We humans are generally pretty rubbish about predicting what’s going to happen. Psychology research has shown that our cognitive biases mean we tend to…
… be overly optimistic about what’s going to happen to us (believing bad things happen to other people)
… assume that, however much we can see we have changed in the past, the way we are now is going to stay consistent (the “end of history illusion”), AND
… underestimate how well we’ll cope if we DO face challenges ahead.
Does all of this suggest there’s no point in making grand visions for the future? Should we ditch the bold New Year’s Resolutions and the “5 year plans”?
One exercise I do with my clients gets them to write their own dream job ad - imagining their ideal future job description. Visioning exercises like this are brilliant for freeing up the imagination and honing in on what you actually want when all imagined limitations are removed.
But if we’re so bad at predicting the future, why bother writing down a lot of lovely things that are probably not going to happen in the way we imagine them? OR that may not even be what our future selves even end up wanting?
As our Head Coach at Careershifters, Natasha, says “we can’t be what we can’t see”. If we don’t allow ourselves to dream big, to even, in the privacy of our own mind or journaling, let ourselves articulate the full extent of our wishes and wants, we are potentially going to be restricting ourselves from the get-go.
If you can’t see beyond your current reality, you may get stuck in the status quo, restricted by a self-editing process that writes out possible routes before you’ve even explored them. Allowing some of these dreams a bit of airtime means that you might spot opportunities to bring in elements of them into your life when they appear.
Also, it’s actually really energising – and fun – to put your wishes to paper. I find it helps if you tell yourself that none of this needs to actually happen for the exercise to be valuable and that you can continue to shift course, to edit and iterate this vision, if what you want changes over time.
I’m curious to know your experiences: Do you create “bold, hairy, audacious goals” for yourself? Do you have a vision for 2024 - and beyond? Or do you just go with the flow and see what happens?