Your Self Improvement Blog

I was speaking to a client’s PA last Wednesday – she started our chat by saying “Are you looking forward to the weekend?” When I remarked that it was only Wednesday, she replied “Sure, but the weekend’s on its way once you get to Wednesday lunchtime!” Indeed, as I write this on a Thursday morning, I’ve already got a few emails finishing with the line “have a great hope weekend!” or words to that effect.

So much of our lives is spent looking forward. First of all, there’s the negative kind of looking forward – we all know and love this one as “worry” – in fact, I’ve just got an email from a client asking me how could he stop the stupid worries that come into his mind at 4 o’clock in the morning. And someone else recently said to me that he was worried because he could think of nothing to worry about! Psychology suggests that we’re hard-wired for worry – that, of the 50,000 random thoughts that fly through our heads each day, we’re more inclined to pay attention to and believe the negative ones.

Of course then, there’s positive looking forward. “I can’t wait for the holidays”, “I’m really looking forward to the girls’ night out”, “I’m going to hire a campervan and travel the world when I retire”, “Are you looking forward to the weekend?” Recently, as I began to address twenty Personal Development clients on a Monday morning in Dublin, Ireland, one of them asked me if I was looking forward to flying home to my family and the French Alps the following weekend. My answer was “I simply can’t figure out how to think that far ahead – if I was to think that far ahead, I wouldn’t be here with you now!”

Our lives should be lived in the here and now. What you do here and now has a direct and lasting impact on your success or, more normally, abject failure compared to the success that you could actually achieve. If you waste your time – even a little of it – looking forward, then you’re screwing up your own life on an ongoing basis, permanently. Small wonder that normal people are “not so bad”, little wonder that university research indicates that normal people only use roughly one percent of their mental energy to be in the only place and time that’s real – the present moment.

The course of your life, which is defined, if you think about it, by apparently random events, will be changed for the better if you were to stop looking forward and start looking at what’s actually going on now. Those apparently random events happen only now – and some of them will take you to where you want to go in life, if you just open your eyes and see them. These random events are what people call opportunities! – and life is full of them if you’d just tune in to now.

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