From Your Future, with Love

Summary: We created a short reflective exercise (with a fun twist!) that helps you clarify your intent for the year ahead and craft Sighting Questions to make that intent actionable. We ran this as the closing workshop at Intent to Impact, and now we're sharing it with you.

Yesterday, I learned how to catch the floating yarn when knitting with two colors at once. This is noteworthy not because I'm some kind of knitting prodigy or because it constitutes an advance for knitters everywhere.

It's noteworthy because I noticed and appreciated the fact that I'd learned something new. I'm bad at two-color knitting, but I can do it. Catching the floats is my new capability.

I noticed this because I've set up tools that redirect my monkey mind back from Shiny Distractionville toward my core intentions for the year.

Before we took a break to host the New Rules for Work Gathering, we were talking about the future. André Martin asked us to rethink our future working relationships, April Rinne encouraged us to adopt a Flux mindset towards whatever unwelcome changes arise, and Hal Hershfield helped us create an empathetic relationship with our future selves.

All together, it's a lot to get your head around. We're blessed with an (over)abundance of potential, and if we're not careful, we can easily be swept away.

This is where setting a strategic intent comes in. In this case, we're talking about one strategic word that conveys the spirit with which you'll approach the year, focusing your attention on how you intend to be or the underlying value you seek to create during your year's journey.

This one-word intent serves as a North Star to guide you. I find reconnecting with my one word - Capability - enormously calming, focusing me when I feel a frazzle coming on. It rapidly restores my sense of agency and motivation.

Want that in your life too? Check this out.

Activity: Discover Your Strategic Intent and Sighting Questions

Step 1: Tune in to your one-word intent.

Our bodies share messages that our awareness may not receive.

In her book and keynote, Annie Murphy Paul talked about the importance of tuning into these deeper, embodied ways of knowing, and the amazing things research shows that people can do when they develop a well-honed "gut sense”. Interoception (internal awareness) precedes conscious intuition.

That's what you want for your one-word intent. You want a word that resonates with your whole self - one that, when you consider all the possibilities, continually burbles up and wraps itself around your mind.

So if you don't have a strategic intent yet - or even if you do but you picked something that sounds like you should care about even if you honestly don't - take a moment to close your eyes.

For me, that word was Capability.

I wanted it to be a sexier word, but I used this exercise to test it, and it is what it is. This is what I need to focus on right now. It’s not cool, but it doesn’t need to be cool to be useful. The only reason I'm even telling you about it is as an example.

Otherwise, only one other person needs to know the word you've chosen.

Step 2: Tell your future self about it.

When we want to think more deeply about a new idea, it's really helpful to talk it through with another person.

Now, we want you to create a relationship with someone who will always be there for you. Someone who has a vested stake in the word you've chosen, and who you can check in with to build on your ideas and intent all year long.

Surprise! It's you!

In our interview with Hal Hershfield, he shared the power of creating a relationship with your future self.

When we each form a vivid sense of who we will be in a year or more, we’re more likely to behave in ways that help our future selves become the people we’ll be proud to be.

One way to create this relationship is by corresponding with your future self, making them your pen pal.

That said, it's one thing to intuit your strategic intent and quite another to translate it into glowing prose. While I firmly believe in the value of coaxing ideas into written coherence, that's not the baptismal fire we're trying to light with this exercise. So to make writing the letter easier, we created a little tool for you.

Did you try it out? If so, keep that window open so you can chat with your future self some more.

Step 3: Craft your sighting question(s).

If you followed the instructions above and read the reply, you noticed that it talked about how important your sighting question was to keep you on track.

The one-word strategic intent creates a fabulous North Star.

Sometimes, though, I forget to look up. And sometimes, even when I do spot my North Star intent, I have trouble figuring out how to align myself to it.

This got me thinking about navigating the wilderness using a sighting compass.

The Sighting Compass as a Blunt-Force Metaphor

Sighting compasses include a mirror on a hinged lid.

Like all compasses sold in the Northern Hemisphere, you can use a sighting compass to find North. The mirror makes this easier when you need to lay the compass flat or hold it out in front of you. You can see North reflected in the mirror even when you have to set your compass down or look at it from a funky angle.

The mirrored lid includes a small notch. When you look through this, it helps you clearly see the direction you’re heading now, and then accurately calculate how far your current path deviates from the direction you intended to go in.

The mirror also acts as a mirror. This means you can use it to:

• Flash a signal at someone else.

• Look ahead and look behind at the same time.

• Reflect, and see yourself.

We wanted a way to do all of that with our North Star strategic intent, too.

So, we crafted some Sighting Questions.

Now, it's your turn.

Reflections and Next Steps

If you engaged in this exercise, either during the workshop in January or through reading this article, we'd love your thoughts.

• What was this experience like for you?

• Will you use your sighting questions? If so, how?

• Do you have experience with something like this? Perhaps you've used futureme, or written a postcard to yourself as part of a workshop. If so, how does this experience compare?

Finally, I want to relate this activity to the New Rules for Work and our focus on the future of collaborative knowledge work.

When we first discussed it, we envisioned this exercise as individual pre-work that folks would complete before creating an initial working agreement with a new team. Our theory is that if each team member has a clearer sense of their personal intent (amongst other things), they'll be better prepared to speak about what they feel matters most.

We decided to pilot the activity at the conference, where it inspired rich conversations. This raised a new curiosity.

• This is an individual exercise.
  How might you adapt it for use by a team?

We hope to hear from you in a reply or the comments, and we hope your exchange with your future self has you feeling just a bit more capable – and always loved – in the year ahead!

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