If you apply the same thinking to your future that you employed to get you where you are today, will you be in trouble? In the words of The Next Generation’s Captain Picard, we face "the final frontier where no one has gone before" and that means you won’t be able to rely entirely on your own experience and knowledge to successfully navigate the future. You’ll need advice.

In North America, we are each headed toward a future full of choices: alternatives that were never as broadly available to past generations and new options, some of which do not even exist yet. This new world calls for confident decision making and clear strategic thinking, or Forward Thinking—neither of which are common skills. The third essential ability is recognizing good advice when you hear it. This skill can overcome or counterbalance deficiencies in the first two.

Too often people ricochet through life bouncing off adversity and opportunity in directions that hindsight labels as "good luck" or "bad luck." You may have accepted this "wait and see how it turns out" approach in the past, but do you want a hit or miss future? Time, not money, is the most valuable commodity, so a more strategic approach may be useful if you decide results matter every time from now on.

To find out if there’s room for improvement in thought processes and decision-making, try asking yourself a few probing questions like these:

• How many sure things have turned sour in spite of my investments of time and money?
• Have I chosen safe or well-trodden paths to follow even if it means compromising my dreams or ethics?
• Do I make commitments to myself and others based on how I hope things will turn out, and find myself continually disappointed?
• Have I consistently under-estimated or under-valued my abilities, skills or intelligence?

In short, how aware are you of your decision making and analytical skills? Do you understand which type of professional advice would best compliment your own abilities and augment your knowledge? With the growing abundance of choice in many areas of life, careers and business, characteristics like flexibility and resilience are, in some ways, more important, than money.

Investigate the wide range of professional advice and advisors available in your community and online. Invest time and effort learning how to identify knowledgeable, consistently-competent professional advisors from the pack of those after your money in any business, service or professional area. Become aware of your reaction to good news and bad, and to someone who disagrees with you so you can recognize good advice, even when you’d rather do something else.

Creating hopes, plans and strategies for the future based upon a continuation of status quo may limit your results. Why would you deliberately decide to do that?