If You’re Serious About Personal Growth, You Need to Start Doing This on a Daily Basis:
Let’s talk about future pacing.
It’s a concept most of us were introduced to as kids:
“Work hard and you can be anything you want to be!”
The goal was in getting us to imagine a successful future for ourselves, and drawing that connection between hard work and success, we’d have reason to learn and practice now for later reward.
Jordan Belfort recently reminded me of future pacing in his book The Way of the Wolf.
Belfort reiterates that in imagining your future self as successful, the feelings that rush you during that imagination process—happiness, satisfaction, sense of accomplishment—act as motivators to work hard now. Even if we don’t have a clear vision on how we’re going to get there, what we feel when we reach that point is enough to make us want to find out.
But too many of us write down our goals at the start of the new year and fail to look at them again.
Even if you have them written down on the front page of your planner, it’s likely you don’t take the time to read, reflect, and reconsider what those goals mean on a consistent basis. And the likelihood you take time out of your day to stop and truly imagine what it feels like to accomplish those goals—and to remind yourself why those are your goals in the first place—is even slimmer.
We need to implement future pacing into our daily routines.
Frankly, it’s too important to not be future pacing on a daily basis.
All of us want to be successful, for both personal achievement and fulfillment. But too often we get stuck in the present, forgetting why we set goals and where we saw our future selves after having accomplished those goals.
Start allocating time in your day to imagining what it feels like to be in that place. Close your eyes and picture yourself accomplishing everything you said you would. Hang on to those feelings and use them as motivators in the now.
You can be anything you want to be—never forget that.
