“Yea, yea,” I hear you say. “Another one of those New Year’s platitudes that won’t work, at least not for me.” Not true! I teach this method in seminars and workshops and can tell you that when the realization finally sinks in that you can have anything that is physically, scientifically, mentally, or morally possible come true for you; fireworks go off in the mind! The world opens up to you, and you understand that the impossible is not only possible, it can happen!

The caveats are simple. If it is possible to accomplish in your lifetime, you can have it happen in your lifetime. For example, scientists tell me that so far we cannot teach a butterfly to talk, nor can we grow wings by Tuesday. You cannot personally travel back through time (at least not yet), and although some people swear they have done it, there’s no proof you can dial-direct to your God. Most everything else is possible. Let me repeat, most everything else is possible!

THE PAST
Here’s how it works. Think of your past life as a storage shed, attic or basement. Everything, and I mean everything you have ever done, thought, or wished, is in that storage shed. You open the door, and it’s packed to the ceiling, right?

If you want to know what happened between you and that wonderful person you had a chance with years ago, it’s there, probably filed under ‘Relationships That Went Wrong’. That failure in business is there, filed under ‘Business Failures’. The relationship with your spouse is there. What you had for dinner yesterday is there as well as what you had for breakfast today. Your challenges, your dreams, and your hopes … they’re there also. It’s your life, and it’s all packed in that storage shed in nice neat, labeled compartments where you can access it on-demand. Right?

YOUR PRESENT FUTURE
That’s the problem. Access on demand. “Oh, I can’t quit smoking (rummage-rummage). See here? Back in 1999 I tried, and it didn’t work.” Or, “That idea won’t work in my business (rummage-rummage). See? Here are the results of that sales program I tried two years ago, and it didn’t work then either!” Or, “I can’t get a degree (rummage-rummage), I’m too old to learn.”

Here’s what this all means. At this exact moment, right now as you’re reading this, your future is another storage shed, and it contains the EXACT SAME material as does your past! In fact, every time you file something in your past, you put a copy in your future with a tag explaining why it didn’t work back then. For everything you want to do you can pull out records that say, “That won’t work!” or “You tried that, remember?” So what do you do? You chart your future using the failures of your past! Wow! No wonder you can’t see the future! It’s crowded with the past!

“How about the present”, you ask? The present is now, neither in the past nor in the future; it’s just ‘now’. The present may have a folder or two that you haven’t yet filed in the past, but other than that, the present is just ‘now’. That ‘now’ probably contains a lot of plans you’d like to have happen … dreams and goals … ‘what ifs’; but you know that as soon as you try to implement those ‘what ifs’, the folders from the past that line the path to your future will say, “It will never work!” or, “You tried that once back a couple of years, remember?” So what can we do?

YOUR FUTURE FUTURE
It’s not easy, but the fix is simple. Close the door to the past. Make sure that all those records in your future storage that are from the past are filed only in the past, and then shut the door! If you can do this, and again I say it’s not easy to do, you’re going to discover your future storage is empty! There will be nothing there. Nothing! There will be no past to filter dreams, no past to remind you of failures, no past to say, “It can’t be done.” Empty.

Now use your dreams and goals of the present to build a new future for you: a future you can have, a future that is possible, a future that is unencumbered by the past. Speak your future, then find out how to make it happen! It works.

How do you put the past in the past and keep it there? You have to come to terms with the past, understand it, forgive it, and forget it. It’s possible, and with work, you can do it. That’s the REAL challenge. Do this, and the future is yours! So … What’s keeping you from success?