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Are you focused on the past, or are you future-focused? Future focus is a concept that I learned when I went through coach training, and I thought, “That’s neat.” But over time, I’ve gained an amazing appreciation for how powerful it is, and how challenging it is if you’re not aware of your brain’s tendency to go to the past.
I see this coming up for my clients over and over again, where they tend to want to focus on the past, which makes sense because looking to the past is super easy. However, in coaching, we like to spend more time in the future, and if you can start shifting to future focus more of the time, I guarantee it will 10X your results.
Tune in this week to discover how to start creating the future that you want from a place of intention. I’m sharing the problem with letting your brain look to the past to decide where your problem is in the present, and how you can start looking forward with future focus instead.
I am teaching a five-day workshop called Train Your Brain, and you’re invited to join me. We’re doing a 90-minute Zoom call every day where I’m teaching you how to get your head in the right place to be able to achieve your goals and solve your problems. I’ll even be doing live coaching. All you have to do is raise your hand! And the best part is it’s only $19. And if you can’t make the call live or you want to watch them again, they will all be recorded for you to watch any time. Click here to join us.
If you enjoy this podcast, or even if it just piques your curiosity and makes you think, you’re going to love my book, Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. It’s available now on Amazon for Kindle, in print, and on Audible!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why coaching is about looking forward, not back.
- What we can learn from looking to the past, but why we don’t want to spend too long there.
- How to see where you’re going to the past and getting stuck there.
- What our brain does when we start looking to the past to face a current circumstance.
- How to start the work of redirecting your brain towards the future.
Mentioned on the Show:
- When you’re ready to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10X level, then come check out Be Bold.
- If you’re a coach who is already certified through The Life Coach School, I want to help you take your coaching to the next level. Interested? Get on the waitlist here.
- Follow me on Instagram or Facebook!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 337: Future Focus.
Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. We are just about to enter a brand new year. How about that? I love a new year. I love the energy, and momentum, and excitement, and sort of recommitment to all the things we want to be and New Year is a fun holiday because it’s a simple holiday. We don’t have to buy a bunch of gifts and decorate. But we get to hang out, and relax, and enjoy one another. So hope you’re having a lovely New Year.
I wanted to mention before we get into future focus that I am going to be teaching a five day workshop called Train Your Brain. And I want to invite you to join me because it is amazing. I’ve done it a couple of times before, last year we did it a couple of times. And people loved it. I get so many messages from people about how they had huge shifts in their thinking and therefore in their lives after going to Train Your Brain.
It’s only $19 and what will happen is you will get to join me via Zoom, if your schedule doesn’t allow you can just listen to them after the fact because we will record everything. But I’m going to be teaching you how to train your brain in a way that will serve you. I’m going to teach you how to get your head in the right place to be able to achieve your goals and to be able to solve problems. So I always think about my work as being in two buckets. And it’s useful in both buckets.
And there will be times when you have a challenge or problem that feels overwhelming. Maybe it’s a relationship issue, something going on with one of your kids, a health problem etc. There’ll be trials that come along. And these tools are so powerful for helping you navigate those kinds of things. And then in the second bucket there are goals or habits maybe we’re trying to develop, things that we want to achieve or ways in which we want to improve ourselves, again these tools work really, really well in that bucket as well.
So you can bring any of those things to the calls. Every day there will be 90 minutes on Zoom and you can raise your hand and come on and I will coach you or you can post questions. I will be interacting you, I want to get to know you. I want to hear your specific situation and questions. And we’re going to take the things I teach you on the podcast and apply them in real life which is where the magic happens.
And if you either come or watch the replays of those five days back to back I would challenge you, of course you don’t have to listen to every day. But I would challenge you to try to, just for one week commit yourself to listening to those every day. I promise you by the end of that five days you will feel a complete shift in yourself and that’s pretty fun. So go to jodymoore.com/brain. And like I said, it’s happening the last week of January, January 24th through the 28th.
All the details are at jodymoore.com/brain but essentially you’ll get all of the information you need and you are welcome to come live or you’re welcome to just listen after the fact. Last thing is if you are in Be Bold, if you are one of my clients in that program you will already get this. We will be posting it every day in Be Bold. So you don’t need to pay the $19 unless you really want to come live. We’ll give it to everybody in Be Bold. And anyway, it’s going to be a great week, tell your friends.
Okay, so I want to talk about future focus today because this is a concept that I learned when I went through coach training. And it’s been – when I first learned it I thought that’s cool, I like that. And I could see the value of it. But over time I’ve gained a greater appreciation for just how powerful it is and how challenging it is, especially if you’re not aware of your brain’s tendency to go to the past. But I see it over and over again in my clients that I coach on all different things. And just noticing the past focus and choosing to shift to a future focus, it will 10x your results.
