William Collins

From 2017-2019, I found myself going through a series of negative experiences that completely stripped my life of anything associated with my identity.  Almost every area of my life had been wiped clean, including what I thought was my strongest personal virtue, my faith.

I decided to treat the situation as if I were starting over again, fresh. There was little from my past that was worth hanging onto because I felt that I had flunked all of life’s tests and at age 63, my future looked very bleak indeed.

I thought to myself, “What if you gave yourself 25 years to transform your life?”

That means that it would take me to age 88 when I would be done, but then I thought:

What if I had a single focus for those next 25 years?

Rather than put together a long list of things I was going to accomplish by “doing“ something, I decided to focus instead on “being” something.

What I hit upon was the biggest reason why I think my life blew up and that was because I wasn’t telling myself who I really wanted to become.

What I realized much later was that I had been going through a major identity crisis that what I was doing was challenging myself to consider the age old question that everyone one of us have had to ask ourselves. “Who am I?”

With this one revelation, I decided that every day for the next 25 years, I would write down something that I thought would help me define who I was. But where could I start?

The only thing I could think of that made any sense was to go back to a book that I had read many times in my past called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I remembered that he was able to make it out of the concentration camps in Germany during WWII by learning how to reframe his future.

After rereading that book, I decided that this was going to be my pathway forward. I would find a way to live out of my Authentic Identity which I believed could be found between the things that stimulated me and how I responded to them.

My thought was that if I could find a way to inject an idea, concept or thought between the stimulus and response gap that it would help me affirm my Authentic Identity. I reasoned that over time, eventually I could become the person that I believe that I was created to be.

After more than 7 years of trying thousands of tiny experiments, I woke up one day and realized to my amazement that my entire life had shifted. I realized that the person that I was trying to be, had suddenly shown up.

With that experience behind me, I started to reverse engineer this process and then began to teach it to my family and friends who were curious enough to try applying a new mental model to their life.

To my surprise, it worked for them too! But the really good news? It didn’t take a major life challenge or 7 years for it to take effect.

In fact, this mental model worked almost instantly and it was something that could be used any time, for any reason to think through how to respond to the overwhelming stimulation that is in our culture today.  

What I discovered was that all that anyone really needed to make this work was just a simple framework and someone who could model how it worked in their life. If they had those two things then they could experience a reframing their future too!

This was how the Future Me Now was born!