I was up late the other night because I couldn’t sleep.  Lately I have been thinking about the future a hell of a lot.  All I could see in my waking hours was a dead end.  No way out.  I then picked up Think and Grow Rich and noticed something that I hadn’t seen the first few times I had read it.   Napoleon Hill is telling the story of Henry Ford and his instance on having a V8 motor in a single block.  Something that at the time was considered “impossible”.

When told that the V8 motor in one block was impossible Henry Ford didn’t change his mind.   He persisted and some would say with dogged determination, pushed his engineers to the point where it was possible.  He used nothing other than a concept of the future that he wanted, lots of money and a sense of unfailing conviction (in himself) that it could be done.  After some time it was a reality.  So there’s nothing extraordinary about that story really is there?  But here’s what hit me.

Ford like so many others had a vision for something that drove him to commit a lot of resources to it.  Some might say it was a sort of faith that drove him in this direction… others would say that it was a determination that crept beyond on the normal sense of common decency or the fact that he had loads of money.  However, the key lesson I got from it was this: you can’t expect the future to be different from what you expect.  That is, unless you are already expecting, looking and building a better tomorrow from the foundational idea that tomorrow will be better… than you are already behind.  In other words, what you have now is temporary… but that mind you have is eternal.   It will follow you through all kinds of circumstances right up to your death and beyond!

I need not stretch myself for evidence in this case.  Have a look around at the amount of uses the word ‘crisis’ has in modern media.  It is bantered around so much that every time there is a something terrible happens, the word ‘crisis’ is sure to follow.  However, if you think ‘crisis’ and ‘disaster’ then you are accepting the default.  What if you began to think of a better future, clothe that thought with an imagination that tomorrow is going to be better and actually saw it happening in the landscape of your mind’s eye? Think about this.  What if you began to imagine a better tomorrow?  You would expect it!  I am not promising that it would happen because bad things happen to all of us.  BUT, if you expect something better instead of something worse, you will, by the natural workings of your mind, begin to see new patterns that you couldn’t before.  Instead of being ‘reactive’ to the circumstances, you will begin to picture something altogether different.

This is not a major revelation for a lot of people, but for me it was so.   It was for me!  Unless I expect and actively begin to hope in the future, I will not believe anything that hasn’t already happened!  I will simply go through life reacting to whatever comes my way by saying, ‘well I knew that was going to happen.’  What Ford tapped into was that the future is not written in stone for us.  It can get better.  Sure, you may have bottomed out in a bad business deal or suffered a horrible loss.  Nevertheless, I believe that if we begin to hope for a better day and imagine what it will be like when get there, we will begin to see things that we didn’t previously see.  Hope will come our way and we will be all the better for it.

When we focus on what ‘we see’ as the evidence for what’s possible, we forget that almost every piece of technology we have came from someone who had some hope and said, “I believe it can be done.”  More to the point, they took actions to back up their faith and actually achieved what was ‘impossible’.   It’s very easy to be a downer and say all will go to hell.   How about you think about a good future.  Something that puts a smile of your face.  Of course it’s not that simple but it’s just as easy to have hope as it is to say none exists.  Try it, I did and made me feel a whole lot better.   It put me to sleep!

*Image Credit: Remind

Recently I went to Hungry Jacks (Burger King if you are overseas) for Father’s day.  I got to the counter and faced with the usual paradox of choice I wasn’t sure what to order.  Then my wife pointed at the “Ultimate Double Whopper”.  It looked great.  When I went to order I left out one word in the title of the meal and found myself eating a regular double whopper.  The word was “supreme” I was devastated… but I did learn something very valuable from this experience… always ask for exactly what you want.

The stinging disappointment of loss

There can be nothing worse that realising you have paid for something that you really don’t want.  I guess the step before that is to know what you want.  I never know what I want in advance… I know I want it usually when I have it… when is not to say I never wanted it.  It’s to say that I didn’t know I wanted it until I had it.  Having it, is not necessarily wanting it, but wanting it… that’s having it from another angle.  I digress.

When I ordered my meal I found myself realising that just one word caused this pain.  I wasn’t eating what I had ordered I was eating a smaller somewhat deplorable version of the meal I wanted!  All because I had not asked for exactly what I wanted.  There are times in life when you must know what you want so clearly that you have to understand it before you want it.  Now, that sounds wrong and it probably doesn’t make sense… yet if you ask wrongly you will be disappointed.

