It's rare that a quote makes me sit up and pay attention, but this one did.

(Chinese proverb)

I've always loved quotes. Maybe it's because I like to think a lot.

Or maybe it's because a good quote makes me take my thoughts in a new direction I hadn't considered before.

Some quotes wake me up to the power and beauty of life, and others remind me of the consequences of my actions.

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I dare say there's a quote for every single occasion and one to back up every point of view.

But I digress. Tonight I wanted to share my thoughts on this quote (at the top of this post).

It arrived on my screen courtesy of the Momentum Extension I have loaded onto my browser.

I love it (the extension) because it not only gives me a new quote to ponder every day, it also shows me a new picture of something beautiful every day.

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And, I digress, again.

Let's go back to this quote... maybe I need to paste it here to refocus my attention:

“If you want to know your past look into your present conditions.
If you want to know your future look into your present actions.”
(Chinese proverb)

That's better! Okay...

I think I meant to tackle this quote in two parts.

ONE: “If you want to know your past look into your present conditions..."

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As someone who has supported clients to work through bad and scary (read: traumatic) things that happened in their past, and done oodles of this work on and with myself, this part of the quote is a no brainer for me.

Scientifically, we know, without a shadow of a doubt that the things that happened in our past change the very fabric of our personality.

Our subconscious mind has the task of protecting us and it accumulates all our experiences and does it's best to protect us from having the same bad, scary things happen to us again.

It tries. It sort of does okay. But it also focuses on the shitty things that happened to us in order to try and avoid having them happen again... but what we focus on expands; whatever we're paying attention to we end up dragging into our reality/life.

This is not woo-woo. This is known fact at this point. We can dismiss it until the cows come home, but we are so, so, so powerful that we can (unintentionally) bring in the same experiences again and again and again.

Ever had a pattern of shitty things happen that your friends or family don't have happen to them?

You can thank your subconscious mind for holding onto that one.

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Thankfully, we now know how to change these patterns and eliminate them for good. For good! And it's good. It makes life work soooo much better!

I have used lots of tools over my adult life. My favourite two are intuitive movement and a form of trauma-informed tapping (similar to EFT but without the endless stream of heady words).

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That's enough on point 1. It's getting late over here. Let's move onto point 2:

TWO: "If you want to know your future look into your present actions.”

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THIS is what actually got my attention with this quote. A lot of the quotes I see are somewhere between "average", "heard it before" or "I disagree".

But THIS one got my attention I THINK because I'm currently in the process of visioning a different future for my business and finances.

I've spent a LOT of time in the past focused on healing the past. And that's important work, as I talked about earlier in this post. But at some point you've gotta look forward, we've gotta look forward, I've gotta look forward.

To create something new we have to imagine something new and then take new action in the present moment to create that different future.

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That's what the second half of this quote is talking about; we're building our future now. Now. With the actions we take now. So, to quote another person whose name escapes me right now:

"If we keep doing what we've always done we'll keep getting what we've always got." (~Some wise person)

What are you imagining for yourself in your future and can you (with full honesty) say you're doing the actions required TODAY to see that vision become reality?

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This is my Hive Blog Posting Month post #17 of a planned 30 days. I have zero idea how to uncentre the body of the post, so since I'm trying to practise writing cool or useful things over writing perfect things, I'm just leaving it as it is.