Future Here Now: The Future Ready Mind has to be brave

This is hard.

A Future Ready mind is flexible, open, willing to learn, able to deal with being wrong, and ready to bounce back from setbacks and failures.

But our evolution shaped us into beings that prefer the familiar over the new, and our Industrial Era upbringing taught us to do what we were told by the boss or the teacher without argument or complaint.

So, as we’ve discussed this month….we have a problem.

Developing a Future Ready Mind is hard. It’s almost guaranteed to be hard. And it only develops when we consistently challenge the mindsets we’ve developed, and work intentionally on growing those new neurons.

In my own case, my mindset changed when I put myself in a workplace that was nothing like what I had done before, with people who were very different from me. Every time I turned around, I was doing something wrong — and I was used to being the Expert in my old field.

Every night I came home, ate dinner, and then sat in quiet for a couple of hours, coloring or drawing, while my brain chewed over what had happened and how it played out, and how that differed from what I might have expected.

That was five years ago. Just last week, I found myself reacting to a challenge in a way that drew from my old mindset, instead of the one I want to claim today. That’s a very humbling experience.

But it a way, it’s also a mercy.

One of the Industrial Era ideas that we inherited says that we have to Get it Right. We have to strive to do the thing perfectly. To attain Mastery.

But in a VUCA world, where complexity and ambiguity show their face more often than not, we can’t be perfect, and we don’t have to be perfect. We aren’t going to attain Mastery, and we’re gonna get it wrong. That’s disorienting to our Industrial Era brains.

But it’s also a relief. Once we get rid of the unreasonable expectations, flexibility and acceptance of the occasional failure feels a lot more healthy than that old model. It’s like taking off a corset and putting on your sweatpants. You may not look as snatched, but you feel a lot more like yourself.

So the last key practice in building a Future Ready Mind is to work on it for the long run. Expecting that we won’t always get it right, and that occasional backsliding will happen.

But knowing that this, too, is part of the growth.