What’s Your Future History?
Leadership coaching is full of stories, if you know where to look. Most of the time, these stories are about the past or the present. But the stories we tell ourselves about our futures are just as important, if not more so.
Jerry Colonna, a coach who works primarily with high-level technology executives, says many of his clients (including himself) grew up seeing life as a hockey stick. Everything is always “up and to the right.” Endless opportunities and success, as far as the eye can see.
You could call Colonna’s hockey stick and everything that comes with it a future history. Everyone has one. It tells us how our life should go, what’s most important, what possibilities are open to us, and what we need to do to get there.
In buying into our future history and aligning our lives with the particular shape it makes, we’re making a contract with life. And whether we know it or not, we make many of our most important decisions trying to keep up our end of the bargain.
Sometimes, our future histories help us by giving us a sense of purpose and guiding us toward what’s next.
But other times, they can harm us. Some of Colonna’s work with his high-flying tech clients—who are often high-resource white males—focuses on helping them deal with the despair of finding out that life isn’t “up and to the right,” even when their expectations had no basis in reality or, even worse, came at the expense of others.
In other cases, our future history may fill us with so much despair we set our expectations so low we never fulfill our potential. Or it might fill us with jealousy, self-contempt, or resentment toward others.
So we need to pay attention to the stories we are telling ourselves about our futures. Take a moment and ask yourself:
What might my future history look like?
What type of person is it asking me to be or become?
What assumptions is it making about life?
How might it be defining what I value?
What possibilities is it opening for me? Closing?
If you can answer those questions, you're in a better position to test your future history to see if it still holds together and rings true, and find ways to revise it when it doesn’t.
Imagine having a place where your future history is welcome, no matter what shape it’s taking.
Imagine reflecting on how you want that story to be different—and figuring out how to retell it.
Imagine learning how to live out that story. What would you do? Who would you become?
My coaching can help you do all these things. Want to know more? Book your free Discovery Session here.