What you ask for you receive

And of course sometimes you don’t.  However, when you have a desire for something, being vague when considering the outcome of that desire is less than helpful.  Say you have a desire to put out fires.   You become a fire fighter and experience the cognitive dissonance of realising that you never really wanted it.  You notice your friends in the ambulance have a good time so you decide to become a paramedic.  You hate this job too.  In both cases you asked for what you wanted and got it… and were still left extremely disappointed.  What happened?  You hadn’t worked out the question.

The question comes first, then the answer

The question and answer to knowing what you want stems from the desire and what it means… not just the desire.  The inward desire to teach doesn’t mean you go and become a school teacher.  Find out what it means to you then reframe the question in another way.  Say you have a desire to fly.  Good, why do you have that desire and what does it really mean.  Don’t rush off and be a pilot yet… otherwise you may find yourself in a load of trouble.  Reframe it and ask what does this desire mean?  Trust me you can save yourself a lot of heartache by first sensing the desire and secondly interpreting it so thirdly you can ask specific questions that are sharp without missing words.  In other words, be sure of what you want by finding out you want it and need it, then focus on extracting that desire as a template.  That does NOT mean you will have it all worked out in advance… it simply means you will know that you know that your desire is clear and the way of articulating it is also clear.

The bottom line to this post

When you have desires they will remain that way until you decide to articulate them.  Remove materialistic constraints from your mind and think with me for a minute.  You will never totally remove desire from you.  The very least you can do is focus on that desire and begin to flesh it out.  In my own life I have a desire to teach or a very basic drive that says ‘teach’.  That doesn’t mean I will be a university lecturer my whole life.  Other doors for teaching may open up elsewhere.  That won’t change the desire but it may change the context in which I air that desire.

In all honesty the signage at Hungry Jacks is probably the main reason I didn’t get what I wanted.  But there was a lesson in it for me.  Focusing on the desire is secondary to understanding the context.  You need to know your desires, what they mean, how to articulate them before you begin to ask for what you want.  Quite often, what you want is not what you need to articulate that desire.  Still, if you don’t let it out of the bag it will let itself out in ways unexpected in times to come… trust me I know.  It was also the simple truth that I didn’t express what I wanted clearly enough to the lady at the front counter… maybe I should get my glasses checked!

Scholar Daniel Isenberg did a study of some managers in 1986 to see how they made their decisions. He found that most people solved a lot of their problems not by gathering more information but by talking to themselves. These managers would speak out aloud to themselves and reason through courses of action in order to better understand the decisions they made.

When solving problems talk to yourself

When I was growing up my parents said to me that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness. Can I say that talking to myself has not made me any more mad that I am right now… it has however helped me work through some options and solve problems better. I have driven from my house to other places hours away talking to myself about things the whole time. I have had people stare at me as they pass by … but I really don’t give a damn! It’s probably one of the most useful things I have learned about solving problems. It can get you out of a wrong thinking pattern and make you see things in a much clearer way.

The concept of ‘bible’ meditation is based on talking to yourself

The Hebrew word for meditation in the old testament is often thought about as contemplation. However, when I have looked it up it always says to mutter. How odd is the thought of Moses walking around chatting to himself about the people he had to deal with. Consider the Psalms. What are they if not an externalisation of a internal picture? Can I say that talking to you is a helpful activity? God said to Joshua to meditate on the law day and night. What does that mean? Talk about it, say it out of your mouth over and over… contemplate it… think about it from different angles.

Talking to yourself moves you into creativity

Try this. Say you are facing a money crisis. Start saying to yourself what you think the problem is… what can I do about? They begin to cycle through the options and reflect on them. You will find as you cycle through the ideas you will begin to get the bigger picture issues and a solution may just present itself. It may not! The thing is you have begun to ‘meditate’ or contemplate the problem from different angles.

Talking to yourself helps to structure your thoughts

When you begin to look at the way you think you might find that overtime you are stuck in the same patterns. In my next post I am going to talk about how rhetoric can work to help you structure your thoughts in such a way that new ways of seeing will emerge. Most people freeze up when it comes to rhetoric but if you follow it through and make good use of clever rhetorical questions you will find that it helps you to develop better ways of thinking. New patterns… new ideas… new solutions. Will they be any better? That’s the real question isn’t it?  So stay tuned!

