Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want, and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it.
Hi! What's up everybody? What is up, fam? I'm here for episode thirteen of Bloom Your Mind, and this episode is the second of a series about the future, about future thinking, or as my husband calls it, future tripping. So today we're going to build off of the content from episode twelve release last week. I'm going to tell you a story from this past week, and then I'll share some research about future thinking and how you can actually do it.
I'm going to give you an exercise you can do at the end. So last week I talked about how I injured my back because I haven't been doing my strength training. Because life has been happening y'all.
I talked about how, if I just think about this experience of having this back pain based on what's happening right now, based on how my back feels, how much pain I'm in, and what last year has been like, I might think, like, this is the beginning of the end. Maybe not that dramatic, but seriously, I could think about how I haven't had enough time this past year.
Life keeps coming up. It keeps happening. Like, there was thing after thing that kept me from practicing self-care. And maybe if I'm thinking from that perspective, maybe I'll start thinking I just need to settle into this time of life where I get injured a little bit more easily. Maybe I have to move more carefully because I have two kids that need a lot of things, a lot of support, and I have a business, and I don't have time to keep myself up to keep my strength training up and my self-care up.
Heck no! I don't want to think like that. I don't want to accept that I'm just going to get injured. Right? And if I think from the perspective of what I'm experiencing right now, I might just fade into that. So instead of looking at where I am now as my new reality and seeing the ways that I've been living that got me to this point, which will give me more and more of the same, I can think about this back injury from the perspective of my future self. A year from now on my birthday, maybe, who's like in the best health of my life, or the best health of the past twenty years, who has her strength and flexibility back, and who's also able to spend time with my kids. If I think from her perspective, then I can accept that this back injury is happening right now.
I can be where I am in this moment. And I can look from her perspective back and say, "oh yeah, that was what happened. That was my wake-up call. That was the moment where I actually realized that if I don't keep my strength up, I'm going to have to deal with some heinous stuff. Like injuries."
And if I think of it as my wake-up call, I am much more likely to start taking action. And then here's what actually happened. This. I exercised for a half hour at least every single day. And I'm on day eleven, y'all. That has not happened for a long time, that many consecutive days of working out or getting exercise. And it wasn't always pretty. Okay? Once I was in a hotel in Toronto and I used the stairway to get my exercise in one day.
I got to the bottom landing and there was a camera there and I was like, "is someone watching me?" On another day, my kids were off of school and the only way—I couldn't leave 'em in the house, they're too young—so the only way was to get exercise right there, while they were playing, in front of them and let them laugh at me.
I found a way every single day for the last eleven days. And I was looking back on it, realizing that, and I realized the only reason I did it was because I talked to you about it when I recorded that episode. And that caused me to do some thinking about how I might think about this back injury from my future self's perspective.
And when I did that, I got into action. So, here's what I want to say about this. Maybe that future self that I'm talking about is like slamming. She's got all her strength and flexibility back. She can maybe even run a half marathon. When I think about her myself, I'm going to be able to do a handstand and stick it, hold it for as long as I want, so that future self might be capable of all of those things.
But just because I'm thinking from her perspective, it doesn't mean I have to run a half marathon. Right? It just means that I can take one small step in her direction. So, I started by walking for thirty minutes every day, just walking. And then a couple days in, I started picking up the pace, and then a couple days more and I started jogging for part of it.
And when I say jog, my jog is like a trot, my trot, and I'm proud of it. I've got a slow pace. But then the last two days I ran the whole, right? I worked my way up and maybe I'll keep running the whole thing or trotting the whole thing. Maybe I'll walk parts of it. But my point is that our minds want to compare where we are right now against our future ideal and see how far we have to go.
But that is not helpful. What is helpful in imagining our future self is accepting where we are right now and taking one next step consistently toward that future goal. It is so much more productive to exercise consistently for thirty minutes every day, even twenty minutes or ten minutes every day, to take a walk than it is to go big and do a two or three-hour workout a couple of times, and then quit.
Consistent steps toward where we want to go is what it's all about. Progress is incremental and all we have to do is take one small next step. But envisioning the future and what our goal for the future is helps us know where to put that next step. Helps us place our foot right, helps us know which direction we want to walk in to get to where we want to go, and you know, envisioning the future.
It isn't all about rainbows and daisies. I'm not suggesting that you envision a future that is unrealistic or impossible for your mind to believe in. But I will say that when you stretch your goal a little bit, you start finding ways to reach 'em. The future's never a place where we've got it all figured out.
That's not the point in imagining the future. It's not a place where we never struggle with things. Our lives as human beings, messy humans, they're always going to be 50/50. 50 percent positive emotions and experiences and 50 percent negative feelings and experiences. And that's just what we want, right? Because that's the human experience.
We only know what the sun feels like on our face because of the contrast that we have with the rain. We only know what joy is because we also know sadness. That's humanity. So, we're not trying to get to perfection. We're not trying to be a perfect self or get to a place where we're happy all the time.
But when we envision what we want in the future and we make choices that match in the day-to-day start to take us in the direction of where we want to end up, we're living on purpose. Instead of letting life happen to us, we're living in line with our values. And the 50 percent that we're experiencing as hard? Is maybe more of what we want.
So, for instance, before I made some changes in my own life, my 50 percent of that negative emotion or negative experience or challenge that I was feeling most of the days was that I was working really long hours, and really long days, and asking a lot of my family, moving 'em back and forth to LA and not spending as much time with my kids as I wanted.
And they're at that young age where it feels sort of like I noticed myself feeling kind of panicky that I was missing these moments with these precious humans and with my husband. And I was also feeling this challenge of, like, working in spreadsheets all the time and working really long hours. And then I made these changes that I wanted to make over the course of the past year and a half in my life.
