I can point to the exact day my future stopped being my past.
I spent a majority of my life living in the gap between hope and certainty. I was a teen mom on welfare hoping that one day things would change. I would hope and wish so much that maybe someone would cut me a break somewhere. I would dream about maybe being able to go to college one day. My past self did not have access to many dreams of her own. They were recycled ideas of what I saw and heard around me. I was a direct reflection of the only world I knew.
I often tell you the story of how I read those six words that changed my life. I do this because it's the ONE day I can look back on and pinpoint the exact moment my internal narrative began to shift. 'Your Past is Not Your Future' released me from the in-between of hope and certainty. It was the first time I realized this was possible. I remember crying saying, 'WAIT? Does that mean this is not all there is?'
I was still me. 21 years old, just barely getting started on completing my high school diploma. I had 5 and 4 year old boys holding my hand and hanging out with me at the dropout recovery school. And even then, I was SO CERTAIN I would not be there much longer. I would create images of finish lines in my mind. I saw myself on multiple stages graduating and giving speeches. I then saw myself in an Army uniform, and even though initially the residue of who I had become throughout those 21 years wanted to hold on and keep me there, I just KNEW that was not me anymore. And so I wasn't.
I became that version of me I saw. I graduated, went to community college, university, the U.S. Army, twice, for enlisted and Officer school, and then I came back and gave the graduation keynote speech at that dropout recovery center. With so much pride in my heart and belief in all the students seated before me, I gave that speech crying throughout it.
The audience cried with me, and I'll never forget the older man who came to find me afterwards with tears still in his eyes to tell me he was so proud of me, and how I had just given him one of the biggest gifts of his life: belief in himself. He looked like he lived a life of being a tough guy, the kind that had a bandana around his neck and rode a motorcycle. And in that moment he remembered so much about the truth of HIMSELF. It was never about me at all. My story just helped him see the miracles in his own life.
This is why it's so important to be aware of where we are living from. There's hope on one side and certainty on the other, and the whole game of your life is playing out in the gap between them. Sometimes you will read or hear something that will awaken something within you, and when that happens, please remember to stand in the line of certainty, because it has always been your birthright.
Picture the radio in your car. It only picks up the stations within range of where you are right now, and the thing that sets your range is how you feel. When you're irritated and a little hopeless, you pull in static and one song you can't stand, so you turn it off and drive home in silence, and the silence expands your frustration about what is true in your reality.
Hope waits in the passenger seat for a better song to come on by itself. Certainty reaches over and changes the station.
You change it by reaching for the one that moves how you feel: the song from your childhood, the one you knew by heart with the windows down. And then you're singing, and you stop checking how far you have left in your drive, and you look up and you're already there. Wow, that was fast.
The dial was in your hand the whole time. You get to change the station. You always could. The good songs are closer than this drive has been telling you.
It's all possible.
If you believe it is.
I do.
ps. that photo above was from 2013 when I was deep in the work and on the other side of my goal. I had returned to visit from basic training and this was the future me I had been certain about becoming. I also found in my phone from 2013, my affirmation lol …. sorry about the swearing but that was what got me through.
FOR THE LEADERS IN THE ROOM
The same gap runs through every organization I advise. Leaders stand on the hope side of it, hoping the transformation lands and the culture shifts, while the organization keeps running on the frequency it always has: the real standards, the actual level of trust, the patterns of thinking that produced the results already on the board.
An organization can only pull in what is within range of how its leadership operates, so a new strategy laid over an old operating system returns the old results. The leaders who move organizations change the range on purpose, before the results give them permission.