The future doesn’t exist. We create it in our minds.
Have you ever stepped onto a stopped moving staircase? – If so, you will have felt your body lurch as the forward movement your brain predicted, didn’t happen.
Our brains work as prediction devices – what we see, hear and feel are actually what we predict in our sensory systems. When a prediction is wrong – on the non-moving staircase, for example – the prefrontal cortex of our brains has to rush to the scene to deal with the unforeseen, the unpredicted. If you have ever witnessed an accident, or maybe even been in one, you will probably remember it very clearly, perhaps in a slowed-down, probably vivid scene, saturated either with strong emotion, with a sense of unreality, or both
This is because your brain found that its predictions of the future were wrong and so had to bring in the brain’s emergency services – and high-level management – to deal with this un-envisaged future. Included in the emergency services were a spray of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline throughout your brain. This acts as an amplifier of current sensory experiences and a memory superglue. It also temporarily switches your brain out of prediction mode and brings all of that most precious of our mental resources – attention – to bear on this unforeseen event.
This is why your senses were so heightened and your memory so vivid.
Now here is the challenging news: prediction is becoming progressively harder for us human beings because of rapid technological, socio-political, economic and climate change. This change is not only super-fast, but is speeding up exponentially – change is becoming changier.
Millions of people around the world can no longer predict the future of their profession or company because of the sudden, dizzying emergence, of usable AI systems, for example.
And not being able to predict, makes us anxious.
Confidence is the substance that creates the future …. but anxiety is its greatest enemy.
How do we square this apparent conundrum?
When Saint Brendan set off in his little open curragh boat across the Atlantic to discover America, a thousand years before Columbus, he could predict nothing, except for the possibility that he might fall off the edge of horizon into an abyss.
The same is true for all explorers – they step out into a world where little can be predicted, and hence they are brought face to face with the reality that the future doesn’t actually exist – until we create it in our minds.
In a sense we are all explorers now, heading into a future that we have to create as we go. We are all, like the Persian-Afghanistani poet Rumi, finding out that the road only appears with the first step.
So, how do explorers do it, without succumbing to the paralysis of anxiety? The answer is, confidence. Confidence builds that mental bridge to the future and makes roads appear that otherwise would be invisible to us.
The Leadership High work with leaders and teams to build trust by making confidence a habit.
Professor Ian Robertson is the Academic Partner at The Leadership High, Neuroscientist and author of the book How Confidence Works.
