Future Self Letter: Your Transformation Tool

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Read the Transcript:

Future Self Letter: Your Transformation Tool

Hi there career women, women in healthcare and my male listeners as well, welcome to the eating habits for life podcast.

Today I want to talk to you about your future self and a very powerful tool that you can easily use that has so many benefits to assist you with changing your eating habits, losing weight in a sustainable way, and any other health goals.

And this actually works for any goals that you have for yourself, including career goals or just personal life goals.

So your future self is just you down the road. You in the future. So that can be three months in the future, six months in the future a year, five years, 20 years period it can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s in the future. It could even be tomorrow.

And then of course your current self is just you right now in this moment. With my clients, I do some work with current self and future self to assist them with transforming their eating habits and losing weight, and it’s both effective and so fun.

This is just something that you can do on your own and the lovely part, is that it is a minimal time investment, maybe 5 to 10 minutes, and has so many benefits, which I will share with you.

I’ll also share how exactly to use this tool, providing you the step-by-step.

All right, so this particular tool is writing a letter to your future self from your current self. Your future self letter is your transformation tool and you’ll see how with these amazing benefits.

Then I will guide you through a visualization exercise and give you steps for how to write your letter to your future self.

And by the way, I learned this tool from my coach, Natalie Bacon…I was in her life coaching program geared toward career women at the time, and she learned it from Brooke Castillo, master life coach.

So here are some of those awesome benefits.

Number one is clarity of your goals and desires. Because you’re visualizing your future self, it’s able to help you to see exactly what you want for yourself, so that it’s more tangible. If it’s more tangible, then it’s easier to then take action to achieve those things.

For example, you might say that you want to break bad eating habits to be healthier. Well what exactly does that mean for you? When you visualize your healthier future self, what specifically do you visualize?

You might visualize yourself feeling more energized, going to the doctor’s less often, not needing any medications, having healthier skin and hair and having a more toned body.

Benefit #2 is that it provides you a motivational boost. When you can see yourself in the future, say six months from now with all the things that you desire, feeling the way that you want to feel, thinking thoughts about yourself that you would love to think, this should make you feel really good.

Positive feelings that this creates, provides excellent motivation fuel. This will then help you to actually reach those goals and desires.

Benefit #3 is personal growth. This occurs because you’re going deeper. Meaning, trying to really access what it is you truly want and being honest as far as where you are now and where you want to be. This helps you to see what habits, behaviors, thoughts, etc that you really want to change. So, it’s really like a self-reflection kind of a benefit. And this really paves the way for personal growth.

Benefit #4 is that it helps you actually follow through on your intentions, because you are getting it out of your head and writing it down on paper almost like it’s a plan of action. And when our brain has some sort of plan of action, it’s more likely to follow through. Especially if you can get specific.

And then to go along with this, benefit #5 is accountability. Actually writing it down and being a little bit more clear on what it is you truly desire for yourself helps to keep you somewhat accountable to yourself.

By writing your future self letter, you’re telling yourself that you will be there in the future. You will have those results. And if you’re someone who intends to keep your promises, then this provides a lot of accountability.

To go along with this, benefit number six is increased self-discipline. If you are committed to creating those eating habit, weight loss, health goal results for yourself, then this can just enhance your self-discipline. Knowing that all of your actions now, even if you don’t feel like doing them in the moment, will help your future self.

And that’s really what the core of self-discipline is. Doing something that is better for your future, even if in the moment you feel the urge not to. It’s having your future self’s back no matter what.

And benefit #7 Of writing your future self letter is an incredibly useful one. It’s certainly not the last benefit, but just the last one that I’m going to talk about on the podcast today, and that is that it assists you with decision-making.

When you have that clear idea of your future self because you’ve written a letter to your future self, with any action going forward you can always ask, what would my future self do? This can really assist you with making a decision that will move you forward towards your future self, rather than keeping you in your current self.

And then after a while, you’ll just get used to asking yourself this and making decisions that are more aligned with your future self. It doesn’t mean that all the time your decisions are going to be aligned with your future self, but if more often than not they are aligned, then you’ll continue moving forward.

All right, now how to do it. So first you’re going to imagine your future self who has achieved her eating habit goals, weight loss goals, health goals, any goals associated with those.

