06 | Creating Your Future Self
06 | Creating Your Future Self
In this episode, I invite you to adventure forward in time and visualize your future self. Who you want to become will guide your decision making and focus on every action you take today.
In addition, I review common obstacles my clients face when discovering their future self. Together, we will tear down the walls of self doubt, guilt, and excuses. I know time is at a premium. How often do you talk yourself out of doing something because you think, “I don’t have enough time to do anything extra?” But I am here to remind you that there is ALWAYS time for change. Opening tiny bits of your schedule for purposeful self-reflection, visualization, and dreaming is crucial to your future self.
I encourage you to give yourself permission to dream. Think about what values you deem most meaningful in your life. Those principles will guide your journey to becoming the best version of your future self and embracing an organized life.
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Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing an Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer, and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy, and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast, we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household, and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.
Amelia: Welcome to Episode 6, Creating Your Future Self. When I was in middle school and then high school, I had two imagined pathways for my future. I was a high-achieving perfectionist student, and I was a dedicated ballet dancer outside of school. Year round I loved spending five days a week in the dance studio. Ballet, reading and writing nourished me. In my mind I was Misty Copeland before Misty Copeland existed. I imagined and practiced living into a career as a professional ballet dancer or in academia every day. Both seemed equally possible to me. For the first 21 years of my life, I didn't want to get married, and I certainly didn't want kids. I couldn't possibly imagine how they would fit into my future life.
I was what was then called a “tomboy.” But you know, now we just call a regular kid. I played outside in the dirt. I loved the woods and climbing trees and didn't spend much time playing “family” for pretend. As a teen, I actively chose not to babysit. Truth be told, I didn't change my first diaper until my oldest daughter was born. Don't tell anyone. In my heart. I imagine that I grow up to be either a ballerina, a lawyer, or a professor. No family needed. When I selected Wellesley as my college home, I made peace with not pursuing life as a ballerina. I dropped the idea of law as I fell deeper in love with studying and teaching. My future self was going to do something that involved reading, writing, and teaching.
On today's episode, we're going to do what I always recommend in an organizing or coaching scenario. We're going to start at the end, you and I will adventure to the future. You'll begin to formulate your future self and you'll see how important she is to the life you are living now. If living with intention or embracing an organized life sounds appealing to you, developing a relationship with your future self is a valuable exercise. It will help guide your decisions and focus for life today. And just to be clear, your age today is irrelevant. Your future self is as close as you want her to be.
So first, I'll expose a few of the most common obstacles you may face when starting this process. Then I'll offer a few reasons why the obstacles are absolute nonsense and how knowing and playing with the idea of your future self is a beautiful compliment to the lifestyle you're living now. And don't worry, I'll tie in organization too.
You are your future self. At age 10, you were the future self of you at age five. At age 50, you are the future self of the 10 year old you. You are always both your present self and your future self. At some point in your growth, the act of dreaming and living into the future version of you slowed. You've checked all the boxes by midlife and perhaps unchecked some of them too. Obligations like bills, children, driving and caring for aging parents and showing up for work dampened the creativity you used to freely experience. These obligations present themselves as obstacles to your personal passions or an uncluttered space.
Yet remember, your future self is still unwritten. Change is always possible and available for you to create. Having time to yourself to think clearly, to tackle a home organization project, to learn a new skill, those might seem impossible right now. The roles you inhabit as an employee, as a friend, as a daughter, as a mother, those keep you focused on the tasks and people directly in front of you. Fear often keeps us thinking only about the near term as well. Anything too far into the future can't be controlled and may be emotionally risky. Your inner voice may even throw out common refrains about you not having enough time or how needs come before wants, or it may even predict all the interruptions or distractions that will keep you from pursuing the future version of you, and you are more organized than you think. You can tap into your future self.
So let's jump all the way to the end of your life. What are a few of the values you want to be known for? Your values are what you determine important, separate from your family and your roles within your community - what you determine are most meaningful. I guarantee you have quite a few. A few examples of values include leadership, compassion, transparency, sustainability or flexibility. Identifying your values is a big picture activity. If I had to look back on the me that wanted to be a ballerina or a lawyer, I'd say my values then were discipline, self-expression and independence. Your values inform the organized life that you want to live. Your values guide your priorities. They help you understand in a big picture kind of way where your time and attention feel most suited.
A Pleasant Solution is guided by three values, and I'll discuss them in depth in a future episode. They are the courage to heal, generosity to self and others, and simplicity of time, space and being. Courage, healing, generosity and simplicity guide the long-term decisions I make in my business. Take a moment to think into your future. It's a blank canvas with infinite possibilities. What are a few of the values you want to be known for? Feel free to journal about them. Dump them out of your brain. Play with lots of different ones. You can search online for a list of values if that sparks your thinking. There's no right answer or right number of values to have. Remember, these are for your future self. They also show up right now in the ways that you move throughout your day-to-day, and you can change them.
