Your Future Self wants you to love yourself NOW

In his book, Authentic Success, Robert Holden describes what he calls The Manic Society, where we are all madly rushing about from one thing to the next, never slowing down to consider the purpose of our actions. We rush, we race, we chase, and we exhaust ourselves climbing the wrong mountains, because we have convinced ourselves that if we were to slow down for just one second, we would “fall behind”. Fall behind on what? That’s the question. And no-one knows the answer, because no-one has stopped to ask the question.

You have probably heard many times over the last few years that we live in a VUCA world – i.e., a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. VUCA describes the situation of constant, unpredictable change that “is now the norm in certain industries and areas of the business world. VUCA demands that you avoid traditional, outdated approaches to management and leadership, and day-to-day working.” To me, this in itself is not entirely accurate.

We have always lived in a world that is characterised by change and uncertainty. We as humans may have increased the speed at which change happens in technology, production, finance etc., and change and uncertainty are a given in life. We have never lived in a world that wasn’t changing.

In the film, Stutz, psychologist Phil Stutz shares that there are three undeniable facts of life, and that if we accept and understand these facts, we will approach our lives differently. Firstly, pain is a given. There is not a person on this planet who has not experienced their fair share of pain and struggle. Experiencing pain, struggle, and challenge, and having difficult emotions to work through, is part of the contract we have with life. If you are human, you will experience pain in your life.

Secondly, uncertainty is a fact of life. Even though we like to treat ourselves as Homo Prospectus – i.e., we want to anticipate and predict how things will unfold in the future – none of us truly know how things will unfold. None of us control the future, can predict, or know the future, or can say that we are certain how things will go. Part of being alive is not knowing, not having all the answers, not always being sure that things will work out. Living full-out, involves taking risks, trusting in life, and responding to uncertainty with a willingness to dare.

Thirdly, there is always work to do. And Stutz is not talking about physical labour. He is referring to the inner work of our own growth and evolution. We never reach a point of completion where we arrive, and we have everything figured out. What would be the point of still being here, if we already have it all figured out?

So, those people who try to convince you that they have it all figure out, are lying to you, or they are out of integrity with themselves, because no-one has it all figured out, no matter how successful they might appear on the outside.

I’ve sat with individuals who are highly successful out in the world. They run businesses, lead teams, create incredible things in the world, AND, they are still human. They still have their own inner struggles, self-doubts, fears, and frustrations. They still don’t know how to build sustainable and loving relationships, how to heal from past pain, how to reconnect with their children or their parents, how to commit themselves to rest, or their own wellbeing, how to forgive themselves for past mistakes, how to slow down, how to understand their own emotions and fears, how to speak vulnerably and share themselves authentically etc.

No-one has it all figured out, because what would be the fun in being alive if there is nothing to learn? Until the day you release your last breath, you will continue to evolve. You will continue to change. When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different to who we are now. In some instances, your past self might seem like a completely different person to you, and it may even be hard to relate to who you used to be. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. However, for some reason, when we look ahead to the future, somehow, we expect that we will stay the same as we are NOW. We assume that we will not change as much in the future as we have changed to get to this present moment.

In his TED Talk The psychology of your future self, Dan Gilbert speaks about this phenomenon. He shares that middle-aged people often look back on their teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

People seemed to be much better at recalling their former selves than at imagining how much they would change in the future.

Gilbert shares that at every stage of our lives, we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we will become and then when we become those people, we are not always thrilled with the decisions we made. He says young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rush to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain.

So, the question that fascinates him is why do we so often make decisions that our future selves end up regretting? Gilbert believes it’s because we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. On a practical level, the rate of change seems to slow over the human lifespan. We witness more changes in the first two to five years of a child’s life than we see as we get older. This has the effect of making it feel like our children change by the minute, and our parents seem to change by the year.

The question is, where is the magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Would you guess that it happens in your teenage years? In middle age? In old age? The answer might surprise you. For most people, that point in time is NOW – wherever now happens to be. What does that mean?

What this means is that we are all under the false illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. We seem to believe that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Change does slow down as we age, but not nearly as much as we think. We are poor predictors of how much we will change in the next ten years, despite also noticing how much we have changed in the previous ten years. We tend to think we will not change as much in the next ten years.

