Think Forward to Thrive

How to Use the Mind's Power of Anticipation to Transcend Your Past and Transform Your Life

Jennice Vilhauer, PhD

• Publisher: New World Library
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781608682997
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie cognitive et cognition

Stop talking about your past and start creating your futureAnticipating a positive future is the key to well-being and mental health. Yet when many people think of the future, they experience anxiety, depression, fear, and self-doubt. Unaware of how to change the future, most people are trapped in a cycle of re-creating their past. But your past does not have to define who you are or where you are going — you can break free. Future Directed Therapy (FDT) is a new psychotherapy that helps people create their future with awareness and choice, with skills based on cutting-edge cognitive science. Think Forward to Thrive is filled with information and step-by-step exercises to help you: * Overcome negative emotions * Identify what you want in life* Transform limiting beliefs * Take action * Live ready for success

Chapter 1

A NEW BEGINNING

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

— STEPHEN R. COVEY

Imagine that you’re traveling through life in a car and you are the driver. Many people are unclear about the direction they are heading in, and some get through life never even learning how to drive. They operate their car in a default mode that allows them to zigzag through life with very little control. Many people get stuck and stalled, while others hit dead ends or go in circles, feeling like they never get anywhere. The goals of Future Directed Therapy (FDT) are to teach you how to drive the car, give you a proper road map to help you reach your destination and, most important, help you stay on course.

THE ROAD TO WELL-BEING

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What many people don’t realize is that in the journey of life we can head in only two directions: toward well-being and away from it. Your thoughts and actions power your car. Your emotions indicate where you are going. If you are feeling bad, it means you’re thinking thoughts that are taking you away from well-being and moving you toward distress. Because we don’t control time, and our life keeps progressing, you never completely stand still. You are always moving, whether it be toward thriving or away from it. Allowing a negative stream of thoughts to flow through your mind does not just prevent you from moving toward what you want; it takes you further away from it. The longer you let your thoughts carry you in that direction, the further away you get from your goals and desires.

By the time you are feeling painful emotions, such as anxiety or depression, your thoughts have been flowing as though your car were going a hundred miles an hour — headed in the wrong direction. You can’t just shift into reverse when you are going that fast. You need to slow the car down until you are ready to turn it around. The same thing is true of your thought process. By using FDT you will learn how to turn yourself around by redirecting your thinking and reaching for incremental improvements in thought rather than by trying to make fast accelerations that often lead to a crash and burn or, at the very least, get you no closer to your desired destination.

While all human beings are constantly creating their futures, many are not aware of how the process actually occurs, and as a result, they have limited control over what they experience. The process of learning to create your future by choice instead of by default starts with gaining awareness of your thought process and then developing the skills that will help you choose the life you want.

RE-CREATING THE PAST

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Most people create their future by re-creating the past. The ability to re-create the past stems from a valuable survival instinct. If we find a good source of food or a safe place to sleep, we want to be able to find it again. If we have a pleasant encounter with someone, we want to have a similar experience again. Our memory is what gives us the ability to store information about our past and present experiences. We use this stored information to formulate expectations about our environment and to make predictions about our future experiences. Being able to predict or anticipate the future enables us to prepare for it by taking the actions we think are necessary to meet future events with success.

For example, if you have been lucky enough to go through life having mostly positive experiences with other people, such as loving parents, lots of friends, great teachers, and nice bosses, you most likely enjoyed these experiences. Because you have had so many positive past experiences, you probably have developed the expectation that most people you meet in the future will treat you well. If you expect people to treat you well, you will likely act in a friendly, open way with them. Your friendly behavior will almost certainly bring out friendly behavior in others, recreating your past experiences and confirming your expectation that people treat you well.

This system works great if you have a past you want to re-create. However, if you would like to break free from the past and create a different future, this system can keep you trapped unknowingly. If you have had a lot of experiences in your past that you didn’t like, chances are you are expecting the future to bring similar experiences, even if you don’t want them. And you are acting in ways consistent with what you expect, thereby re-creating experiences similar to those past experiences you so disliked. The good news is that, once you are aware of it, you can stop this process and do something different. Your past does not have to define who you are or where you are going.

While we use our history to predict the future, it is not the only means by which we can create the future. We can become aware of this process as it is happening in the present moment. Once we are aware of it, we can intercept it and consciously choose to think new thoughts that have the potential to grow into new anticipatory beliefs. These new expectations will lead us to taking different actions that will create a different future. We can also use newly learned information about who we are today to help identify what we are capable of going forward.

