Learning to Time Travel
How Flashing Forward and Backward Can Reveal New Insights
Have you ever caught yourself saying "If I only knew then what I know now?" It's a common sentiment and it comes up frequently in my coaching. People facing critical decisions in their lives or dealing with a sense of dissonance in their work or personal lives often look back and wonder what their lives would have been like if they had had access to more information, more insight, or more wisdom "back then", that could have helped them plot a different, more fulfilling path. Often a ruefulness and sense of nostalgia accompanies these kinds of discussions.
Rather than dwelling on those emotions, I usually ask if my client is willing to do a visualization with me, one where we either time travel forward or backward.
Can We Fast Forward?
With the forward-looking visualization, we try to imagine what the client's older, wiser self would counsel on a given situation or decision. Some coaching training refers to this as "the Sage" or "The Leader Within" – access to a deep inner knowledge that contains courage, clarity, certainty, and compassion, coupled with self-acceptance and self-authority. Access to this inner font of clear wisdom and centeredness is often elusive to people, so the visualization exercise is a way of getting the heart and head opened up to different possibilities and ways of thought.
Often, these imagined encounters take place in a favorite place of peace or serenity – a mountaintop, a favorite vacation getaway, or a tropical beach. This makes it easier to find the inner focus needed to fully inhabit the visualization and get the most insight from it. It's a variation on the question "At the end of your life, looking back on this situation, how would you have wanted to behave?" Not the outcome that you would have wished happened, but the behaviors and thinking patterns you would have wanted to demonstrate. In other words, it's more about the kind of person you would want to be, not what you would have done.
While this kind of exercise can be difficult, especially for people bogged down or stuck in situations fraught with difficult emotions, I've seen deep insights emerge from coachees who courageously embrace this journey. I help create the context as their coach but importantly, the wisdom and the realization come from somewhere internal, not external. This way, the insight is more profound and likely to be applied and sustained.
The Power of Flashing Backward
When people look backward ruefully and think about what they should or could have known, they usually reference mid- or early adulthood. Rarely are they referring to their childhood. I sometimes ask a client to think about himself or herself as a young child, perhaps aided visually by a childhood photo to connect to their open, innocent, unique child persona. The Skeptic in some people can gravitate toward the naivete of children, but I encourage clients to think about the purity, openness, uniqueness, learning capacity, and essential goodness of children, and to come up with positive characterizations of who that kid is, and what powers he or she possesses.
My childhood photo is at the top of this column; my characterization of it is "I hang upside down to see the world differently". There is power and insight in the photo; when I look at it, it reminds me of my essential self and it dares me to not play it safe and to find joy in everything.
As children, we experience less interference ("noise", to reference my prior post on signal-to-noise ratios) between exposure to ideas and internalizing them. We expend far less energy comparing new ideas to those we have already subscribed to. We are less likely to divide the world into rational/analytical versus creative/emotional. We are intensely curious and not yet jaded by life experiences. We can be more spontaneous in the moment ("being") with little or no worry about future consequences. We have no false front or pretense. If we are sad, we show our sadness intensely. Ten minutes later, we can be wildly excited. Our sense of amazement and awe can be directed at experiences that adults consider minor.
Access to these child-like qualities and the freedom they bring can be amazing catalysts for creativity and creative problem-solving. Adults inundated with noise and internal and external expectations can benefit greatly from reconnecting to the purity of spirit that comes with their child, which is still within them.
We explore who this child is, not what he does. He or she may be curious, kind, funny, lighthearted, wild, timid, scared, sweet, naughty, creative, or full of awe and wonder. It is up to each person to draw out what they feel about their child self; having the photo available can facilitate the connection. It does for me. Bringing forward the purity and innocence of that child self can build more self-empathy and give context and new energy to decision-making in the here and now.
I love taking these forward and backward time travel trips with my clients – we always arrive somewhere interesting and thought-provoking, and, like any good trip, we come back bearing gifts!
Inquiry: how would access to your older, wiser self give you a different context for your life as it is today? How would accessing the energy and purity of who you were as a young child impact the person you are being today?