Anticipate

Please Note: This page is still under construction

Your objective here is to get into the habit of anticipating future problems that may arise. This way you can make the necessary preparations to deal-with and solve these problems before they get out-of-hand. The key here is to be preactive.

Let’s now explore this sub-step in a little more detail.

Being preactive means that you’re trying to solve tomorrow’s predictable problems in advance. It means putting yourself into opportunity-mode, looking at problems before they occur, and then preventing them from coming to fruition. Moreover, it means that instead of reacting to changing circumstances and conditions, you are consciously acting in advance to change circumstances and conditions in such a way that will help you to avoid future problems.

To develop the habit of being preactive, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the problems I’m about to have?
• What problems could I or my company face in the coming weeks, months and years?
• What problems will other people face (customers)?
• What problems will current trends and changes create in the future?
• How could I use these transformations to innovate my life or business?
• What impact will all this have on the way I conduct my business or my life?
• How can I find creative ways to integrate new and old technologies in my field to yield better results?
• What is my ideal future 10 to 20 years from now?
• What are some of the steps I could take to shape that future now?

Your task here is to identify and leverage your uniqueness in new and powerful ways in order to take advantage of opportunities in the future.

You can’t keep doing what you’ve always done, even if you keep doing it better. The only way to survive and thrive in the future is to continuously reinvent and redefine your life and business. This essentially means seizing the opportunities to rewrite your own history — before it happens.

For the reasons stated above, it’s critical that you are actively shaping your future using your future-view.

Your future-view is the mental picture you hold of your future existence. This is not the same as goal-setting, planning or ambition. It is in actuality the picture you hold — for better or worse — of what you expect and believe about your future.

It’s important to note that everyone has a future-view, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. This future-view controls your life decisions and behaviors and shapes the future YOU. Moreover, it determines what actions you will take, and also what actions you will avoid taking — shaping your future outcomes and destiny.

In order to begin shaping your future-view, ask yourself the following questions:

• What am I certain about?
• What are the hard trends of my future, versus the soft trends? [see: fact-find]
• What are the permanent, linear changes, and what are the cyclical changes? [see: fact-find]
• How are current trends going to affect my life?
• What does my visible future look like?
• What problems am I about to have tomorrow, next week, next month and next year?
• How can I solve these problems before they happen?
• What actions can I create now to create a better future?

The moment you create a different picture of your future, is the moment you can start making different and better choices in the present.

Integrated into this stage is a set of visual thinking techniques, strategies, tools and processes that you can utilize to help you visualize your thoughts on paper or in physical form. These techniques will be revealed and integrated into each stage along The Path over time.