But it’s also challenging to do. So I want to talk about it a little bit. I want to teach you the concepts and then I want to give you some tips and some examples to help you try to figure out how to shift your brain into a future focus. But this is one of the things I love about coaching. There is a time when it’s necessary to dive into the past. I’m not saying it’s wrong to. I think that usually the work that happens in a more traditional clinical setting like therapy is about exploring the past and that can be very healing and that can be very necessary.
But in coaching we like to spend more time in the future. We want to teach you how to create the future that you want and to encourage you to think about the future and to think about it intentionally. So sometimes we do talk about the past, actually a lot of times in coaching sessions. A client comes on the call and they tell me about something that happened that was challenging or an emotion that they’re feeling that doesn’t feel good or isn’t serving them, or again, even a goal.
And we’ll go to a past situation simply to gain awareness. Now, the awareness that we’re trying to gain is about your thinking habits and patterns. It’s just awareness of your brain. So in other words, I don’t need to know all the details of the past. In fact I don’t even let people spend a long time telling a past focus story. What I do is I get one specific detail and then we use that to take a look at their brain.
So for example if a client says to me, “I have a teenager who is really disrespectful, he just disrespects me.” Now, what they are tempted to do is to tell me a really long detailed story and give me a dozen examples of how disrespectful this child is. I can relate to this by the way, because not that I have a disrespectful child but that I have other situations in which I want to tell all the details. And often I’ve told the story a few times so I’ve gotten really good at telling it.
I know the right place to add some colorful adjectives and I know how to make the story sort of engaging and entertaining. And how to get the response I’m trying to solicit which is some validation or something like that. So a client will come on and say, “I have a really disrespectful teenager.” And in a coaching situation it’s very different, my job isn’t to just validate, it’s to help them get out of this challenge. So I will say, “Give me one example of something your teenager has said, or done, or not said, or not done that in your mind is disrespectful?”
So this is going to the past, it is. I have my client go to the past and give me an example. But the only reason we do it is because we gain awareness of the story in the client’s brain that is creating the real problem because all problems are thought problems, they are. So I want to uncover what the problem thought is. Now, they presented with a problem thought which is, my teenager’s really disrespectful and then there’s a thought in parenthesis which is and he shouldn’t be.
So that might be the thought that’s the problem. But it might be a slightly different version of that thought. And so by getting a specific example and then playing with what are you making that mean then we get some leverage over, okay, this is what your brain is doing. But because this is not therapy I don’t need to hear all the details. I’m not going to ask a whole bunch of questions about their teenager. And I don’t need tons of other examples. I only need one example because then what we do is we shift our focus to a future place.
So we do that by questioning, what kind of mother do I want to be in this situation? What kind of woman do I want to be? How do I want to think about my child? How do I want to feel about my child? How do I want to show up around my child? What do I want to do or not do? What do I want the result to be? We have to gain awareness of where you’re at in order to then know how to move to a future place and figure out where we’re going to go?
But I think that sometimes because the awareness piece takes a while it feels like to many people that we should just spend our time thinking about the past and observing ourselves in the past. And while that can be useful it holds us back when we then take those stories we have about the past and use them as limiting beliefs that prevent us from creating the future that we want. Sometimes people take these tools and they make them their identity and then they’ll just simply keep recreating that because your brain wants to be right about what you believe is true.
So if you believe you are a person who loses their patience easily, your brain takes note and will help to recreate that over and over again so that you can prove yourself not crazy. If you believe that you’re just not the kind of person who’s able to be successful in a certain area of your life your brain will try to recreate that, in the most bizarre ways we do this. So this is why we don’t need to spend a long time thinking about the past in coaching, we really don’t.
Again, if you have trauma from your past and you need to process that emotion, or heal from that, or what have you, I highly recommend some therapy or clinical counseling to help you do that. That’s important work. But for the majority of the topics that I see that my clients bring we don’t need to do that. A lot of times my clients have already been to a therapist if there’s something like that, or we’re talking about a situation that doesn’t require that level of awareness, we simply need to redirect our brains to the future.
So depending on when you’re listening to this podcast, the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022 ish, and we have a whole new year laid out in front of us. And this is the time when many people are starting to set goals, and resolutions, and they’re thinking about what they want to do this year, what they want to accomplish, what they want to change in their life. And what’s tempting is for the brain to go to the past to decide where we’re at and what the problem is.
So for example, weight loss is a common one, it comes up at this time of year. So people will say, “I want to lose weight or I want to get into shape, I want to be healthier, I want develop a routine of exercising more”, what have you, something like that. And then they start telling me about the past. They start saying, “What I tend to do is I exercise for a little while, and I’m really gun-ho for a while and then I quit.” Or “What I tend to do is overeat in these particular situations.” Or “What I tend to do”, and they tell me about their past.
