In times of uncertainty, conventional wisdom and our own reactive response has us hunker down, cut costs, be cautious. This certainly makes sense, initially. However, we suggest there is another pathway—something that would take advantage of current circumstances and gain competitive ground. In other words:

How can an individual, a group, an organization be powerful and effective in the face of difficult conditions? How can you produce breakthroughs in your business/life now? Where can you find the energy, the enthusiasm, the inspiration to make something big happen, gain a competitive edge, use the opportunity to leap forward? Here’s a story that illustrates how you can produce a breakthrough in your/your company’s performance:

Some years ago we did some pro bono work with gang kids, “youth at risk,” from the Los Angeles Hispanic and African-American gang community. These 8 to 16 year old children were the most unhappy, angry, violent, and depressed beings we had ever encountered. None of the well-meaning interventions by other organizations had made much of a difference in altering the course of their lives.

We were there for something new, unprecedented, something impossible: a no-kidding breakthrough in the life of each child.

These children came from crime-infested neighborhoods where drug dealing was a widespread activity to earn a living, where gun shots could be heard daily ringing-out across the “hood,” and where neighborhoods were squarely marked off between one gang and another, like countries at war—crossing a border meant death. In the pre-course interviews I conducted with these children, it became obvious as to what the source of their current ways of being, behavior and mood was, and it was not their past or even their present circumstances. It was their future. They told me over and over in our interviews what their futures were: death somewhere in their 20′s, daily violence, family members raped or murdered by other gangs, dealing in drugs to make money, drug addiction for themselves and those around them. And no escape. Anyone with such a future would be profoundly miserable, angry, despairing.

Here’s the breakthrough: in our course, they discovered that this future, concrete for them as whatever your hands are touching at this moment, inevitable for them as your next breath—this future to which all their thoughts and actions were tied, from when they got up in the morning until they went to bed—this future was not  “out there” waiting to happen to them. It was not inevitable, even though they related to it as such.

Go slow here. In fact, this future they were living into was their past! All their expectations, fears, predictions, “gut sense,” even their hopes, the decisions they had made from their past experiences—this is what was in their future. All of it was from their past! It was as though they had accidentally filed their past in the wrong drawer—the drawer called “future”—and where the past actually belonged was in the drawer labeled “past.” Eureka!

Once they “moved” their past out of the future and into the past, the actual future they then had was empty…was nothing.  It had nothing in it. It was a future of “anything is possible.”  A future of possibility. They were free to invent a new future that turned them on. When they got this, and I mean got it down to their neurophysical, cellular selves—and we made sure they did—something amazing happened. Their faces changed. Excitement replaced fear. Joy replaced despair. Making a difference in life replaced survival. They left our program and went to school, got married, quit their gangs, talked to other “home boys” to share this insight and liberate them. A radical drop in recidivism (the rate of return to juvenile detention) stunned the State of California (the biggest drop they’d ever seen from any youth-at-risk program).

So how about you? Your group? Your organization? The same is true. And not just in times of difficulty—in any time and any circumstance. The truth is that your future, when unexamined, unawaredly, is comprised of your past! It’s just the hole that the “being of being human” falls into, again and again! Recognizing this, ongoingly, seeing the given, assumed future for what it actually is (past), and putting it where it belongs (in the past) frees you to create a future you choose! Even an “impossible future.” (More on “making impossible futures happen” in future Writings.)

Perhaps the most worthwhile time you can spend: give yourself, your organization, a chance to ask,

What is the future I’m living into? What do I predict? Expect? Not the “good-organizational-person, professional, what-I-should-say” future, but the real future I am living into each day. The higher up in the organizational structure you are, the more widespread-in-impact your answers will be.

What’s the mood I have in the face of that future? Fear? Sadness? Anger?

Hope alternating with hopelessness?

If you examine it, and tell the truth, you’ll see that you’ve got your past in your future right now! So put it where it belongs—in your past.

Next? What future inspires you? Moves you? Turns you on? Calls to you? You can declare what is possible, what you can create, what you can stand for, and make it happen!

Helen Keller said it well:

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”