Top Highlights

• First, everyone experiences a future in front of them, even though few could articulate it. It goes beyond what they expect to happen, hope will happen, or think might happen. This future lives at a gut level. We know it’s what will happen, whether we can give words to it or not. We call this the default future, and every person has one. So does ev...
• Why is it so hard to change? Because wrestling with that problem, over and over, lives in their future—sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but always struggling. No matter how much they try to change, or how many self-help books they read, their default future has a predictable shape.
• Our default future consists of our expectations, fears, hopes, and predictions, all of which are ultimately based on our experience in the past. Incidents from the past live on as prediction, giving us our default future.
• Notice that the default future has a lot to do with how situations occur in the present. Unless we do something—something other than fighting the future we see coming—it becomes the default setting. It will happen, no matter how much we don’t like it or try to resist it.
• 1. Commit to the discipline of completing any issues that surface as incomplete. 2. Articulate the default future—what is the past telling you will happen? 3. Ask, do we really want this default future? 4. If not, begin to speculate with others on what future would (a) inspire action for everyone, (b) address the concerns of everyone involved, and ...