And I will often say, “Okay, who cares? Who cares what you’ve done in the past? What do you want to do in the future? Who do you want to be? Who are you going to be when you are the healthy person that has the healthy lifestyle that you want to have?” We don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about that. I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about that anyway. My guess is most people don’t.
So for example, there are all kinds of Christmas cookies and treats on my counter right now because it’s middle of December when I’m recording this. So if I want to be healthier in some way, which I would like to consume less sugar than I do. I think that would serve me in a lot of ways. So instead of seeing the cookies and thinking, I just want one and noticing the urge, or the craving, and bringing along with me this story I have which is I have a really bad sweet tooth, I love dessert. I love dessert more than most of my kids do.
I don’t know why but oddly enough my kids don’t really, people bring over treats and they’re not the ones eating them, I’m the one eating them. So that’s my story about my past. What I need to do is stop thinking about that so much and instead think about the future. If I were this healthy version of me and there were cookies and treats on the counter that my neighbors brought by, because they probably still will, bless their hearts. What would I think when I see these treats? Who would I be?
Now, it’s challenging because going to the past is easy because we have a whole file cabinet full of data to pull from. I have visual images. I have smells and tastes. I have words and sounds. I have a whole database of memories, even though a lot of our memories are actually very inaccurate, but that’s another podcast for another day. I still have a whole database to pull from to think about the past. If I say to you, “Tell me about the future. Tell me about yourself in June of 2022.” It’s like handing us a blank piece of paper and saying, “Draw me a picture.” Most of us don’t like that.
I don’t even know, I can’t wrap my head around who I will be, what it will look like, what it might sound like, what it might feel like. What I do know is I’m not going to torture myself and I’m not going to be willing to suffer for too long. So what’s it going to be like to not suffer and not eat so much sugar? Who is that version of going to be? What will it feel like? What will I look like? What will be different for me? What will be different about our routines? What will be different about what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling about food, about myself, about my body, about all these things?
That’s more challenging to do but do you see why it’s more useful? When you can wrap your head around that future version of you, guess what happens? You just start becoming her. You don’t even have to figure out how or put tons of focus on it. You just naturally start heading in that direction. This is how human beings work. The things that we’re focused on and thinking about, we create in our lives without even realizing it sometimes.
This comes up a lot too when I am coaching entrepreneurs. So I have a business coaching program called Business Minded. I think we have a call coming up soon. We do group coaching calls and then I also have a small high end mastermind I’m working with. And it’s not uncommon on that call, whether it be with one of my mastermind people a little more intimately or in a bigger group for people to start telling me about the past.
So for example, maybe we’re trying to clarify their offer. And I’ll say, “Who is this for? Who’s your ideal customer here?” They’ll start telling me about people that they’ve worked with. They’ll tell me about customers who have bought from them or clients, depending on their business, the people that come to them in the past. And I’ll say, “Who cares? Who do we want to come to you in the future? Who are we creating your future business for?” Sometimes they’ll tell me about their clients, this is common when somebody gets ready to scale or change their business.
They’ll say, “Well, I have these clients that aren’t going to like it if I make this change. Or I have these customers that are going to be disappointed if I stop offering this thing, or this product, or what have you, if I change it up.” And I say, “Okay, but we could live in the past or we can live in the future. You can’t build a future business for your past people. Some of them will come with you, great. Some of them it won’t be for them anymore.”
I mean this is honestly so glaringly obvious in business because it happens not only with your clients and customers, some of your people that were the right fit for you, the right customers for you when you were first starting out aren’t going to be your customer later on. They don’t want what it is that you offer down the road. But this is true even within the business. Some of the strategies, or tools, or contractors, or things like that that I used in the beginning of my business that were great and served me really well, aren’t the right approach now that my business is at a different level.
So if I think about the past it’s fine but I’m not going to grow and evolve my business. I have to be thinking about the future. I have to be thinking about where do we want to be in a year? Where do we want to be in five years and 10 years? And ideally we’re trying to build to head us towards that future instead of dragging the past along with us.
So you see why this is challenging to do, right? It’s super challenging for me, I’ll just say. I have not mastered this by any means. I think what I’ve gained, what I have gotten pretty good at is noticing it. I’m really good at noticing it in other people, like when I’m coaching my clients I’m constantly like, “Who cares about what happened last year? Let’s talk about what’s going to happen this year.” I’m getting better at noticing it in myself. I hope to keep progressing in this area and to get good at dreaming about the future.
I think for me, and I don’t know if this is true for everybody, I’m sure we’re all different. But I think for me what holds me back is I sort of tend to judge myself. If I ask myself in my business for example, who do I want to be, or even with my physical health, do I want to be that person that you see every day going on a walk, or jog, or on the neighborhood, or that woman that has really sculpted arms? Or the person that says, “No, thank you”, when they offer dessert at a function. Who do I want to be? Do I want to be the person that works out every day no matter what?
