I LOVE TIME TRAVEL

Do you believe in time travel? I do. I do it all the time. I love going back in time as much as I love visiting the future. And, the cool thing is, anyone can do it. 

I’ve learned that consistent journeys into the past and future are essential to being a successful entrepreneur or business owner. Here’s what I mean. If you want to be truly successful at any of your life’s endeavors, you must, and I repeat, you must be willing to visit your past regularly. The past holds all the collective knowledge necessary to travel into the future. 

I first learned about this while studying the concept of Zero-Based Thinking. The key element of this concept is the acronym KWINK, which stands for “Knowing What I Now Know.” When you face any level of challenge, or, for that matter, opportunity, the top 1% will stop and KWINK the situation. They ask themselves, knowing what I now know from life, what do I know or have I experienced already that can help me with this issue? 

In my role as a Master Business Coach, I encounter people who are struggling, often because they have not allowed themselves to learn from their past experiences. We know that sometimes our successes and our failures can be our best source of solutions. One of my mentors that I’ve been blessed to have would scold me, reminding me that a mistake or failure is only a mistake or failure if I did not learn something from the event. We’ve even created a four-step process to use when a situation goes south. One, ask yourself What happened? Two, ask yourself, Why did it happen? Three, we ask ourselves, what did we learn so that this situation never happens again? And, four, we smile and wave goodbye to the issue, as we’ve learned something and (hopefully) will never allow it to happen again, and we can help others when faced with a similar situation. 

To honor our past, both good and bad, we must be willing to travel back in time. 

Going to the future is a bit different. For you to have a vision, a big vision for yourself, you must be able to project yourself one, five, ten, or even twenty years in the future and envision what your future looks like. The issue is that many of us have forgotten how to dream or are afraid to dream.  We lack confidence; we are ok with mediocrity; we’re lazy; or we have every flimsy excuse in the book for why creating a vision is crazy. We’ve heard them all. “I don’t have a formal education.” “I was raised poor.” “I’m too young.” “I don’t have the experience.” And on and on and on. 

But traveling to the future and creating your own confidential vision for what it could be is how regular people become amazing. That vision of the future will then drive your goals. It will drive your confidence and enthusiasm. It can give you something to live for and work for. 

The future is where you’ll soon live. It’s where your children and their children will live. You have the power to make it better, or not. Don’t be afraid to learn from the past, and to believe in the future. Make it your goal, when all things are said and done, that you can say, “Wow, what a ride!”