“Stop future faking,” Dr. Ramani.  Future faking is the act of promising something in the future for an action now and not following through on that promise.  The example of this is, “I will never do x again if you can help me with y now” or “If you stay, I will do this in x amount of time” and then it never happens.  Dr. Ramani uses this in the context of relationships, and how some people do this in order to keep others around.  I immediately saw how we do this to ourselves.  How often do we keep kicking the can or moving the goal post on a goal we have?  Like, I’m going to wake up early and start working out but then we feel exhausted and we sleep instead.  Now look, I know there are some people who go hard core and no matter what happens—anything at all—they will force themselves to go through with it.  There is 100% a time and place for that and there is value in it; if you stayed up late watching movies the night before, get your ass up, that’s your fault.  But I’m a realist:  There is also a time and place to stop pushing. If you’re sick, if you’re not seeing results and you need to pivot—there is no point in pushing forward because you will not get anywhere—you’ll end up doing circles or doing more damage and pushing yourself further back than if you had just taken the rest.

Yes, a lot of this comes down to accountability, but it also comes down to consistency and honoring who we are.  Beyond honoring, we must know ourselves well enough to call out when we are lying to ourselves and then do something about it.  When we aren’t being who we really are, a lot of things happen.  We start listening to what other people say about us and we start believing it, we lose authenticity because we aren’t adhering to what we know we need to do/the core of who we are, we lose hope because we aren’t seeing the results we want, we find it easier and less painful to try and convince ourselves to believe we can do something later.  But if we are honest with ourselves, we honor ourselves. When we do what we say we will and stick to our values and principles and those steps we have to take to follow through are crystal clear.  We see results when we take action toward it, not when we think about it or listen to other’s opinions on it.

Above all, as painful as the realization may be, we can’t allow ourselves to believe we have all the time in the world.  Now, this isn’t to be morbid and suggest we are all going to die tomorrow, but the truth is we do get a step closer to that end every day.  When things work in divine timing and we are in flow, there is a point where time ceases to exist and we simply are.  But when we kick the can, we are delaying the moment we dive in and learn to swim.  Over the last few days we’ve talked about discovery and not allowing others to drown us in their ideas of who we are and this is a key principle in that: all we have is now so there is no point wasting time trying to convince people of who we are or letting them tell us who we are.  We simply need to be who we are and seize the opportunities that cross our paths.  The universe is a funny thing and if we say we want something we need to have open arms to receive it.  We can’t dismiss it when it comes and hope that it comes around again.  Take accountability for our lives and make the decision to live in this moment, to respond to what we need now, to create now, to love now, to allow joy to flow through us now.  We don’t need to postpone our lives now in the hope that we can start living tomorrow.  What if we don’t have tomorrow?  Yes, the future will be there but sometimes we don’t know what it will be.  Sometimes it needs us to decide our present so we can see what we get tomorrow.