You’re Already Rehearsing Your Future

Hey

Most of us say we want a different future, but very few of us spend any meaningful time rehearsing it. Instead, we unconsciously rehearse the past, repeating familiar thoughts, emotional reactions, behaviors and even aspects of our personality until yesterday becomes the blueprint for tomorrow. Neuroscience suggests that a significant proportion of our thoughts are repetitive, which means that unless we consciously interrupt the pattern, familiarity keeps winning.

Our lives are a constant dance between stimulus and response, and the most interesting place isn’t either of those, it’s the space in between. This tiny gap is where possibility lives, because it gives us the opportunity to stop automatically reacting as the person we have been and begin rehearsing the person we could become.

This is why I’ve become fascinated with meditation as a rehearsal technology. Not meditation as simply sitting in silence trying to think about nothing, but as a deliberate practice of moving beyond the busy doing mind and into brain states associated with greater creativity, imagination and suggestibility. Instead of waiting for the future to arrive and hoping we behave differently when it does, we can mentally and emotionally practice meeting it before it gets here.

The question, then, isn’t whether you’re rehearsing your future. You already are. The question is whether you’re rehearsing the future you actually want.