Bigger Future-Self

“A man without a vision for his future always returns to his past.” Unknown

This is 2022. A time when most employees should have made the shift from economic slavery to economic mastery. You need to take charge of your career. You need to be responsible for your economic security. You need to stop depending on your employer. You need to see work as a partnership. You need to focus on making your future bigger and better.

As you work and advance in career, most times you become unintentional about your future. Gradually, you begin to experience a past that is far bigger than a future. You continually reminisce about the past and how good it is. You relish the memory of the past and avoid talking about the future. If your communications consist of 70% talk about the past, then your past is bigger and better than your future.

This means one thing: you are running out of future. You are no longer becoming valuable and useful in the workplace and marketplace. When your future self gets bigger than your past, you become free from your past. The only reason your future self can become bigger than your past is when you continually rely on your ability for your economic security.

The major value for an employee is not what you are paid but who you become. The major reason for focusing on making your future-self bigger and better than your past is not what you get but who you become in the process. You will never leave a job with the salary you are paid, but you will certainly leave with who you have become. You can earn more than you are being paid right now because you can become more than you are.

There are two basic ways an employ can make his or her future-self bigger and better than the past:

1.??????Growth, which is the process of expanding your mindset and increasing your capability

2.?????Value creation, which is the act of moving your employee from a level of lower productivity to that of a higher usefulness in the marketplace

Most employees are trapped in economic childhood and slavery where they have to work to earn. Someone is clearly in charge of the who they become and how their future turns out. The seek job security. However, when they take responsibility for their growth and decide to depend on their ability to create value for their economic security, they will make their future bigger.

The key to making your future to continually grow bigger and get better is always focusing on creating new forms of value for your employer and the marketplace. Any employee that keeps this focus will never slip into job security or economic childhood where the past is bigger than the future. You understand that your own bigger future relies on you creating value that makes your employer and marketplace’s future bigger and better.

Job description only maintains the future your employer has already created. That doesn’t make your future-self bigger. When I coach employees, my focus is to get them to start depending on their mindset and capability not their employer. Value Giver Employees have shifted from serving their employer through job description to creating game-changing value in collaboration with other like-minded employees.

Your employer is in control of your results when you are subject to the job description. You should never give anyone power to determine how your future turns out. If you do, they will turn you into an economic slave. Stay in control of your future by focusing on developing your ability to create value. Even if your superiors through greed and bad decisions make the future of the company smaller until it no longer has a future, your future will still remain bigger because it is not dependent on the company but your ability.

Your future depends on your commitment to grow today and the value you create. The secret of your future is determined by what you do daily. Your future-self will thank you if you decide to learn, grow, improve and create value each day. The best way to be in control of how your future becomes is to commit to growing and creating value today.

“Invest three percent of your income in yourself (self-development) in order to guarantee your future.” Brian Tracy

To make your future bigger and better, you will have to triple your investment in expanding your mindset thereby making your imaginations bigger than your memories, and in your ability to create value thereby bypassing dependency on your employer.

FOR Conversation

To achieve a bigger and better future-self, you need to continually engage in what I termed the FOS conversion where F stands for Freedom, O stands for opportunity and R stands for risks. Your FOR Conversation is dependent on the Future-Creating Question you ask yourself. When you are clear about the answer to the Future-Creating Question, then you will gain confidence and courage to make your future bigger and better.

Future-Creating Question: In the next three years, what value will you need to create that will put you in charge of economic security and making your future bigger and better?

"The future-based person achieves freedom from the past." Dan Sullivan

When you ask the above question. It will results ion your gaining:

Freedom: You get to know what combination of mindset and capability, that set you apart and stand you out, you need to bring to the marketplace that will help you make a unique difference. Having the right mindset and capability puts you in charge of creating and capturing the opportunities that will make your future bigger and better. Knowing you have unique capabilities gives confidence.

Opportunity: You get to understand the specific opportunities you need to create and capture that will make your future bigger and better. If you depend on the opportunities created by others, you won’t be in charge of how your future turns out. Knowing the exact opportunities, you need to create and capture brings excitement.

Risks: You get to know what you have to stake and trade-off to capture the opportunity and what it will cost you if you don’t capture the opportunity. Having clarity about the risks you have to take produces courage.

The combination of confidence, excitement and courage makes the employee unstoppable and very valuable.

To have a bigger and bigger future-self, you have to continually remain useful and valuable to your employer and the marketplace. Once an employee begins to rest on her laurels, it will become increasingly hard for her to become useful and valuable to her employer in a meaningful way. She becomes arrogant. Gradually the past begins to get bigger and better than the future until one day she is completely out of future. Being out of future means to stop being useful and valuable.

When employees are out of future, they will no longer be in charge of their economic security through value creation rather will choose to try to do sneaky things to hold on to job security by maintaining the status quo. Their reputation in the workplace declines.

Once everyone begins to seek to be part of the status quo, those who are committed to being in charge of their economic security through value creation begin to leave to seek new opportunities. As a result, the company begins to run out of future. Value creation challenges the status quo.

The key to stay useful and valuable to your employer and the marketplace is to continually invest in your growth and commit to value creation.

Want to be in charge of your future as an employee? Make the decision this year to be coached to become responsibility for your economic freedom. Join the Value Giver Coach and see your value increase when you start creating value. For details, send email to [email protected] or whatsapp to +2349071602727 to begin the journey of becoming a value creator and take charge of your career.

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