And you can pick the time frame. Like I said, it could be three months from now, six months from now a year from now. I recommend six months from now.

That allows enough time to break bad eating habits, and really have the benefits of that. Plus, it’s not so far away that it’s not exciting.

So I feel like it’s a good balance of a time period where you can have so many results, but also it’s close enough that you can really feel the positive effects from thinking about it. So, it’s like in the future, but the not too distant future.

All right, so before you actually write your future self letter, you need to visualize your future self. You can even write down, which I highly recommend all of the details about your future self.

Here are some questions or prompts to help you.

How does your future self look? From head to toe. How does your future self feel? This is such a good one.

We all want to feel really good and oftentimes, maybe even arguably all the time, we set goals because we want to feel and anticipate we will feel a certain way when we reach them and maintain them.

What does your future self think about herself or himself? This is also a really big one, because how you think about yourself creates how you feel about yourself.

How does your future self think about food? How does your future self think walking into social situations with food? Or maybe even better how does your future self feel around food or walking into social situations with food?

What is your future self do meal time? How does your future self handle sweets? How often does your future self enjoy sweets?

What does your future self think about her or his body? What about other self-care habits like movement, sleep, hydration, emotional health?

How have relationships improved because your future self has changed their eating habits and feels differently about their body?

How has your future self’s workday changed as a result?

What are some of the positive impacts that being healthier has on your future future self, meaning like five years down the road, 10 years down the road, 30 years down the road?

So there are lots of different things that you can explore.

Now, for the part where you’re actually writing your future self letter.

Get comfy, put those notes that you jotted down about your future self in front of you to help you visualize.

Now you’re going to imagine that you are writing this letter to that person that you are going to be in six months or whatever time period you chose.

So you’re writing from your current self to your future self.

You’re going to tell your future self things like the challenges they overcame, the habits that they changed. How it might have been scary or felt like it would be impossible, but it really was not scary and not nearly as difficult as they thought.

Because that’s always the case. It always seems like it’s going to be worse than it really is. Or it may seem like the results you desire are impossible, but they’re really not.

You’re going to write some encouraging words, inspiring words. I actually recommend that you get as cheesy as possible with this. Because this will help to create a lot of motivation.

You’re going to also include the benefits that they’re now experiencing. Benefits that include how they now think about themselves, feel, and the physical benefits as well. All the benefits that you can think of.

This helps to show just how worth it it is to make these changes for yourself period to transform your eating habits. It helps you to actually make the changes that you’ve been needing to. The changes you’ve been intending to do. The change that you’ve been wanting to make.

After you’ve written your letter, I recommend reading it from top to bottom. And keep it in a place where you can read it regularly. This will help create inspiration, motivation, and really great fuel to assist you with taking the next steps to reach your goals. Whether that’s trying it on your own, or if you’ve tried it on your own already getting help.

And if you want to share your future self letter with someone, that can also increase accountability. You’re welcome to share it with me if you’d like. You can e-mail it to me here: https://katemjohnston.com/get-in-touch and I will read the whole thing. It’s 100% confidential, so I will not share it.

And if you are at the point where you feel like you need and want help with breaking bad eating habits, especially if you feel like you have at least 10 lbs you’d like to lose, I can help you. This is what I do every day.

So, if you feel like all of the things that your future self has, and all of the ways she thinks and feels about herself, food, her body, and all the positive impacts, is so valuable, then let’s do this. Book your free 60-minute consultation with me and we can talk about your specific struggles, your future self, and create a plan to get you there.

Book your free consultation right on my website https://katemjohnston.com/consult, or if you’re currently listening on a podcast listening app, just go down to the episode description and you’ll see the link there.

And, if you have your free consultation, and feel like the plan we create really resonates with you and wish to move forward with coaching, if you make that commitment and have our first actual session by the end of August, you will get some coaching for free. That’s my eight week confidence continuum transition program. We can talk more about that during the consult if you’d like.

All right, so start visualizing your future self and get out your pen and paper and write that to future self letter. Like I said, very minimal time investment for maximum benefits.

Thanks so much for listening, and please share this episode with a friend, family member, or colleague who you think would benefit from a future self letter as well.  Take care, and I’ll talk with you soon.