If there's a value that pops out at you that sounds interesting and you'd like to cultivate a little further, take note of that too. You get to decide, and your future self would love to grow into it. Another step in creating your future self is allowing yourself to dream freely. Real life is happening all around you. So I recommended clients to carve out purposeful time to dream. This is essential if you're already starved for time. When you were young, your imagination had full reign to run wild. Your imagination is still inside of you. However, you may have to consciously decide to activate her. She's being drowned out by overworking, by social media, by alcohol or food, by the never ending to-do list and the general low lying hum of your brain that always seems to be noticing and anticipating the needs of the household and others.
Find a few minutes to invite your imagination to play. Drift off for a few minutes in the shower. Adopt the stereotypical habits of our male counterparts and stay in the bathroom for 5 or even 20 minutes longer than your typical routine. Let your mind float while you exercise. This is what I often do. Wake up a few minutes earlier, if you're a morning person. Put your phone down and meditate a few minutes earlier, if you're a night person, picture the things that you want and begin to take note of what feelings your mind goes after. And if you're a person who doesn't create images or pictures in your mind easily, try writing or speaking aloud your thoughts. For those of you who prefer more directed dreaming, select one area of your life to dream around at a time. Imagine your future self in your future home.
Don't be surprised when the noisy invader of a practicality pops up into the thread. Just allow the voice to drift through and return to the feelings you are seeking for your home. This exercise has nothing to do with the work that it takes to accomplish the task or to declutter your space. You are feeling, you are stretching yourself beyond the now. You're hearing the parts of you that haven't had much time or space to let themselves known. Think about the home you're drawn to create. Let it exist in one moment in the future, your final decade, or simply the one ahead of where you are today, and allow the magic to warm your heart.
So to recap, one of the initial steps towards creating your future self is identifying a few values that inform your life. These are the threads that will help you identify your priorities and will help see what truly matters outside of all the obligations and roles in your life. The next step is giving yourself permission to dream. Dreaming may take practice. The engine of your imagination will unlock and get going each time you allow it to do so. The third activity is living into the values you've identified and adopting the identity of your future self today. This is not an exact science, but a way of trying on who you want to become.
For example, I've been thinking about podcasting for at least a year. Many life coaches have podcasts. I had a blog. I started it after being in business for about eight months. Looking back, I had no idea when I started my blog that I'd start a podcast. I valued writing, communication, and connection. I had to first become a blogger to learn my voice, deepen my belief in myself and my ideas, and become consistent with my blogging before I became a podcaster. I lived into my values by showing up consistently every two weeks, then monthly. I actually was becoming a podcaster during that time I was blogging. I didn't know it. Podcasting floated into my subconscious and would pop up as an occasional idea here and there. I didn't speak the idea or the desire out loud until six months ago.
I had to practice seeing myself as a podcaster, visualizing the weekly routine, and building the fabric of my podcasting identity all before I even began to take action. This is why the ideas, the snippets of dreams, the nuggets that appear when you allow yourself to dream are important. Your future self is always forming. You can either passively allow her to form or you can actively shape her. You can actively shape her by trying on a future version of yourself now. Trust me, no one will know, your partner, your work colleagues, even if they're little babies, little infants. (I like to see those as work colleagues too when you're a stay-at-home mom.) Your family, anyone. They can't hear what's happening in your head. So if you currently view yourself as someone who's chronically late to appointments, you can choose to imagine the you whose always timely.
You don't have to take actions towards changing your routines. You can just play pretend. How does she get ready each day, this version of you? What's her mental and emotional mood like? What does she do differently when she has an appointment? How does the version of you who's timely, how does she schedule her day? Does she always remember to add buffer time in between activities and schedule time for the drive? Again, you are not rushing into altering your behavior. You're dreaming, and through dreaming, you can become her. It puts the element of possibility at the forefront of our minds, and this step is absolutely golden.
Our brains can't really tell the difference between reality and pretend. I had to pretend I was a podcaster before I became one. That's where I got the courage to get started. The same applies to getting a promotion or eating a tad bit healthier. When you give yourself permission to become the person who is your future self, you set magic in motion. This is part of the work I do with my clients. Creating your future self starts with giving your mind a bit of freedom, of setting aside the mental clutter just for a moment. This gives us a chance to want and desire change, new beliefs, new identities and new ways of being are called forth when you release the expectations of today for the benefit of your future self, it's lots of fun.
As you begin to do this work, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know how it goes. I'd love to share in the glimmer or just bit of sparkle that you see when you look ahead into your organized life. Talk to y'all soon.
Outro: Thanks so much for tuning into this week's episode. If you liked this episode and know of just one other person who’d get value from it too, I invite you to share it with them. I'd be more than grateful. I'd love to stay connected with you too. Make sure to follow this podcast to connect with me on Instagram at @apleasantsolution and join my community at www.apleasantsolution.com. Talk to y'all soon and remember, you’re more organized than you think.
