What Will You Tell Your “Future” Granddaughter?

Fleeting…in the big scheme of things, that is an apt description of our lives. That point has been made abundantly clear to me in the past week. I got news that a friend from college died unexpectedly. Then two days later, another friend’s wife passed away.

With the burden of loss, I’ve been giving extra thought to how I spend my time and the gravity and implications of those choices.

I’m reminded of a visioning exercise. Here’s my spin on it. Think about yourself at 75 years old. Your teenage grandchild comes to see you, because she’s doing a project for school. With all earnestness, she asks you a series of questions:

• How did you spend your life?
• Did you do the things you wanted to do?
• Did you accomplish what you wanted?
• Did you become the person you wanted to be?
• Did you make an impact?”

And after all those questions, she asks a final one. “If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?” You pause. The weight of your answer sticks to your throat. The reality of all those daily choices comes cascading through your mind.

So how can you learn to live so that you truly use each day as a gift? How do you make the most of each moment so that you are living the life that you want? And what are the consequences if you don’t?

I’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. The costs of not getting control over your time and your life are enormous. In fact, letting the moments of your life slip by with no purpose or vision is to miss out on life’s greatest rewards. It’s letting your gifts and dreams lie dormant, unattended and abandoned. Likewise, the regret of spending years stuck in a holding pattern can be heartbreaking.

There’s a huge fallacy alive and well. It’s that we have all the time we need and our lives will unfold as they should. But for most of us, what happens is that we settle. We often unintentionally, but carelessly, put off the important stuff, consumed with life’s many meaningless distractions. We fall into a life without intent or purpose. We lose our passion. We let life happen to us. We drift along with a mixture of success and failures, unsure of where we’ll end up.

If we dare give ourselves permission to dream of what we want and to create a vision for our future, we often stop there. There’s actually a satisfaction, perhaps even a smugness, that we now know what we want. As if our work is done. It’s not. Dreaming is the beginning…not the end.

Or perhaps by giving ourselves permission to dream, we are filled with uncertainty or fear. Our minds can become overwhelmed with how to move from where we are to where we want to be. Sometimes we only see the obstacles. And sometimes that is our path.

Either way, we stop there. Perhaps deferring on our dreams until we have time to give them proper attention or until we figured it all out. Guess what? It’s a well-researched phenomenon that we humans practice. We often put off the hard work until tomorrow. Somehow, we feel confident that our “future self” will miraculously be less time-starved and more in control. Somehow, by putting things off, we’ll build the willpower, discipline or know-how that is missing today. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Research actually proves that our future-selves are no more competent than we are.

So how would your life change if you made decisions and choices TODAY as if you were already the person you wanted to be TOMORROW? What if you decided not to wait until the stars aligned perfectly before you made your next move?

And here’s another hard question, I use with my clients (and myself), “What would happen if you took 100% responsibility for everything in your life?”

Let’s combine those two thoughts – making choices for tomorrow and taking total responsibility. In other words, what if you gave true focus to what matters most and took full responsibility for the outcome? Would you be able to look in your granddaughter’s eyes and feel proud that you had lived the life you had?

Sometimes to live the life we envision for ourselves, we have to stop doing what we’ve always done, so we can do what matters most.