What’s the harm in making pessimistic predictions? I mean, after all, negative predictions are not reality. They are just predictions. So what could they possibly hurt? They can even be kind of fun, like if you predict the football team that you don’t like will have a losing season…and then it turns out, they do.
But many negative predictions can be profoundly limiting.
Say there are two people in the same profession who are about the same age and have about the same abilities and health statistics. One predicts he will die in the next 6 months, while the other predicts the next 6 months will be the most amazing and expansive of her life. These two people will probably use their next 6 months quite differently, not based on anything other than what they currently imagine about their future.
Intellectually I know this, but sometimes I still find doomsday predictions horribly tempting.
Actually, I’ve predicted one sort of doomsday or another countless times in the past and luckily it has yet to come to pass.
What did happen is that I expended a great deal of energy worrying about the Doomsday I predicted and let this worry distract me from many of the good things that I could be noticing and experiencing. To be honest when I was worrying about predictions of doomsday I felt miserable and scared most of the time.
And yet, knowing this, I still keep trying to predict the future. From politics, to my business, to when I might die, I have a propensity to try to figure it ALL out. This habit can take tremendous energy, lots of time, and be distracting and depressing. At its worst, this habit can lead me to subconsciously pursue actions or inactions that might prove my fears correct.
Far from being certain, predictions are sometimes accurate to a degree and sometimes not. But there’s no absolute certainty in predictions, otherwise every prediction would be correct, 100% of the time. This is simply not the track record predictions enjoy.
If I could get back all the energy I’ve poured into my fearful predictions over the years, I would use that energy in a far different way today.
Noticing how dire predictions make me gloomy, I could shift my focus and become a rose colored prediction aficionado. But these predictions, albeit happier, probably have about the same chance of being accurate as negative predictions.
Maybe it’s time to accept that the future is unfolding beyond our ability to know what’s going to happen. Some of the future will probably be better than we can imagine. Some of it might be worse.
From this place, maybe we will allow ourselves to focus less on the imaginary world we concoct for ourselves and more on the daily work involved in piloting our lives in the direction we want them to go.
Maybe….
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JASON FREEMAN is a Professional Speaker and the proud owner of a Speech Impediment. He is also the author of “Awkwardly Awesome: Embracing My Imperfect Best” and a Perseverance Coach.
He excites and encourages his audience to break through the barriers of their own limitations using a method he created, called “Doing your Imperfect Best ™”.
His Imperfect TEDx Talk can be viewed here.
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