Planning for the Future While Staying Present

When you're building a house, which moments of planning, architecting, and construction happen outside the present moment?

None of them. The blueprint gets drawn at a particular desk on a particular afternoon. The schedule gets written in a real hour of a real day. Planning is something you do in a given present moment, the same as swinging a hammer.

Most people don't see it that way. Thinking about the future often gets mistaken for leaving the present. So once you start getting present in your work, planning can feel like it pulls you out.

The things you want to build start to feel like something you have to leave presence to go do. Which leads to people becoming very good at responding to whatever shows up, while they slowly stop creating what they want.

A client of mine ran into this recently. He'd delegated a lot of his work to a team that was getting more capable, his calendar was freeing up, and he was spending a couple of hours at a time in presence and enjoying it. When he described what he'd actually been working on, nearly all of it had come to him rather than from him.

So I asked him: How might you still be proactive in creating what you want, from presence?

Presence Doesn't Mean Doing Nothing

My client could sit on a park bench for a couple of hours in full presence. Then he'd open a to-do list and, as he put it, have to get back to the grindstone, and he was back in his head.

It sounded like he thought that to be in a state of presence, he had to be doing nothing.

Those are two different things. Having less on your plate is one. Operating from presence is another. They often arrive together, so it's natural to assume the open calendar is where presence lives. It's easier to be present with less on your plate, the same way it's easier to concentrate in total silence. But the power is in learning to concentrate when there's noise. Your work is where you train presence, rather than what you leave to find it.

Check this for yourself. Are you present right now, reading this? If you are, notice that you're doing something. Presence and activity were never in conflict. Planning is an activity too.

So if planning doesn't take you out of presence, what does? When I asked my client how he took himself out of it when he worked, he said planning meant worrying about what could go wrong, and that the worry became a story he was a player in.

That's the distinction. Thinking through what could go wrong can be part of making a plan. Worrying about it is a story, and the story has a specific shape. He'd learned to accept what is in the moment. Then he'd decide in advance that if a certain future moment happened, he'd resist it, so now he had to make sure it never did. He was pre-resisting what is. That's what pulled him out.

Finding What Pulls You Out

Start by not trying to be present all the time. You relax into presence rather than working your way there.

Efforting to get there is just more trying to fix what is, which takes you further out. You can get so focused on the mechanics of presence that you lose the essence.

So instead of trying harder, simply notice the moments during your day when you're not present. Once you can see them, you can look at how you're creating them.

1. Write your own recipe. If you wanted to guarantee that you drifted out of presence every time you sat down to work, how would you do it? Answer honestly. Whatever you write down is how you take yourself out of presence.

2. Separate thinking about what could go wrong from worrying about it. Fear itself isn't the problem; it invites you to pay attention. You can welcome it, acknowledge you might lose the customer, and then go respond.

3. Scenario plan from presence. If this happens, I'll respond this way. If that happens, that way. Do it without making any of it a problem, and trust future you to handle future issues. Worrying about a decision before it arrives spends the energy you'll need when it does.

The Blueprint Still Gets Drawn

There's a moment my client described where he's sitting on a bench in the park, and everything is already perfectly still. Nothing needs to happen. Nothing needs fixing.

And when nothing needs fixing, you can just go create what you want, instead of trying to avoid and fix something you don't want. That's what allows you to make plans from presence. You can draw the blueprint, pick the materials, set the schedule, and even think through what might go wrong, without making any of it a problem.

And with no story about the future clouding what's true right now, you can clearly see what needs to happen, when it needs to happen, and give all of yourself to it when it does.

With love,

Dave Kashen