Lately I’ve been enjoying reading business books, especially ones that focus on women. I found The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. They’ve been telling me about how women can gain more confidence.

All of these books bring up the sad fact that there are woefully few women in the executive leadership positions of business. What is going on with that? Why is that the case?

And they said, “The past is prologue.”

That stuck home.

Prologue tells you what is going to happen. Prologue sets the stage for the story you are about to experience.

There is very little that is new. We have seen these stories before and we know what part we are to play in it.

They were talking about how the past forms our expectations of what we see in the present, and what we can expect in the future.

So if there is nobody like me in that place, then I will assume that there will continue to be nobody like me–certainly not ME myself–in those corner offices.

So I won’t even try. I’ll look elsewhere.

What has happened in the past sets our expectations.

My expectations won’t even need to be adjusted; because they never thought anything more was possible.

But it is possible the past in a different way. A way that would allow us to see the present and future in a different way.

As the investors like to say “Past performance is not an indicator of future results.”

One thing that is constant is change, so it is possible, even likely that the way things have been could change to something different.

That phrase was actually a phrase Shakespeare put it into the Tempest.
“what’s past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.”

Which fits. The past is the story that came before, but what’s to come is in our control. We get to discharge it.

Our pasts are the events that came before, but we can make whatever we want out of the future.