Every Future Is Imagined Twice

Can I ask you a question?

Do you remember lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day, looking up at the clouds and seeing shapes that nobody else could see? 

I can still remember lying there for what felt like hours. One cloud became a sailing ship. Another became a giant rabbit. A few moments later, the wind would quietly reshape them into a dragon, a mountain or something else entirely.

Looking back, I don’t think those moments were simply about passing the time. Perhaps they were some of our earliest lessons in imagination.

Long before we learned facts and formulas, before deadlines, responsibilities and expectations filled our days, we learned to see not only what was, but what could be. We imagined possibilities that existed nowhere except in our minds.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if those afternoons spent watching the clouds were preparing me for coaching long before I knew coaching existed. Coaching, after all, is helping another person see possibilities that have always been there but have not yet been named.

Then something changed.

As children, we happily coloured outside the lines. Somewhere along the way we learned to colour inside them. 

Life has a way of rewarding certainty. We become so accustomed to dealing with what is visible that we begin to distrust what has not yet appeared. Yet every meaningful future has always begun the same way.

Someone imagined it first.

On 19 September 1783, the future quietly lifted off from a field in France.

The Montgolfier brothers launched the world’s first hot air balloon carrying a sheep, a duck and a rooster. A few months later, they sent two human beings into the sky for the very first time in history.

Imagine what that must have felt like.

For thousands of years, humanity had accepted that flight belonged to the birds. Then, in a single afternoon, two brothers quietly challenged what everyone else believed to be impossible.

Yet not everyone celebrated.

When one of the balloons later drifted down into the French countryside, local villagers reportedly surrounded it with pitchforks and stones. Unable to explain what they were seeing, they believed it to be some kind of monster and tore it apart.

It is easy to smile at their reaction.

Until we realise how often we do exactly the same thing.

History is full of ideas that first looked impossible before they became ordinary. Flight. The telephone. Electric light. Landing on the moon. The internet. Every one of them existed first in someone’s imagination before they became part of everyday life.

Our brains are remarkable, but they are also prediction machines. They constantly use yesterday to make sense of today. Perhaps that is why genuinely new ideas often feel uncomfortable before they feel obvious. 

The unfamiliar quietly challenges the stories we have come to believe about what is possible. Little by little we begin to settle, not because possibility disappears, but because disappointment slowly teaches us to expect less.

I have seen this countless times in coaching.

A leader begins to imagine a healthier organisation. An entrepreneur sees an opportunity that others dismiss. Someone quietly senses that their life could look different from the one they are currently living.

For a while, the future exists only in one person’s mind.

That can be a lonely place.

Others cannot support what they cannot yet see. Sometimes they question it. Sometimes they dismiss it. Occasionally they become hostile towards it.

Perhaps they have carried dreams of their own that never came to pass. Perhaps disappointment has slowly convinced them that expecting less is safer than hoping for more. 

Mediocrity rarely begins with a lack of ability. More often, it begins with the gradual loss of imagination.

One of the central ideas I explore in The Imaginal Coach is that transformation begins in what I call the imaginal space. Before our lives change outwardly, something changes inwardly. Before a leader leads differently, before a family heals, before a community flourishes or an organisation is transformed, someone first imagines that another future is possible.

Looking back, the villagers were not really attacking a balloon.

They were attacking a future they could not yet imagine.

Perhaps that is worth remembering the next time someone struggles to understand the possibility that has been quietly growing within you. Resistance is not always evidence that you are wrong. Sometimes it is simply evidence that you are seeing tomorrow before others can.

When I look back over my own life, I realise that many of the most significant turning points began because someone imagined more in me than I could imagine for myself. A teacher. A mentor. A coach. They saw possibilities long before I was able to see them.

Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts we can offer another human being. Not simply to give advice or to provide answers. But to help another person see a future they cannot yet see for themselves.

As you head into the week ahead, perhaps spend a few moments with these questions.

• Where in my life have I quietly settled for what is instead of imagining what could be?
• Is there a possibility I have allowed disappointment to quietly bury?
• Who imagined more in me than I could see for myself?
• Who might need me to imagine more in them this week?

Because every meaningful future is lived twice: First in the imagination. Then in reality.