Daily Inspiration: “It’s your future. What’s holding you back from finding a different path to meet your original goal?”

“It’s your future. What’s holding you back from finding a different path to meet your original goal?” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Let me toss you a challenge this morning: five years from now, when you look back on the decisions that you were making today, will you be happy with what you see?

Will you see someone who accepted that your future would never go back to where it was before, but only to a new and vastly different place? Will you see a person who believed that we would soon be ‘back to norma’ and that you avoided making the big shifts necessary to align to a completely different realty? Will you see someone who incessantly used that most annoying phrase of the pandemic, ‘new normal’ – signifying a belief that only a few minor tweaks to your universe were required?  Did you see someone that thought the global pandemic might be over in but a short period of time – or that it would take years, and perhaps decades, to wind its way through the course of history? (Hint: It’s the latter.)

Bottom line: do you minimize the long range impact of this seismic era in human history? Or are you someone who truly believes that this is a universe-shifting period of time? The scope-equivalent of the two World Wars and the Great Depression – events that massively shifted and disrupted the future?

Consider this context: I posted this image yesterday in a group of event and meeting planners in which I participate, offering it up without comment.

Which person are you?

What belief system drives your actions today?

Because if you are in the ‘new normal’ camp, there’s a pretty solid chance that you are going to wake up in five years and be pretty sad with the decisions and actions you were making today – and pretty horrified in considering the person that you are today.

The origin for the photo and the quote? It’s based very much on my recent video “Transformation Leadership – My Keynote @NASA”