Meeting Your Future Self: The Method

Meeting your future self is a familiar trope in science fiction stories featuring time machines. According to a scientific hypothesis, such a meeting but would result in the dissolution of yourself.

Thankfully, eschewing time travel, if you were to rely on your imagination to take you to your future self, the meeting could be beneficial. For one thing, you get advice from your future self regarding what you could do better to reach a better future, which pitfalls should you avoid to make your progress smoother?

Fantastic as the idea may seem, how could you actually do it?

Thankfully, Greg Giesen- a leadership coach, author and speaker has a visualization technique to help you do this. Head over to Giesen’s blog to read the technique in detail.

Here, we discuss the salient aspects of the technique and their significance.

Like concentric circles in a ripple, the movement towards future self is tranquil

Meeting your future self

Taking a leaf out of mindfulness practices, your are urged  to envision your body as a tranquil body of water. Into it are dropped pebbles, each of which creates a ripple effect which reverberates across the entire water body.

Each ripple to is a wave of tranquility that passes through yourself. Touching every part of your body, from the toes to the head, these waves instill a deep calmness in you, that transports you into a mental zone where you are completely relaxed.

Regular practitioners of mindfulness may know this relaxation technique to be useful. The beauty of the process is that it shows effect in a relatively short span of time- making it a great practise for after-work hours.

The next step involves imagining yourself to be in a forest with a cabin in it. You walk up to the cabin’s door where your future self waits to greet you. Yes, in this  visualization exercise- your future self lives in a cabin in the woods, how cool is that?

Once you settle down with your future self in a comfortable spot in the cabin, there are two key questions which you need to ask him or her.

Questions to ask your future self

The first question you ask your future self is what should you give the most attention to at this point in your life?

Suspending disbelief for the moment, you then listen closely to the answer your future self would have for this. The question, as you surely have noted is meant to help you improve your present actions. More precisely, it’s to help ensure that you are focusing on the right things in the present time.

We may be diligent at doing something, and we may have been performing the task for some time now. However, regardless of how earnest we have been in the task, we may not be seeing a pronounced improvement in our lives. We often find ourselves in this juncture: one which could lead to self-doubts.

The simple fact is that involved as we are in whatever actions we are performing, we may miss the forest for the woods and not see if our present area of endeavor is the most meaningful for our further progress. A detached point of view- especially one talking from the future perspective- would be invaluable in this context.

The second question involves an advice you seek from your future self. Knowing what the latter knows now, what’s the one piece of advice s/he would give you?

Once again, you listen closely to what s/he has to say, residing in the zone of tranquility set in the initial part of the exercise, not reaching for the answer, rather allowing it to come to you.

In the lap of nature awaits your future self...as per the envisioning method

Vision about the future in Temenos Vision Lab

The encounter with your future self and the answers you receive to your most significant questions contribute to self-improvement and in may cases, course- corrections.

That such simple techniques exist which allow you to access a font of knowledge that resides in yourself and which may otherwise remain out of bounds is a cause for celebration. More importantly, such techniques should be practised to benefit from them.

Incidentally, such mindfulness-driven practices form a prominent part of Temenos Vision Lab or TVL.

TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility which helps change agents discover their True Personal Vision and teams their Compelling Shared Vision. Keep in mind the fact that a future self is also a part of your vision about the years to come.

Pertaining to introspective mindfulness, particularly important is the Clean Slate- one of the more important sessions included in TVL.

By helping cleanse the change agent’s mind of negativities which hamper their growth, it helps them move on with more confidence and less mental baggage. You could learn more about the session here.