If you want to change your future, you must first change your expectations about the future. Study after study proves that the thoughts you choose to think have a direct and powerful impact on your future success, health, and happiness.
In the following excerpt, Super Bowl-winning coach and player Tony Dungy explains how your thoughts create your reality and why it’s so important that you consciously choose to think positively about your future…
You have the ability to paint a picture of what your life is going to look like. Your perspective today has a lot to do with what happens tomorrow. What you believe and what you expect have a tendency to come about.
This is why it’s so important to be careful how you speak to yourself, think of yourself, conduct yourself, and develop yourself. The landscape of your future is in large part determined by what you think it will be and by how you see yourself in it.
This is “the power of self-realization,” which study after study seems to validate.
Those who have positive expectations experience positive results more often than those who have negative expectations. So it’s vital to make sure your perceptions are positive.
I’m not suggesting life will always be easy if you have the right thoughts, or that blessings will be showered upon you if you simply start thinking positively. But negative thinking sets you back. I’ve seen it happen with athletes and teams living out their self-fulfilling prophecies. The way I see it, if these “prophecies” tend to be self-fulfilling, they might as well be positive ones.
With God’s help—His power, encouragement, and energy flowing through our lives along with the gifts, abilities, and talents He has given us—we can shape the future. Because He created us, we have the potential of living lives of significance, possibility, and impact.
For better or worse, what you envision often begins to take shape. Be intentional and choose to envision a life of significance, possibility, and impact.
— Tony Dungy, from his book The One Year Uncommon Life Daily Challenge
If you have the ability to shape your future with the thoughts you think, why would you not take this opportunity seriously? Why would you not approach your thinking habits with the same discipline you apply to any other worthy habit?
So many of us take a passive approach to our thinking. We allow negative thoughts and expectations to freely flow into our mind. Or worse, we actively feed our minds negative and pessimistic thoughts about the future with the news, books, music, and movies we bombard ourselves with.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
As Tony Dungy points out based on his lifetime of experiences, you can proactively create a new reality for yourself, your family, and your team. You can do this by taking charge of the thoughts you think and the expectations you have about your future.
When you do that—when you visualize a positive future and feed yourself optimistic, faith-filled, can-do thoughts—you create a new and better reality.
How do you envision yourself in the future? What do you expect to accomplish? What impact will you have on those around you?
Don’t take these questions lightly. Spend time developing a positive self-image and a positive outlook for your future. Then actively reinforce those positive expectations over and over again.
How you think of yourself and how you see your future will directly impact every subsequent thought you think, every decision you make, and every action you take throughout the day.
Choose wisely.
