13. Achieve Any Goal by Becoming Your Future Self (Part 2)

I am Deidrea Kiesling and you’re listening to The Success Minded Woman, episode 13.

Today is the part two that we started last week on creating your future self and to achieve our goals. And this week we’re going to talk all about how to be your future self. And I want you to stay until the very end because I do have a special invitation for you and I hope that you will take me up on it. I really want to connect with you and hear all about your dreams and your vision for your future. And I mention this in the episode but I wanted to just say it again right here on the intro to do something today that your future self will thank you for. Keep in mind your future self and how you want to be her today.

Hi, I’m Deidrea, wife, and mom to three teenagers, coffee snob, and certified life and business coach. If you’re a high-achieving, goal-oriented woman and you know you were meant for more, then you are a success minded woman and you’re in the right place. I’m here to help you make the money and the impact you’ve been dreaming of, to step into your confidence, create habits and systems to support you, ditch that imposter syndrome, and harness the power of your mind. If you’re ready to create a life and business you love, then let’s go. I’m so glad you’re here.

Hello, welcome back. I am so excited to continue our conversation from last week where we talked about the concept of your future self and how all of our goal achievements starts with our identity of who we want to be in the future, our future self. And in today’s episode we’re going to take it to the next step which is really how to be your future self and why it’s so important. You become your future self by having a clear vision of who you want to be, the life you want to live. And then making 100% commitment to creating it. You come from your vision, not to it. And that is the part that’s missing from most goal setting approaches.

You start with the vision and then every step, every action is taking you closer to your vision or away from your vision. So you can ask yourself, would my future self be doing this? Would my future self be thinking this? How would my future self handle this situation? Interpret these results. Decide what next best action step to take. When we come from our vision, come from our future self, we can tap into the wisdom that our future self can give us because we have such a clear direction of where we’re going.

When you’re disconnected from that future self, it's easy to default to our old habits, our old ways of being and thinking and searching out quick hits of dopamine for immediate gratification and relief. So you must invest in your future self and the sooner you do that the faster you will create the future that you’re dreaming of. Investments is what you do today for the payoff in the future. And I like to tell my clients, “You can pay now with hard work, focus, healthy habits, discipline and action or you can pay later with your disappointment and regret.” Either way you pay.

So what is it costing you? Pay now, it's costing you discomfort in doing what you don't want to do, discomfort in taking action when you're scared and uncertain and full of doubt. Discomfort or worried about what people will think of you. Discomfort in putting your goals as a priority in your life, putting yourself as a priority in your life which sometimes is uncomfortable to readjust how you're living your day-to-day life. So pay now and that's what’s costing you. If you paid later, what is that costing you? You won't live the life you’ve been dreaming of.

You won't achieve the results that you’ve been dreaming of and that dream will never die. You might give up on it but it's always going to be there and so you're going to have this ping of regret and disappointment of unfulfilled dreams, of wondering what might have been. So I want to tell everyone and encourage everyone to pay now because not only are you doing what you know you need to do to get what you want but you're becoming who you want to be along the way. And one of the things that I absolutely love about this concept of creating your future self and then living into that vision that you have for yourself.

When you have a clear vision of the future you want, of who you want to be, it is easier to make the choices and decisions now so that today is an investment in your future. The more you are connected to who you want to be the easier it is to do the right thing, to avoid the temptation of the quick dopamine hit, of going on social media or eating something sweet or salty for enjoyment and distraction, when you don't want to do what you know you should do. What would your future self do? What would your future self regret?

I love, love, love this book that I just finished consuming like crazy. I’m going to just immediately reread it again, Be Your Future Self Now by Dr. Benjamin Hardy. And I highly recommend that you read this ASAP. He outlines beautifully the concept of your future self and how it is backed by science, of intentional transformation. If you want something different than what you have now you have to become someone different. And it starts with knowing who you want to be and why you want to be her.

In the beginning of the book, Dr. Hardy shares a quote from Viktor Frankl from his timeless classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and here is the quote. “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you’re about to act now. It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibility more than this maxim which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and second that the past may yet to be changed and amended.”

I have been carrying this book with me in my purse or in my car since my mom was in the hospital before she died. And yet I didn't really get this until reading Dr. Hardy’s book of how he applied this in his life. He asked himself, “How would my future self feel and what would they do in 20 years from me if the, for me, 70 something year old me would come back and live my life today for the rest of the day as if I was thinking about it from my future?” And let that sink in. How would you live your life today when you are looking back at it 20 years from now?