By doing this I have found ways around problems that I couldn’t see before and I have found answers where my linear thinking patterns weren’t helping.  I think they key thing that’s not said here but is implied is this: what is the mechanism through which you believe?  If you could change what you believe by thinking and mastering new beliefs through using this mechanism then what would that be like?  See, I got that by talking to myself .

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Do you have a dream?  I do.  I dream to be successful in all that I do.  One thing that kept me going through the hard times was a desire to see something happen in my life that was great.  I would say that at least on one occasion holding onto hope was very important.  Having working with a aid organisation for awhile now I can say of the hallmarks of extreme poverty is how people in the slums of the world lose hope.   The dreams they have escape them and the reality of the sounds, smell and feelings of their situation stop them from hoping for something better.   It’s sad to see older people who have given up hope that their dreams will ever come to pass.  Here are some reasons why you should never give up hope.

1. Hope is a goal setter

Hope sets the goal for some future event to come to pass.  Whether you realise it or not, you have the power to hope for something better.  When you focus on what’s happening in your life and hope sets in you will begin to dream.  We are all equipped with the mechanisms of hope, so there is no excuse.  Transcending reality is the hard part and I will talk about that in a later post.   You need some kind of goal to set for yourself so hope for something.  Ask yourself this question:  What do you like doing?  Are you doing it?  No?  Why not begin to hope you will?  Set a goal on the inside and begin hoping.  Without the goal how can you ever get anywhere?

2. Hope makes you feel good

Hope can be medicine for your soul.  Are you stuck in a terrible situation.  Begin to hope for things to change.  Recognise what it is that you want to change and begin dreaming about it.  Think about the underlying emotions that rise into your consciousness when you do.   What feelings do you feel?  Doesn’t it make you feel better.  The only problem is staying in that state.  You need to foster hope and make it grow.  You do this by remembering the hope day after day and entertaining it in your imagination.  I do this often and it has helped me tremendously in goals I have achieved and goals I haven’t.  I almost have a PhD which is the result of hoping for something first.  When I began this journey I wasn’t qualified and I should not have been let in.  But I hoped and believed and here I am today.  It all began when I had a dream in my heart of wanting to study more at university.   I will share this story in more detail later on.  There were times when I was studying over the past seven years that I felt I would never emerge out of it in one piece.  But, thank God, I never lost hope that I would emerge out of it with my dream in hand.  What do you dream about?  Begin hoping for it by seeing it in your minds eyes.  Hope for something better.

3. Hope is a template for faith

In the post that follows this one I will explain it in more detail.  Hope sets the goal and provides the template for you to believe.  The power of belief is something everybody has.  You use it to shape and guide your life on a daily basis.  Think of it this way: hope is the blueprint of your dreams whereas belief is the concrete.  What do you dream about?  I dream about a world where communities are transformed from poverty into prosperity.  I dream about things that spontaneously come to me during prayer, my children’s life and those that I teach.  This is not real it’s a dream.  Yet it provides the template for me to want something better in my life.  There is a saying I have heard in Christian circles, ‘hope deferred makes the heart grow sick’ (it comes from the proverbs).  When you lose hope you lose everything.  I have seen the reality of this in people’s life.  What you think about your life and the direction it’s taking is very much the substance of hope.  Everything you are doing is based on it.  If you are a practicing lawyer, doctor, accountant or IT person you once hoped you could do that.  That hope lived in you as a dream.  Now that you are doing it, you no longer hope for what you have.  Yet, if you didn’t hope in the first place you would have had to template to form a belief in you and you would have thrown it all away.

4. Hope builds optimism for the future

A very close friend of mind said it this way, ‘hope is faith in the future’.  I like that.  Hope is faith that at same point you will be experiencing a future dream.  Whatever it is that you want to do if you hope for it, see it and begin to expect it you will eventually have it.   You cannot reach your dreams if you don’t have one.  You cannot build a better life if you don’t think about what it is you want and hope like crazy.  Will you get it if you hope for it?  No, but you will begin to move towards it and without that you will never get your dreams.  Hope is the substance we use to lay down a blueprint for the future.  It’s the part of us that was born into us or discovered as we grew older and it’s the real us surfacing up from underneath letting us know that we are really there.    Today, why don’t you begin to hope and see what you find in your heart.

Remember what you see is not always what is real.  Hope forms a firm foundation for the future actions you wish to take.  If you don’t do it… then your life will resemble pretty much what it does at present.

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