Session 11 – Future

Action Step

1. Write down your Future for one of your life plan accounts.

2. Post your Future in the GU Leader Community.

Post your response to this question in the GU Leader Community by clicking here. Share one of your new Actions and ask for feedback.

Session Transcript

Welcome back to another session of Guidestone University.

So, we are moving in to now completing the account form, the personal plan account form for your first account. Okay? So you should have your The Simple Personal Guide that goes along with this course and you want to pull that out and go to the page that has the Simple Personal Plan account form on it and at the top, the first section we’re going to look at today is Future.

Now here’s the great thing about this, you’ve done most of the work already. So we’re just going to complete it real quickly.

So, the future is, where you want to be in this area of your life five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years from now, depending where you are placed in life, in the future down the road, where do you want to be in this area of your life? So if you’re working on your account for your spouse or significant other, where do you want to be in this relationship?

So, what you want to do is take upon yourself the mind of a writer. You’re going to write a story that describes maybe a day in your life in the future for you. What does that look like? Or a month, you know, what is that extended period of time in this relationship or in this area of your life, what does that look like? What do you see when you look into the future for this area?

Now, I told you you’ve already completed most of the work for this. So, what you’re going to do is take the work you did or thinking about the funeral and the eulogies that people were going to say. What will they say about us at our funeral? So you can go back-up in your personal plan guide and you can take what you wrote and use it as the basis for what you’re going to write here for future, for this account. So again, if you’re doing a spouse account, like I would for my wife Sarah, then I would take the few sentences or the paragraph, whatever I wrote for Sarah, and then I would copy and paste that. You can go to a computer or you can just rewrite it out if you’re writing it out by hand.

And here’s what I want you to do, you’re going to make one change. So, when you wrote out what they will say, you wrote that from the perspective of, “I want them to remember me and the way that I was and I want to remember our relationship and then they just describe the relationship.”

Here’s what I want you to do one thing different as you write out Future. Write it as if it’s happening or write it as if it’s already happened. Okay? You got that? Write it as if it’s already occurred. Write it as if it’s already happening. And here’s what I mean by that. I’m going to read to you the difference between what I wrote, when I wrote out, I want her to remember me or what I want her to say at my funeral and then I’m going read what I wrote in the future section of my life plan account for Sarah.

So, here’s what I wrote when I thought through what I wanted her to say at my funeral or how do I want to be remembered by her. Here it is, “I want Sarah to remember how much I loved her, that I understood her, that I helped her accomplish her dreams. I want her to recall specific times that we spent together; when we laughed, when we cried, when we sat silently, when we held each other, when we talked about things that were important to us, when we spent time together with Madison and Andrew.” So that’s what I wrote when I said, “What do I want her to say about me? Or how do I want her to remember me at the end of my life?” okay?

So then, when I went to write the Future, I copied and pasted that and then I added some to it. Okay? And I wrote it as if it was already happening or if it were happening. So here’s what I wrote for Future in the Sarah life plan account. “Sarah and I love our time together. And we live and work together with focused purpose. I’m actively pursuing her love, her honor and her respect. She is happy. I see her smile every day. We’re enjoying the best days of our lives and we’re always looking for adventure. We are deeply in love and romantically involved. We regularly reflect on our incredible experiences together. We are serving people together as a family, passionate entrepreneurial and supportive. We are enjoying our life together through our complimentary interest.”

So the important thing that I want you to see there is that one of them was written by kind of how I want to, it’s prescriptive. It’s how I want to be remembered by her. But the Future when I wrote it out for my personal plan account, I wrote it out descriptively. This is the way that I envisioned it happening. And the reason why we want you to write it as if it’s already happened or as if it’s already happening is because we want you to get used to thinking about that way, about each relationship in your life and about each area that you have put down as this most important. What’s most important and who’s most important in your life and in your work, make sense?

So, simple action item for this session. Write down Future for one of your life plan accounts. Okay? So in the Simple Personal Plan account form, you’re going to write the name of that account. For me and that blank, I would write, “Sarah”. And then you’re going to write out the Future for that particular area of your life. Okay?

And then you’re going to post that. Number 2, you’re going to post that in the Guidestone University Leader Community or email it to me. Some of them may be, you may feel like it’s too personal to post publicly in that forum, even though it’s a safe place for us, and don’t worry about that. But if you feel like it’s too personal, email it to me. I’ll be happy to take a look at it, give me any feedback on it so that as you go and do the others you’ll be more effective or as effective as possible when you do those. Okay? Sound good?

We’ll see you in the next session as we work on the next section of Simple Personal Plan.[/text_block]