(5-minute reading time, long and you'll have to think)
There is a post you have not written. A price you have not raised. A conversation with your team that you have been postponing for months.
The reason is not strategic. It is linguistic.
We act based on the future we expect. If you expect rain tomorrow, you will act differently than when you expect sunshine.
When you expect a price increase to go well, you will act differently than when you imagine this one picky customer who always complains.
But there is no future apart from the one constructed in language.
Language: Thinking, speaking, writing, and visual imagination.
The language you use to construct the future is given by your past — or better said, what we remember about the past (aka what I think).
What we think is given by what we have practiced.
What we have practiced are the thoughts and conversations we have been reinforced for remembering, either through pain or through pleasure.
Many of the things we have practiced have been introduced by others. Family, friends, school, country, work context, through the conversations individuals and groups share.
Groups, families, and partners can have a significant impact on what conversations we continue practicing, as they often reinforce certain behaviors while punishing others.
For example, many people have an aversion to being in the center of attention, as they have often experienced others attacking people who have gained a lot of attention, internalized judgments against them, and now can’t be that “kind” of person, prohibiting their own desire to share an idea or perform or “go out there” with their business.
This is the past slipping into the future, as the conversations about people are now internalized, even years later, to still form the behavior of the individual by projecting what has happened onto what will happen.
The process goes like this:
A teacher once called you an idiot. You learned: idiot = bad.
You watched people online get attacked for being too visible. You learned: attention = egocentric.
Now you have a business. You do not promote it. The business struggles.
Your parents say get a real job. The judgment lands on a conclusion you already have. You are an idiot.
The teacher was right. The future just confirmed the past.
This way, my past continues to slip into my future. Yet it is not a rule that the past has to do that. It is a linguistic phenomenon, which means it can also be changed in linguistics.
How?
By saying so.
Language can construct a self that is an idiot, and one who is not. The evidence for each could be found in anyone’s history.
The future is not a prewritten script but one we script continuously by analysis of current data and the process of remembrance of the past, which both happen in language. The remembrance and the reimagination of the future.
When we “speak” the future as empty, we construct a new possibility for creating the future, rather than continuing the automatic process of projecting the past into the future.
Being and acting are always arising in a context, and that context is given by the constructions we have created in language for the past, the future, and what is here now.
If we take a chair, for example, a carpenter sees the material to work with and the time the creator put into the chair. A dancer sees a tool for expression, many moves to be done with the chair.
A founder looks at her company and sees a list of problems. Her investor sees an asset. Her best employee sees a place to grow.
Same chair. Same company. Different worlds.
The way the situation presents itself to them is shaped by their worldview (how reality presents itself to them) and their self-view/identity (how they present themselves to themselves).
And both world and self show up for us as linguistic phenomena. When they don’t, we are also not there to think of them, understand them, or interact with them. Only when language is present is there someone to interact with what is happening.
There is also the element of observation, meaning you might see someone interact with their business in a way you have not. Yet your seeing of what is actually happening will be shaped by the language you have for it, your idea of the world and yourself in that moment.
For example, if you see a peer raise prices and double their revenue, you might then think to yourself, “I could never do that,” which now again defines a you in language — a you that can’t do x or will never do x.
We project this into a future we construct in language into a world we construct in language.
As powerful as language is to help us navigate reality, as limited it also is to capture the vastness of it, the complexity of moments we reduce to a simple definition. This is a powerful way to reduce the amount of data we need to process to a minimum, yet by the same token, we can fall into the false belief that what we have constructed in language is, in fact, the totality of who we are, what the world is, and what is possible in the future.
When we start to see both the power and limit of language, and that almost everything we interact with we interact with through an interface of language, and that this interface of language shapes the thing, situation or self (self and other) we interact with or have as actor, we gain to have a corrective understanding — much as if we have isolated a thorn in our leg which has caused us pain. We can now see how we might construct a narrative that makes us suffer, limits our own capability by speaking and presenting ourselves in an incompetent way, or shapes how we speak to and about others.
Language is now seen as both a tool for distinction, description, and creation.
We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we speak and think it.
We don’t see ourselves as we are; we see ourselves as we have constructed a self in language.
The post you have not written. The conversation you are postponing…
None of them is a strategic problem...
They are conversations you have not created yet.