What Happened Next Year?--Planning by Reviewing the Future
A 1-2 hour presentation.
How about a different approach to resolutions? Making resolutions is often a matter of will power, wishful thinking, and guilt--strongly intending to do what we think we should. In this program you'll learn how to do a presumé, a great way to intuitively plan work projects and clarify personal and professional directions, a way that effortlessly cuts through the New Year's hazards of guilt and wishful thinking.
A resumé reviews accomplishments from the present, and a presumé reviews accomplishments from a point in the future. In doing our presumé we'll assume it's midnight, December 31, 1998, and write down what happened in 1998. We can also trace the steps, priorities, obstacles, and breakthroughs involved in accomplishing things during the year. By doing a presumé we can add some clarity about exactly what our goals are, how they are interrelated, and the steps necessary to achieve them.
Possible Benefits of "What Happened Next Year?"
You will:
- Determine desirable personal and professional goals for the year without so much guilt and wishful thinking
- Learn the sources of time pressure and time poverty
- Learn how typical ways of planning tend to perpetuate the past, restrict creativity, limit well-being, and intensify time pressure and anxiety
- Identify the feelings that are currently moving you in various directions
- Learn a method to reverse our typical way of thinking about the future and eliminate its typical pressure and tendency to perpetuate the past
Highlights and Key Points:
Our planning usually involves thinking about the future room we've created separate from the present room, trying to see what's coming down the pike toward us from the future room, and what we'd like to see in the future.
Why is this kind of planning limited? The flow of time is actually a product of ignoring negative feelings and emotions: our experience of the flow of time actually seems to be the sum total of all our repressed negative emotions. The stronger the flow, the more the past determines the future. Rather than carefully thought out plans, we have little clarity about a future within a raging river of time that is quite determined by past events. This way of planning can produce a future that's a treadmill of stagnant events, with little chance for greater productivity, change, and enjoyment.
Thinking and planning for future times is fine and necessary, but seeing and feeling separate future rooms within the flow of time is a waste of time and an impediment to creativity, productivity, and well-being.
If our experience of linear time results from trying to get away from negative feelings and emotions, what's the chance that our planning done within the flow of time will also not be partly an attempt to avoid some feelings?
Is there some way to make plans and resolutions without having them determined by old patterns and their underlying emotions? Since patterns are problematic only if we can't seem to stop their momentum, and since all momentum is carried by--or is--the flow of time, if we can stop the flow of time we can stop any or even all of these problematic patterns. This claim makes sense if we know that the flow of time is actually the sum total of all our repressed negative emotions. So changing this flow is a way to deal with these old feelings and break up our old problems, including pessimism and optimism in their different forms.
Whatever we can do to encourage a sense of timelessness rather than a flow of time will help stop whatever emotion and habitual behavior is currently active.
Is there some feeling that makes up some of the momentum that is moving you to plan now? How are these feelings moving you to plan? In which directions are these feelings moving you?
Doing the presumé exercise can put a dent in the momentum of time and dissolve some of our habitual patterns.
The presumé may bring about an unusual sense of completion, well-being, or peacefulness. Why? We're usually trying to get ahead, perhaps struggling against time, looking forward to happiness and completion in the future. This becomes a habit so that we're almost constantly off balance and dissatisfied with what's happening now. Stopping the flow of time with this exercise puts a dent in this momentum of seeking and its dissatisfaction. Yet doing it in this way also allows us to make plans and think about the future.
An article that contains material related to this presentation is: "What Happened Next Year? Turning New Year's Resolutions Around."
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