How do you design your best future life and in particular what would you envision your best future life to look like in 10 years time? Ten years is enough time to achieve almost anything. This is a fascinating question which is the subject of my new course Design Your Life with Futures Thinking .

What do I mean by preferred future? A preferred future is one that we positively hope for and work to create. What we do today builds our preferred future. It’s impossible to predict the future and that is wonderful news! It’s wonderful news because the future is not fixed and is open. That means you can build the future that you want by your actions today. It doesn’t always mean that your goals are going to happen exactly as planned. It does mean that you can move in the direction of your preferred future. Of course your preferred future can also change as well. It’s your plan and your preferred future and you can change it any time you wish. Its not a straight jacket.

Your future will come anyway!

Here’s the thing – if we don’t decide what future we want then the future will happen anyway. Our future will emerge anyway – it’s coming whether we plan it or we don’t. Therefore it is well worth the time and effort deciding what you want and going for it. Your future self will thank you! The sad thing is that most people spend more time planning their holidays than planning their future. There are three basic steps when planning your future:

1. Know where you have come from and where you are now in your life
2. Know where you want your future to go
3. Build a solid strategic plan on how to get to where you want to go

Futures thinking methodology

There are various futures thinking tools we can use to help us build a solid strategic plan for our long term future. For example to understand where we have come from and where we are now we can look at stakeholders in our lives and the stages of life. We can look at trends and forces – internal and external. We can also look at our beliefs, values and assumptions.

To know where we want to go in future we can explore multiple plausible futures using scenarios. In the course you will develop 6 plausible future scenarios. These are the more of the same future, the optimistic scenario, the negative scenario, 2 wild card scenarios and an aspirational scenario.

Step three is to build a solid strategic plan to get us to our preferred future. To do this we create a vision of our preferred future along with strategies and action plans to achieve that vision. To strengthen our plan we use tools like backcasting, vulnerability analysis, gap analysis and contingency planning.

Design your own future

“Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.”

Ashleigh brilliant

If you are interested in building a well considered personal strategic plan for your preferred future 10 years from now then please check out my new online course. The course has the tools and templates that you need to design your best future life step by step from the ground up. We work methodically through the three steps – where you are now, where you want to go and the plan to take you there. By the end of the course and the 27 worksheets you will have a solid and well research strategic plan for the next 10 years of your life. Remember the next 10 years will pass anyway so why not shape your future now?

Please watch the above video or check out the link for a free preview of the course and discount (current best available price on Udemy)

I look forward to seeing you on the course and also interacting with you and fellow students in the dedicated Facebook discussion group.

Best wishes,

Tom Carroll, PhD