Do I want to be the person that doesn’t drink soda or things that just kind of don’t feel good in my body and I just drink water? I don’t even know exactly who I want to be. But if I am her, what does she do in this situation is a really tough question for me to answer. My brain, it just wants to go, “I don’t know.” It feels like so much work. I just can’t even imagine what it would be like.
And even in my business, like I said, I tend to judge myself, so I might ask myself, well, what do we want this business to be in five years? What do we want it to look like? Who do we want to be serving? What role do I want to play in this business? What impact do we want to make in the world? What do we want to be known for? And first of all I tend to want to say, “I don’t know”, because I have a really hard time thinking that far out. But second of all, anything that does come up I immediately want to shut down and judge myself for.
I want to be like, who do you think you are? You could never do that. You’re not that smart, or you’re not capable of that, or you’ll never be there. You’re too much of a mess. You’re just not wired that way. You’re not that kind of person. So any, even little dream that I have that comes up I notice my brain try to shut down with judgment. I don’t know why we do this. I don’t know if it feels protective like let’s not get our hopes up or something. Or if it is just coming from that part of us that questions ourselves and our value.
But it really does block my ability to dream big about the future, my judgment of my desires and dreams. I had somebody ask me because I did a podcast a few weeks ago about meeting your own needs. And one of the steps I gave was you have to figure out what your needs are. And somebody sent me a question which by the way you can always DM me questions on Instagram. I try to answer as many of those as I can or I’ll at least find themes to speak to on a podcast.
Somebody said to me, “How do you know what you want, what you desire, or what you need, what your interests are?” And it’s an interesting question because it seems like it will be obvious but it’s not. And what I told this person and what I do believe is that because we judge our desires at some point, when we’re little kids we don’t do this, we just are like, “I want this.” But as we get older many of us start judging our desires and interests. We start shutting them down saying, “No, we can’t have that”, for some reason or we shouldn’t want that.
Or we just get so busy taking care of everyone else or doing whatever it is we’re doing in our lives that we just start ignoring that part of us. And so we lose the connection with ourselves in that way. We lose the connection with those desires. And so what we have to do is just start listening again. We just have to pay attention to the even little whisper of a desire, sometimes for me it’s just a curiosity, and don’t shut it down. Don’t judge it. Don’t also think that it means that you have to go make some big life change right now. You don’t.
Just let the desire and the interest come alive, hear it out, give it space. And if you do that I find that it does start coming back and you reestablish a connection with that part of yourself. And that’s a great way to become more future focused. Who do I want to be? What do I want to create? What might it look like? I’m not talking about planning. And planning is great and all, for all my planners out there, you can plan. But I’m not talking about you figuring out exactly where you want to go and how you think you’re going to get there.
I’m just talking about dreaming. I’m talking about having a nurturing relationship with your vision or dream of the future and spending as much time being curious about that and allowing space for it to come to life as you do thinking about the past. At least spend as much time thinking about the future. Ideally we would spend even more but let’s at least balance it out 50/50, if you’re like me it’s totally out of balance.
So as we move into a new year you can approach this any way you want to. A lot of people like to choose a word, a word like focus, or nurture, or simplify, or inspiration, or whatever. Some people like to choose a word, great, if that works for you, choose a word. And then think about how am I going to invite that into every area of my life?
For me I like to picture that little girl within me that has dreams and desires. And I just like to give her some airtime. So for me the best way to do that is journaling, letting myself just write and kind of let my brain wander as I write, not judging it, not thinking it has to be on any topic.
One of my favorite journal prompts is what do I really, really, really want? And just write about that on occasion. Sometimes I can do it when I’m going for a walk and I shut off the audiobooks, the podcasts. Sometimes I can have music on and I can still think to myself. But sometimes just silence is the best way. It can happen through prayer or meditation of some sort. But it’s sort of like you have to quiet all the noise in order to hear the little quiet little voice within you especially if you’ve been ignoring it for a long time.
But everything you desire is a part of, I think, the path to your most amazing life and the best contribution you can make while you’re alive. So there’s never anything wrong with what you desire, we just want to give them airtime. Some of them you might choose to pursue and some you might not. Some you’ll just kind of let live there but you’ll never actually take action towards them, that’s okay. I like to think of it as there’s a huge room full of dreams, and desires, and interests.
And some of them I will pursue and some I never will but I still don’t want to shut the door on that room no matter what. Because within that room is first of all the ability to achieve any of them that I choose to go for, and second of all, something really interesting to learn about myself. So my friends, I hope that you will join me in choosing to have a future focus this year. Let’s focus less on the past and more on the future that we want to create. And again you can find me at Jody Moore Coaching on Instagram, if you have questions about this.
Come and join me for Train Your Brain, I will teach you how to do it and I can’t wait. I’ll see you there. Thanks for coming.
Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.
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