The concept of “next step thinking” came up last week in a conversation. This is all about focusing on being in the moment and being confident that you can do the next thing you need to do with complete focus and confidence. It seems that this is very important at the moment. Much of our thinking, confidence and focus is constantly tempered by a view to the future and a sense check of whether we’re going to “deliver the result”. We rely heavily on this barometer of future success to give us a sense of belief in the here and now and as a result we confuse personal confidence to perform with our perception of expected future success.
So, given that the ability to predict the future and work out that everything is going to be o.k. seems to be a near impossibility at the moment we have a couple of choices.
1) Choose the fact that we can no longer predict the future and become very stressed and have a constant feeling of impending doom with us every step along the way, or
2) Accept that information about the future is essential, but untrustworthy at the moment, so focus on building the future one step at a time.
If we focus on next step thinking and contemplate all the reasons why we are completely confident that we can take the next step with the required skill, style and commitment, then we have a chance of getting on a confidence roll. We all still have the same skills, abilities, knowledge and experience, so it’s essential to keep focused on applying these skills to new sets of problems that arise.
So, what’s your next step today?