beliefs, let them go, and replace them with beliefs that serve our dreams.

It means focusing on the road ahead and getting excited about the future. It means that to create a different future, we must create something that doesn’t exist in our past.

We must believe something that we don’t currently believe. If we already believed it, we would have created that result in our life already.

If you would like some help learning to be future-focused, sign up for a call with me, and I can show you how to change your focus so you can create the results you want in your life.