For a long time, almost all my life, I lived elsewhere. Not here. Not now. Always one step ahead, anticipating what came next, wanting to be the one who sees it coming before the others. Ahead of her time, people said of me. I took it as a compliment. It was mostly an escape.

Then came a hard crash. A fall that gives no warning and no room to negotiate. Everything I had built by moving forward stopped at once, and I had to sit still. Really still. For the first time in my life.

I used the time to go back over my past, plainly, without telling myself stories. And it was from that detour, oddly enough, that my present was born. Now that I have rebuilt myself alone, it is the only place that still really counts.

The problem: why do we run so hard from the present moment?

You have surely seen it in a child: no thought for tomorrow. No comparing his place with anyone else’s. He simply enjoys being there, beside someone he loves.

With adults, it is often the reverse. Happiness gets postponed: when there is more, when the position is higher, when that goal is finally reached, the one that keeps moving back as you get closer.

The same reflex shows up inside companies. Managers who value only the final result. Teams that allow themselves a breath only “once everything is wrapped up”. Leaders who forget to mark the small daily wins, too busy looking further ahead.

You may know the feeling: chasing a horizon that moves every time you think you have reached it.

Aurélie, in Lausanne: the race that never stops

Aurélie leads a team of twelve in a company in the canton of Vaud. For ten years she has lived by one rule: anticipate before everyone else. She plans the next quarter before the previous one has been marked. Her people respect her, but no one ever sees her stop, or breathe.

One morning in Lausanne, she collapsed in the middle of a meeting. Nothing serious physically. But her body had just said stop, where her head had refused to listen for years. She came to see me a few weeks later, worn out from always living a step ahead of herself, unable to remember the last time she had simply enjoyed a moment without measuring it against the next.

Why this mechanism sets in

This mechanism is not a character flaw. It is a survival strategy that ended up becoming a prison.

Projecting forward gives the illusion of controlling what comes. Anticipation reassures; staying ahead of events gives a sense of command. The trouble is that the future is never truly under command. And by dint of living out in front of yourself, you end up not living at all.

That is exactly what happened to me. The crash forced me to slow down, then to look my past in the face. I had to understand where that constant need to be ahead of everything, and everyone, came from. And it was that return to my own history that brought me straight back to the present.

Epictetus wrote it long ago: some things are within our power, others are not. The future, by nature, escapes our grip. The past is already written. Only the present moment remains as ground where you can truly act, decide, stand straight. That simple truth guides me today: there is no arguing with what you have no hold on. It is time to see it, and to spend that energy differently, with discipline.

What the crash taught me, in the end, is that discipline is worth nothing without self-knowledge. You can hold a schedule, tick off objectives, move fast, without ever really knowing what drives you or what you actually need. Doing your best every day is not enough if you do not know who you are. That is why you have to take the time to know yourself, before wanting to discipline yourself. The two work together, or they do not work.

The Mental Sofa method: anchoring discipline in the present

The support does not aim to erase ambition, or to give up looking ahead. It aims to rebuild a discipline of the present: staying fully where you are, without losing the thread of what you are building.

This discipline rests on one central principle, which I share with everyone I support in Lausanne and across the canton of Vaud: real power lies neither in regret for the past nor in anticipation of the future, but in keeping your commitments, day after day, to yourself first. My method builds on that principle to help each person find a steady presence, even under pressure, and to know themselves better in order to hold over time.

Exercises: the daily anchoring ritual

Here is the simple ritual I suggest, to adapt to your own pace:

• Each morning, before anything outside asks for you, write down one single intention for the day, not ten.
• Set three pauses in the day, morning, midday, evening, to breathe deeply ten times, no screen, no goal.
• At the end of the day, list what was accomplished, however modest, rather than what is left to do.
• Choose one simple commitment to yourself this week, and note each evening whether you kept it.
• Once a week, give yourself time with no calendar, to observe rather than produce.
• In the evening, before sleep, name one thing lived today that will never exist anywhere else again.
• A team that marks its progress goes further, for longer, with less exhaustion.
• Someone recognised today gives their best tomorrow, naturally.
• A leader who is present creates energy that lasts, beyond the numbers alone.

Holding to the present is not giving up on the future: it is recognising that only the present truly belongs to us, and that personal discipline is exercised there, nowhere else. Real leadership is not only charting tomorrow’s route. It is knowing how to light today’s path, with steadiness and honesty towards yourself.

If you feel, like Aurélie in Lausanne, that you have been chasing a receding horizon for too long, book a first 15-minute conversation: one simple step, and already the present.