Category Archives: Planning

You will change more than you think in the next 10 years!

Goal Achievement, Planning, Psychological blind spots

Every day we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we become. However we are not always happy with those decisions. Dan Gilbet who is a psychologist asks a tough question:  Why do we make decisions that our future selves will live to regret?  That is a great question!

Dan in his TED talk (below) says that we are all walking around with the illusion that our personal history has just come to an end.  That we have just recently become the people we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives!  This is called the End of History Illusion.  We find it easier to remember who we were 10 years ago but we find it much more difficult to imagine who we will be in 10 years time and because we find it hard to imagine we think many changes are not likely to happen!  The bottom line is that time is a powerful force and it reshapes us in every way but we seem to appreciate this fact only when we look back at our lives and not forward!  Dan says that ‘human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished’.   The one constant in life is change.

Look back at your last 10 years.  Have you changed a lot/have a lot of things around you changed?  I bet they have.  Now look ahead to the next 10 years and realise that things will change just as much.  Remember however that the future is not fixed and you can profoundly influence the life of the person you will become by the actions you take today and every day.  That thought is empowering.  Make decisions today that your future self will live to appreciate.

 

 

Not Making Progress on Your Goals? Don’t Worry There is Plenty of Time…..

Goal Achievement, Planning, Procrastination

We are now three weeks into the new year.  How is 2018 going for you?  Making progress on your new year’s resolutions?  Are you making progress towards your 2018 goals?  If not then don’t worry – there is always next week, next month or next year…….

Or so we tend to think!

However out of the blue people get sick.  People get cancer,  people have accidents and get killed, even celebrities get sick and die suddenly.  We have seen many celebrities die over the past few years.  Just recently Irish musician and singer-songwriter Dolores O’Riordan of the group Cranberries passed away unexpectedly (R.I.P).  She was only 46 years old and in London to record a cover of her hit song ‘Zombie’ with hard rock band Bad Wolves.   She had left a message with one of the band the night before saying how much she was looking forward to seeing them in the studio the next day to record vocals.  Within hours she was dead – we wait for the inquest to know why but foul play is not suspected.  Sadly in an instant all her dreams, goals and plans are gone.  Sadly we will never get to hear that cover version of ‘Zombie’.

But of course death or serious injury or disability always happens to somebody else.  It will never happen to us and in our reasoning it will always happen to somebody else.   In terms of all our goals and our dreams we estimate that we are going to live the average life and therefore we can say well I’ve got another x number of years to live.   Plenty of time to do all the things that I want to do.  Someday I’m going to be rich.  Someday I’m going to buy that house.  Someday I’m going to go on that holiday.  It’s all gonna happen someday.   But the reality is that we don’t know just how long we have got.

Therefore we should never put our goals and dreams off until tomorrow, next week or next year.  We should never postpone our dreams because we may just unexpectedly run out of time.   Make sure you are spending your time on things that really matter to you.  Yes you and I have to pay bills.   But we need to make sure also to spend at least some part of our day working on our dreams and goals because we just never know how long we actually have and that somebody else might just become me.  Life is like a clock and we just never know when those hands will stop and if we are not careful we will die with all our goals and dreams still inside us.

Place no faith in “Tomorrow,”
For the Clock may then be still.”

The Clock of Life

“The clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour………..
…..So live, love, toil with a will,
Place no faith in “Tomorrow,”
For the Clock may then be still.”
― Robert H. Smith