Looking Back At The Future

Posted: February 10th, 2009 | Author: eetion | Filed under: writing | 1 Comment »

Recently, I was chatting with a close friend of mine about making our goals come closer to us. We do this every so often, but when we get around to having that conversation, it’s usually a very insightful and encouraging one. This time around, the reason the topic of goals had come up is because he decided to apply for another position at the current company that he works for. So from there we would start to trade positive thoughts and encouraging advice.

A Little Bit of History

Not too long ago, I worked for a company doing something entirely different than what I do now. I was that guy behind the 800 number that you had to talk to if your server went down or your mysql database somehow broke. I was level one tech support for a web hosting company. Did I love my job? Contrary to what one might hear from most tech support guys who burn out, I was so fresh and new to the whole thing that I had no reason to do anything but enjoy the fast paced and exciting job experience. I learned a lot very quickly, I enjoyed spending time with the coworkers, I felt that I was progressing daily in expertise – I was pretty upbeat about everything that I was doing there, the only downside to that job was that I made juuuust enough to pay the bills at my cheap apartment.

As my family began to grow, my current job was no longer a sufficient means to keep me satisfied. To sum it up, I wanted to make more money. Something just had to change. What was previously working just fine for me quickly became a roadblock for my future plans. This is the point where I began to change my thoughts to reflect my ambition and desires. I began to imagine myself in a different field of work that was directly related to the four year degree I held which had yet to get me a job. I’ll save you the suspense and just say that I landed a position which fit my proposed criteria. But I’ll rewind a bit and tell you how I got there.

Starting The Change

Out of all the things that I did to make the transition from my previous job to my current one, the thing that stood out like a sore thumb was upthinking/future-blogging, or whatever you want to call it. If the name doesn’t give it away, let me describe to you exactly what I did.

One day I sat down and starting writing a journal entry, documenting how my day went and how great a time I was having in my current position. The catch there is that all of this stuff had yet to actually happen. I wasn’t working for the type of company I was writing about, I didn’t do the types of things that I was writing about, and so on. But, I wrote that journal entry down as if I had just got home from the job that I wanted and had done all those things that day. Doing this created the feelings I wanted to feel, the images I wanted to see, and brought my goal closer to me.

Fast forward again to the conversation I was having with my buddy who’s applying for a new job at his current company- while I was talking to him, I remembered those things I’d written down, those feelings I’d had; I remembered feeling like what I was doing was against all normal reason and that I knew it was going to work even though it was kind of strange. I remember hesitating to write about the future at first, thinking it would feel silly, but then embracing the idea and diving in.

Then, I remembered that I still had the journal entry in a notebook or file somewhere. So after a good amount of searching, I found it. To my surprise, what I had written almost exactly reflects, right down to the amount of monitors on my desk and the workload that I have, what I am doing right now at my current job.

Spooky huh?

Don’t Knock It ‘til You Try It

When you read the books, and you hear people talking about it, the whole idea of upthinking, as I’d like to call it, or visualizing, or positive thinking – it all seems like a bunch of hand waving at first until you try it and SUCCEED. But it’s not by positive thinking alone that you get to your end goals, but changing your mind is the first step if you’re in a pool of negative thought. It’s those first inspired thoughts which can change the entire direction of your future for the better and that’s why it’s important to think those thoughts.

I’m glad that I went ahead and decided to write that journal entry. That was such a rewarding experience; it was worth every minute and every ounce of thought I’d put into it. Have you ever done anything like that? If not, try it out!

If you’ve got a word processor open, or you’ve got a notepad handy, go ahead and do a little bit of upthinking yourself. Try it on and write out a journal entry, reviewing your day, from the future that you’d prefer.

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