For those of you who have spent more than three decades on this planet, I want to invite you to do this exercise. Think back on who you were at age 18. What did you value? Who were your friends? What was most important to you then? Who were you at age 18?

And now consider who you were at age 28. What did you value? What was most important to you at age 28? Was it the same things that were important to you at age 18? What were you up to in life at age 28?

Now move forward in time to age 38. Who were you at age 38? What was most important to you? How did it differ from what was important at age 18 and age 28? Who were your friends? What were you up to in the world? And what if you are now age 48? How is this age different from who you were at ages 18, 28 and 38?

If you were to really slow it down, you will notice your own evolution. You will notice just how much you have changed in your short life span. You will notice how you are essentially a completely different person from your 18-year-old self.

This is significant, because it speaks to the truth of what Stutz shared – the learning never stops. An important piece of the puzzle of life, is that we are here to learn and grow and we never stop. Not even at age 78 or 88. Even if you are thinking you won’t change that much at those stages of life.

I’ve witnessed my parents and my parents-in-law transition from their fifties into their sixties and now into their seventies, and they are different people now. They are no longer the people they were in their fifties. And I’m not merely talking about physical signs of aging. Their thinking is different. The things they focus on are different. Their values have shifted.

What I’ve learnt from watching this evolution in our parents, is that even personalities change. We tend to think that personalities are fixed. They are not. Our personalities are fluid and change as we go through different experiences that stretch us out of our comfort zones.

The more open we are to change, the more we are willing to create ourselves, the more likely we are to experience a shift in our personalities. Other times, it’s subtle, but it’s still there. I’ve witnessed hardcore, aggressive people soften with age. I’ve witness gentle people become more confrontational or anxious. Our personalities shift and adapt to our experiences, even when we are not paying attention to it.

So, why does it matter that we have more awareness about how much we actually change, versus how much we think we will change? Gilbert reasons that it matters because it bedevils our decision-making in important ways. We tend to overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences, because we overestimate their stability over time.

Gilbert reasons that part of why this phenomenon is occurring is because we find it easier to remember than to imagine. Most of us have difficulty imagining just how much things will change and how much we will change. And then we mistakenly think that because it’s hard to imagine, it’s not likely to happen. So, despite living in a VUCA world, we seem to be ill-equipped to deal with it. We seem to dismiss our own possibilities for change.

Another thing I would like to point out here, is that this becomes even more frustrating when we leave it up to chance – when we allow life to determine where we will end up. This is why there is value in consciously creating our future, instead of just letting it happen. When we consciously CHOOSE who we want to become, we take some of our power over our own evolution back. We get to choose how we will evolve. And it starts with accepting that you will change, even if you don’t choose to. It’s part of the nature of being alive. You will change. Once you accept that, you can start taking more responsibility for HOW you will change.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished. This is why the statement, “you are both a masterpiece and a work in progress” has such power. In this moment, you are a masterpiece, because you are a culmination of every choice you’ve made up to now and every experience you have had over the last few decades of your life. And, you are still a work in progress, because you will continue to change until you die. You will continue to have experiences that you cannot even predict yet, and you will continue to change in terms of what you think, what you value, what you focus on, who you become. And that is true at every decade of your life.

The truth is that the person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, as temporary as all the people you have been. When you embrace that awareness, you can choose to love who you are now, knowing that you will not always be this version of yourself. And you can have some love and compassion for who you’ve been, because all those versions of you birthed this version of you. They had to be so that you could be here NOW. And your future self might not recognise who you are now. Would you want your future self to have some gratitude to you for who you are now and for all that it took to get here? Then start with having love and gratitude for yourself now, and compassion and forgiveness for your past self. Each version of you did the best they could with what they knew at the time.

References:

1. Gilbert, D. (2014). The psychology of your future self. TED2014. Available online at: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_psychology_of_your_future_self?language=en
2. Holden, R. (2011). Authentic Success: Essential Lessons and Practices from the World’s Leading Coaching Program on Success Intelligence. California: Hay House.
3. Seligman, M. E. P., Railton P., Baumeister, R. F. & Sripada, C. (2016). Homo Prospectus. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. Stutz. (2022). Directed by Jonah Hill.