Don’t Let the Past Define Your Future

While reading the DUBAI FUTURE FOUNDATION The Global 50 2026, I stumbled upon a word I had never encountered before: psychobiography. The word literally stopped me in my tracks.

Psychobiography, the report explains, is a form of social science that uses detailed life stories to analyse how a person’s psychology, experiences and decisions shape who they become. What made it particularly interesting was that The Global 50 then took the concept beyond the individual and asked whether the psychobiography of cities could help us understand how past decisions shaped what they have become — and therefore help us make more intentional choices about what we want them to become in the future.[1]

Interesting, I thought. But what stopped me was a thought that came up. Isn’t that, in a way, what I did to myself? Not because I sat down one day and decided to conduct a psychobiography on myself. Far from it.

More than 25 years ago, I had reached a point in my life where the gourmet deli I had opened was failing — and I was failing along with it. I couldn’t see a way out any more and was advised to get help. I resisted at first. I had plenty of excuses why I didn’t need help. But eventually I picked up the phone and called the number I had been given. Looking back today, that phone call changed my life.

The help I received made me look at my past. It made me question the story I had come to tell myself about who I was and had become through it. At the time, I had come to believe I was good for nothing and with my business failing well I had proven it. Yet, when I was guided back through my life and experiences, another picture began to emerge. Something I had never seen in me. That there was like another person in me with potential I had never really given a chance. That person was born to be a therapist, a communicator but also a teacher, researcher and a traveller – someone who needed movement in his life. And there I was… imprisoned in a small shop selling charcuterie and cheese feeling out of my element.

What I didn’t know is that there is a word that comes remarkably close to describing part of what I was being guided through: autopsychobiography. The term is not something I invented either. Margaret Young, for example, described her 2008 paper A Handbook on Bears as an autopsychobiography — combining psychological theory and biography while examining part of her own life.[2] More recently, psychologist Liezille Jacobs has described autopsychobiography as a modified form of psychobiography in which the researcher analyses their own life by bringing together lived experience, psychological theory and social context.[3]

I still haven’t found who actually coined the word. But discovering that it existed fascinated me because, more than two decades ago, I had unknowingly been guided through something with a strong autopsychobiographical component. Before and this is the important part to establish what I wanted instead? Because understanding how I had become who I was wasn’t the place the help I received stopped.

The process I went through all those years ago eventually became the foundation of what I now call Futurizing Yourself and, with hindsight, I can see four distinct movements within it: Interspection, Retrospection, Introspection and Futurespection.

First, Interspection. Stop for a moment. Step back. Where am I? What is happening in my life and around me? What isn’t working any more? What has changed? What needs to change? What do I want instead?
Then, Retrospection. How did I get here? What experiences, choices, decisions and stories contributed to me becoming who I am today? Which parts served me — and which parts have brought me somewhere I no longer want to be? This is where I now see the connection with autopsychobiography most clearly. But you don’t look backwards simply to stay there, analyse yourself to death or blame your past for your present. You look backwards to gather information.

Then comes Introspection. What lies beneath the stories and circumstances? What potential has always been there? What really matters? What do I fundamentally need to flourish and thrive — and only then, what do I want? That order has become increasingly important to me: needs before wants. Because wants can change with circumstances. Needs sit deeper.

Over the years I began describing these deeper foundations as the DNA for Your Future — not DNA in the biological sense, but that which Does Not Alter, even though it can be expressed differently as life and the world around us change.

My potential as a therapist is a good example. It was there long before I became aware I had been born to be one. Today that potential is expressed through osteopathy, teaching, writing and the founder and instructor of The Reaset Approach. Tomorrow it may need to express itself differently again. The expression can change. The underlying potential doesn’t.

That matters enormously today because the future has become increasingly uncertain. We don’t know exactly what work will look like ten or twenty years from now. We don’t know what AI, biotechnology, robotics, or other emerging technologies will do to our daily lives. We don’t know which future scenario will unfold. So rather than first asking, ’ What future do I want?’, perhaps we need to establish something more fundamental: What potential do I have within that I can develop and need to flourish and thrive no matter what scenario unfolds? And, what do I want to be present in my future for it still to feel like a future worth waking up to?

And only then do we arrive at Futurespection — projecting ourselves forwards and creating a preferred future from that foundation. Ironically, this was also the part I resisted most when I was receiving help all those years ago. After helping me look differently at my past and uncover my potential, I was asked to imagine an ideal day ten years into the future. What? My business was failing. I had a zillion problems that needed solving now, and someone was asking me to sit there imagining an ideal day ten years from now? It seemed preposterous. But I did it. And, with hindsight, I can say that imagining a future I actually wanted to wake up to was exactly what I needed. It gave me something I had lost: direction.
Today I am the therapist I once couldn’t see in myself, with my own practice. I teach internationally, research, write and travel. In many ways I became what was latent in me and what, during that difficult period, someone helped me to see.
Which brings me back to that one unfamiliar word in The Global 50 2026. Psychobiography looks backwards to understand how someone became who they are. While, autopsychobiography turns that lens upon oneself. But perhaps the real opportunity is what we do with that information next.
Because the past has already happened. The question is whether we allow it to continue deciding our future — or whether we learn from it, establish what we truly need and want, and use that knowledge to give our future direction. Where am I now? How did I get here? What do I need — and what do I want instead? And what preferred future can I begin creating from here? Those four questions changed my life long before I had names for them.
Today I call the process Futurizing Yourself. And that process — including the story of how I stumbled into it rather than consciously inventing it — is at the heart of the completely revised and expanded second edition of Futurize Yourself: How to Flourish and Thrive in a Fast-Changing World, coming this September. Because the future is not something that simply has to happen to you. It is something you can give direction to and move towards — one step at a time — from, with and on purpose.
Be good to you, be good to y’our future.
Tom

References

1. Dubai Future Foundation. (2026). Future Opportunities Report: The Global 50. “Future Humanity — Psychobiography for the Future of Cities”, p. 49. The report defines psychobiography as using detailed life stories to examine how psychology, experiences and decisions shape who someone becomes and proposes extending the approach to cities to inform more intentional future development. https://www.dubaifuture.ae/the-global-50
2. Young, M. L. (2008). A Handbook on Bears. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(6), 999–1009. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800408321975. Young explicitly describes the article as an “autopsychobiography”, combining psychological theory and biography around a particular portion of a life rather than an entire life story.
3. Jacobs, L. J. (2024). Rocklands: On Becoming the First Generation of Black Psychologists in Post-Apartheid South Africa. African Minds; see also Jacobs, L. J. (2025). “Becoming The First Generation Of Black Psychologists In Post-Apartheid South Africa: An Autopsychobiography Of Decolonising Psychology.” Gender and Behaviour, 23(3). Jacobs describes autopsychobiography as a modified form of psychobiography in which the researcher analyses their own life through lived experience, psychological theory and socio-political history.
4. Meyers, T. (2026). Futurize Yourself: How to Flourish and Thrive in a Fast-Changing World. Revised and Expanded 2nd ed. The personal account underlying the article describes being advised to seek help during the failure of the gourmet deli, gaining a new perspective on the past, being coached to uncover latent potential, and subsequently being asked to imagine an ideal day ten years into the future.

Human-led. AI-assisted. The ideas, experiences and conclusions in this article are mine. ChatGPT supported the research, structuring, drafting and refinement of the text. The final content was reviewed and approved by me.