Most people create their future by re-creating the past.

The other good news is that learning to create a future experience is a skill anyone can learn.¹ Research has shown that people who successfully do things to create their future, such as setting goals, planning, and solving problems, consistently experience greater well-being,² while people with fewer of these skills tend to experience more negative emotions, which can lead to serious conditions such as depression.³ If you keep reading, this book will teach you the skills you need to break out of old patterns and habits so that, with a little effort, you can stop recreating your past and improve your ability to make different choices and create more of the experiences you desire.

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Kelly was in her early forties and had been unhappy in her marriage for many years. She largely depended on her husband’s approval in order to feel good, and even slight criticism from him could land her in bed for several days. Kelly knew she had “married her father,” who had been distant and critical while she was growing up. Kelly always worked hard at being perfect to avoid criticism, but when her strategy of being perfect failed, or she didn’t receive the positive reinforcement she craved, she would spiral into bouts of negative emotion and self-criticism. Kelly had been in other types of therapy for many years, and she was easily able to recognize that she had re-created the relationship dynamics she had with her father and that she was acting in ways that were continuing the pattern with her husband. Yet she had never been able to break the cycle and do something different.

When Kelly began FDT, instead of trying to help her understand her past, the focus was on helping her identify a new pattern of future behavior, which included putting approval of herself over everyone else’s opinions and seeing her husband as an equal, not as someone she had to work so hard to please. The plan for her treatment then became focused on teaching her the skills to help her achieve what she wanted and overcome the obstacles that were getting in the way. Initially she struggled with breaking her old patterns; she had difficulty creating a visual image of what it would be like to respond differently and to see herself as someone with more self-confidence. With practice, however, she developed the awareness to recognize when the old patterns were kicking in so that she could implement her new skills. This eventually led to improved self-esteem and a more equal and fulfilling relationship with her husband.

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CREATING A NEW FUTURE EXPERIENCE

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Creating a new future experience is not difficult. There are four basic steps. First, you have to initiate a thought about something you want that doesn’t yet exist. For example, I want a new job. Next, you need to imagine what that job would look like. I would like to be a manager at a retail company, not in sales. Then you must anticipate the tasks necessary to make it happen. I need to create a résumé that shows why I would be qualified to do this job; then I need to search the internet for open positions; then I need to mail my résumé, and so on. Finally, you will need to execute the tasks you have anticipated. While these four basic steps may sound relatively easy, many obstacles along the way can trip you up.

In many ways, creating your future is like trying to lose weight. Everyone knows how to lose weight — eat less and exercise more. But people struggle every day with this issue because of the many complex barriers that get in the way; that is why helping people to lose weight is a multibillion-dollar industry. Likewise, everyone knows, to some degree, how to create their future because they do it all day, every day. But very few people know how to direct this process in a way that regularly leads to successful outcomes or how to get around the many barriers in the way. In the upcoming chapters you will learn how to approach life from a place of awareness and successfully complete the steps to creating a desired future experience, as well as how to overcome the roadblocks you may encounter along the way.

WHAT ABOUT THE PRESENT MOMENT?

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The power to alter the course of your life lies in the present moment of awareness. However, we cannot hold on to the present moment. The present moment is what just passed. The future is always what is arriving. The now and the arrival of the future are one and the same, and you have tremendous power to influence the future that will arrive to become the now you experience.

A good deal of emphasis has been placed on “being in the present moment” by psychologists, popular-culture authors, and spiritual leaders, so much so that thinking about the future has gotten a bad rap. While being aware of thoughts and feelings in the present is an important skill, keeping your thoughts focused on the present moment by itself will not help you create a better future. If you want something different, you will need to think ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• An Introduction to Future Directed Therapy
• Chapter 1: A New Beginning
• Chapter 2: The Value of Your Thoughts
• Chapter 3: Components of the Human Experience
• Chapter 4: Creating New Expectations
• Chapter 5: Overcoming Resistance to New Beliefs
• Chapter 6: Mindfulness and Meditation
• Chapter 7: Knowing What You Value
• Chapter 8: Setting Your Goals
• Chapter 9: Visualizing Your Future
• Chapter 10: Generating Solutions for Success
• Chapter 11: Taking Action
• Chapter 12: Allowing the Future to Arrive
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• FDT Website and Worksheet Download Information
• Letter to Professionals
• Index
• About the Author