If you could step into your life today from your future, how do you want to remember today? How do you want to feel about this day that you're looking back on? You can create that now, which I love this concept of the future self when you’re envisioning how it would be to come back to your present as your future self. It actually makes you more present in your current self, in your current moment in time because you're so focused and connected on the memory that you're creating, the experience that you're creating, that you’re going to basically give to your future self?

So yesterday I took my son, Ross to an orthodontist appointment and we always schedule these at 8:00am so we can go there and then I can take him to school after. He always asks me to slow down, to take our time so that he can have less time at school on those days. And up until yesterday I would say, “No, we need to get back to school immediately so you miss as little as possible.” And having just read this book and remembered this story I noticed that I wanted to rush and get him back to school so I could get home and get back to work. I thought about how my future self would look back on this moment.

I actually remember sitting in the orthodontist’s office and thinking about my future self and how I would look back on this exact moment of sitting in the orthodontist’s office. And did I want to be distracted and thinking about all the tasks and duties of the day and rushing through this and getting him to school so I could get back to do what I had planned for the day? And then I just realized that even that, it was taking me away from the present moment. So I just sat there and thought about how I wanted to be present here waiting for my son at the orthodontist.

How amazing it is that we have this wonderful orthodontist in our community. How amazing and wonderful it is that my son is able to go into his appointment by himself. He’s 13 and I don't even go back with him anymore. How amazing it is that we have this beautiful day that we’re experiencing together, that I have this wonderful minivan that I love that I can drive him around, just everything was just so crystal clear and poignant as I was being so present and enjoying this moment with my son.

So while he was in his appointment and I was doing all this mental imagining, when he came out, I said, “Let’s go back to school.” But then I said, “Let's do this differently.” And I thought about how my future self would look back on this moment and if it could have just another appointment rushing through it to get back to school or I could do something different. I could make an investment for my future self who focuses on family above work and connects with my kids daily. What if my future self could go back in time 20 years and relive this experience?

And so we made a plan during the drive to the appointment. After the appointment we would go get some cards and a gift for his best friend's birthday party on Saturday. And normally I would have pushed that task off till later in the week and then been rushed to squeeze it in before the party. And then we’d get gas for the car and then we’d go get donuts and then we’d take the long way back to school. And focusing on my future self actually allowed me to be more present in the moment. Being who I want to be now is creating who I want to be in the future.

I kept that going most of the day and I was so productive and I really enjoyed my day, taking our time, doing a little sneaky thing together, being a little bit rebellious and not rushing back to school. I was so present in the moment and soaking it all up. So why do we make decisions our future self will regret? It’s because we’re not connected in the present moment. When we’re really connected to who we want to be we become that person now in the present moment. So I love this idea of thinking, will this decision that I'm making today, will my future self, thank me for it or will my future self, regret it?

We get caught up in the daily grind of life, dealing with urgent and not important tasks and our dreams for the future go unfulfilled. And becoming your future self. being heard now is, it’s in these little decisions, it’s in these little choices in the day, moment by moment and choosing how to respond to our life instead of reacting to it. Thinking about how we want to look back at this moment, how we want to relive this moment actually changes the moment that we’re in.

Knowing who we want to be and how we want to live our life with a clear vision and a strong connection, we begin to become our future self and it all starts with a vision. And the more detailed and specific you can be, the better. From my early childhood until I was 18 I dreamed of being a ballerina. I had a singular focus on that and everything I did in my life was about ballet. Everyone in my little hometown in Harlingen, Texas, knew I wanted to be a ballerina. I was in the paper a few times with my ballet pictures and recitals and other performances.

I read books, I watched anything about ballet. I read magazines about ballet. I had posters all over my bedroom walls with ballerinas. And most school days after school I went to ballet and usually on the weekends too. All my summers I spent at ballet camps except for one summer when my parents insisted that I go to a regular summer camp and have a regular summer. I dreamed of moving to New York City and being a ballerina in the American Ballet Theater. It's all I ever wanted to do. And I would watch videotapes of ballerinas dancing before I went to ballet.

