In the few days since President Biden passed the torch to Kamala Harris, I’ve realized that, until now, I’ve been operating from fear that Donald Trump might win the election and all of the horrible—but likely—stuff that might happen.

We would be overpowered by fascism. We would lose the possibility that America has stood for all these years. We would throw away what my Father gave his life to and what millions of other Americans died for. I had allowed the far right’s propaganda and narrative to dictate my moods and leave me either resigned or angry at feeling powerless. I had forgotten my mother’s wisdom.

My mother was a “Why worry?” kind of woman. Her fundamental approach to all problems was that everything has already worked out—or it hasn’t. I guess that was her version of “Que Sera Sera” (whatever will be, will be). Most of the time, I thought she was just being Pollyanna, but her approach has grown on me. Today it’s now a core principle in my role as a teacher of coaching and transformational leadership.

A central tenet of coaching is that the coach doesn’t go into a game to see who is going to win. They must come from the idea that the game is already won. This idea of “coming from where you want to go” (sometimes expressed as “standing in the future”) is what great leaders, artists, creators, athletes, and even great soldiers have learned: the key to accomplishment is the ability to relate to the future as if it’s already happened and have your actions and commitments be an expression of that commitment. While this doesn’t guarantee success, it always gives you insight into what’s needed next.

Coming from where you want to go also speaks to the fluidity of time. When you let go of resisting the way it is and trying to control or make the future happen, you also open space for something else to emerge, including whatever appears that is aligned with your intention and the context that is created when you stand in the future.

Personally, I’d rather be an inspired combatant playing 100% within a vision of victory than a morose, despondent, and gloomy player trying to not be killed. I’d like to maintain the attitude of Captain John Miller from the epic war film Saving Private Ryan that, while there may be tragic losses and sacrifices, the direction of the world is always positive. (The 1998 film followed a group of soldiers on a mission during WWII to locate Private James Francis Ryan in Normandy and bring him home to America.) The positive can always include the negative, but the negative cannot include the positive, except through some form of suppression and control. Perhaps this is why colonialism failed and why there are no examples of sustained autocracies in modern history.

Since the President’s announcement, I have recovered a calm and a sense of faith in our future that, while difficult to explain, is firmly grounded in a conviction that it has already turned out okay. I think, in retrospect, we’ll realize how close we came to losing everything that makes America what it is. This shift in my mood is not unique. I sense it everywhere. I can see it in the media’s pivot away from trying to hold the Red/Blue as a kind of horse race between two equivalent forces. I sense it in almost all the conversations around me. I see it on the faces of the young who are turning out in droves to volunteer for Harris. And, most of all, I sense it in my heart and in my mind as a peace that I didn’t have before this shift.

I am reminded of a conversation I had with the great American basketball coach Red Auerbach. His trademark was to always carry an unlit cigar during a game. He told me that, the moment he was clear that his team had either won it or lost the game, he would raise his head, chomp down on the cigar, and, from that moment on, he was playing the next game. I think that Joe Biden’s difficult but inspiring action to surrender, to own his own relationship with the future and also own America’s relationship with its future, was his declaration that the game he was playing is lost, and now it’s time to play a new game, a game we’ve already won.

Thank you, President Biden.

Reframing how we interpret and relate to what’s happening can free us from the endless mind chatter and coffee house opining that sucks our energy, turns us into spectators, and diminishes who we are and who we can be. My conversations changed the moment our President acknowledged what most Americans were thinking and feeling. He has allowed our love for and faith in America and American democracy to escape from a prison of fear.

This has released an avalanche of enthusiasm for the future. Yet enthusiasm does not guarantee a specific outcome. This is not a time for complacency or for taking our hands off the wheel.

I invite you and everyone to audit your conversations—about everything—over the next few weeks. I ask you to check your moods and pay attention to the quality of your relationships. In doing so, maybe make a note or two and see whether you observe any change in yourself.

I notice that I am giving much less attention and even less concern to what Trump is doing. I’m having more conversations for possibility. And I have expanded my horizon of conversations about non-political aspects of life and the future. Best of all, I am liking myself better.

I am, once again, in touch with the future as a possibility. I have a renewed respect for our Constitution and a rekindled faith and trust in our larger institutions. As Václav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, remarked, America’s constitutional democracy is the only system of government which includes the rules for how to change and evolve the system (to correct its flaws and be responsive to changing times) within its constitution.

Whatever happens next, let us not forget these words of President Lincoln from his 1862 address to Congress.

The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

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Originally published July 26, 2024 on Jim Selman’s Substack “At the Crossroads”