I remembered this as I was preparing for this podcast, my favorite movie back then. It’s still one of my favorites. I actually probably want to go rewatch it again, called The Turning Point with Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine. The story is about these two old friends that became friends when they were in ballet together. Anne Bancroft’s character became a successful famous professional ballerina and Shirley MacLaine’s character whose name is Deedee which is so funny I didn't even realize that that was her name until I went to Google about The Turning Point. And that's my nickname and I didn’t even really connect that when I was all those years of watching that movie.

But, Deedee gave up her ballet career to become a wife and mother. So one woman lived in New York City, living this glamorous ballerina life. And the other lived in a small town in Oklahoma running a local dance studio. So they were really living separate lives and then their two worlds collide when Deedee’s teenage daughter who's been studying ballet under her, gets invited to come to New York City and do this summer program and audition to be in the professional company. And the movie is basically the course of that summer and what happens.

And all the times that I watched that movie I was so focused on the daughter and her experience of studying and training to audition and become into the professional ballet company. I really didn’t even pay attention to the stories of the older women and their whole story. But now as I’m older I realize that that was a whole other story about making decisions in your young life and the direction that that takes the rest of your life. But my point of telling you all this is that in the movie there’s so many amazing dance segments.

And I had that movie on a VHS back in the day and I would put that videotape in, in my parents' bedroom. I knew the time segments of where the dance scenes were. And I would go and watch those dance sequences, especially this one pas de deux from Don Quixote and I would watch that over and over. I mean I watched it so many times, I actually still, as I'm saying this podcast, I could probably do that whole pas de deux because it’s so just ingrained in my body. And even as I’m saying this, I can see that. I can see that. I can see her dancing. I can see her red tutu.

I can just envision all of it because I'd just immersed myself in that. And what I realize now what I was doing then is I was imprinting in my brain the vision of who I wanted to be. I was watching that video on that VHS and I was doing the steps. I was literally standing in front of the TV doing it as she was doing and really thinking and feeling like I was her. And I realize now that I was envisioning my future self and I was creating her through this very experiential habit of watching that video and doing the pas de deux by myself in my parents’ bedroom.

So I will talk about that in a later podcast about that whole, what now is called reprogramming your subconscious mind and basically imprinting in your body the experience that you want to have. Because we build our future self, we build those experiences with a visceral connection to the feelings that we want to have. And that’s what I want for you and that’s what starts with creating this future self, deciding who you want to be and then creating the life that you want to live. And it all starts first with deciding who you want to be, creating this vision of your future self.

And we are going to talk more and more about that, about how you actually do that, how you take that vision for yourself, for your life and become your future self. So we are going to get more into that over probably the next 20 episodes. We’re going to talk about more about creating that identity, about developing all the habits and systems and routines that you want for your future self, how to reprogram your subconscious mind. I’ve got lots of good things coming, so keep listening.

And so for today my action step for you is to really spend some time dreaming about your future self and start taking deliberate action to create that in your current life by being present, by showing up today as the person you want to be. And asking yourself, is this taking me towards my future self or away from my future self? And I'm just thinking about you so much and I just want to hear from you. I want to know what you're dreaming of, what your vision is. And I want to help support you in however I can. So I was thinking about that.

And what I came up with is that I want to offer you a free visioning call. Let's get together and dream together. Everything starts with your vision and your vision for your dream come true life. And I want to help you with that. Do you have the dream and vision for your life? Do you have a clear mental image of your future self? Do you need clarity on the next steps to make it happen? Have you ever talked to someone about your dream? Said it out loud to someone else? Let’s dream together. I want to hear all about your dream and help you get clarity on what you want and how to make it happen.

So I'm offering you this free visioning strategy call to help you get clarity that you need and to get into action. So go to my website, thedreamacademy.com/schedule to book this free versioning strategy call and let's dream together. We’ll spend a luxurious 45 minutes dreaming together and you will walk away with a clarity on your vision and your vision statement. Your first three action steps and your personal affirmation and mantra that you can use to inspire and motivate you and become your future self and create the vision of your life that you’ve been dreaming of.

So I want to connect with you and dream big and vision with you. So I really invite you and hope that you will take me up on this offer. And I just would love to connect. So thanks for listening and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

If you love what you’re learning here on the podcast and you want to start implementing these concepts into your daily life then you must get my free course where I will teach you how to get 10 hours back a week. Imagine what you could create with 10 more hours a week. So go to thedreamacademy.com/freecourse and learn about the magic wand of time. Thanks for listening. Bye.