And now the challenges are how to spend super-quality time with my kids and also do all the things I want to in my work. How to get more exercise in, how to stay consistent with my content creation, and social media posts and email and program creation while serving all the clients that I have, because my client roster's full.
I don't know how many more space, but these are all problems I want to have. Right? So, what my point is here is that you will always have challenges that you're working through, but you get to choose what type of challenges those are, and setting goals to work toward in the future. Envisioning the future that you want to have creates momentum toward those wins, those delights, those high points, and also those challenges that are the challenges you want to be focused on instead of the ones you don't. Envisioning a future helps us get there. And there's lots of evidence to show how just envisioning the future benefits our brains. Here's how. Envisioning the future helps us to feel more agency, more choice, less depression, less anxiety, more hope, and it actually has us take more action.
Just envisioning; sitting to envision the future. So, there's a lot of research that shows that people who envision a future make better choices toward their health in the day-to-day. So they'll make choices to exercise more or drink less, or socially engage more, push themselves to, like, go out and be with their buddies, which makes sense, right?
Because if we're envisioning a future, our mind is more aware. We're playing the long game, so our mind will be more likely to make choices in the interest of that future self. So I'm going to share something really interesting about that in just a moment. But first, I want to share a caveat that my recommendation truly is to envision the future that you do want so that you can take steps toward it.
And here are four reasons why.
Number one, when you envision the future that you want in really strong detail and you have fun with the envisioning part of it (which I'll tell you more about later about how to do) here's what happens. Number one, you generate the feeling state that you want to experience in the future.
So, this is often called pre-feeling. There's a lot of research behind this, and actually a neurobiologist has this quote that says, "you can practice a feeling state until it becomes a neural trait." And the studies around this in neuroplasticity show how you're literally rewiring your brain to respond how you want to the things that you experience in the world.
But you're sort of like preloading it and you're training it so that when you actually experience something, your brain is much more likely to respond in the way that you want. The second reason is that you start becoming a behavioral and attitudinal match to the future that you want to become, right? So you're trying to behave like that person that you want to be, like exercising thirty minutes every day, for instance, hypothetically, of course.
And number three, what happens when you envision the future that you want, is your cognitive bias kicks in and it helps you recognize opportunities that match what you want. This is called opportunity direction. So you'll start matching the things you see in front of you, opportunities and possibilities, with that future you've envisioned. And you look to take actions that are in line with your deep values and with the things that you want to create and achieve in your life. So that's opportunity direction.
And then the last, the fourth reason is that it really helps with habit change. We talked about that a couple minutes ago, that just when you're practicing this future thinking, you are rewiring your response to the things that are habitual, whether that's habitual ways of feeling or habitual things that you do.
But you're doing that on a subconscious and a conscious level. So, here's the thing that the caveat is about. Research actually shows that imagining any future has really strong benefits. So, what I mean by that is in the book Imaginable, Jane McGonigal talks about something called Episodic Future Thinking, and she shares some research that she did.
She's a gamer and also a futurist. And when you put those two together, who knew? You come up with some really cool things. She predicted COVID, including when it would happen, what would happen, and how societally and individually we might respond. So, what she's showing here is that it is beneficial to imagine any future, whether that's a positive future or what she calls a shadow future.
She simulated this COVID prediction with a group of people and asked them in this shadow future how they might respond and what they might do. When COVID actually came around, it resulted in the people who had actually gone through that simulation being much better prepared, adaptable, and in general, just handling COVID better because they'd already walked through it in their mind.
What her research shows is that when we practice what she calls Episodic Future Thinking, when we imagine the future, whether it's positive or a shadow future, something challenging that happens in the future or more creative—and this is agreed upon, by the way, in all the fields, like design, thinking, psychology, futurist, athletes, business philosophy, everybody agrees that imagining the future engages more creativity in the brain, but it also makes us more hopeful.
Even if we're imagining a shadow future, it generates more hope in our brains because just taking our brains there, taking them into some possible future gives us more of a feeling of hope. An agency. We can think about how we might impact that future, either coming to be or not coming to be, and how we might actually take action within it if it does happen.
It also generates a lot of empathy. This one's really interesting. So McGonigal says that the best way to imagine the future is to project yourself ten years into the future. It's a good timeline to anchor our imagination on because it's far enough away that when we're imagining ourselves that far into the future, a decade in, we see ourselves in the third person. Wild.
So, when we're thinking about ourselves from that third person perspective, we're more logical, more reasonable. We're coming less from our ego and more from our reasoning mind. So, many reasons why spending time imagining the future, your future self, future possibilities is really good for our brains, and for creating the lives that we want, and for turning our ideas into real things because when we imagine that idea being out in the world, whether that's an optimistic view of ourselves in the future, with the idea out there, with the reality created that we want, or whether we're imagining some things that can go. We will be more hopeful, more creative, more happy, less anxious, and we'll be more prepared.
One other interesting thing from the research that McGonigal did in her book—and if you read the book, I'll put the link in the show notes, you actually can see the study that this is based on—But she says, if you want someone to imagine what a future event is like, ask them to imagine it happening in as much detail as possible.
She simulated this with a couple of groups, and the group that was asked to imagine the situation in a lot of detail rated the event as much more likely to happen than the group that had not imagined it in detail. So now let's extrapolate here. Let's think about this. If you imagine the future that you want in, great.
It becomes much more likely to happen in your mind. So, think about that. How do you act when you think that something is very likely to happen? For me, I stop resisting it. I stop calling it unrealistic. I start talking about it, and then I start noticing ways I can get there. I start taking action to make it happen.
I start noticing the things out in the world that match that future that's going to happen one way or another. I start exercising a little bit every day. All right, so I am now going to end this episode with an exercise that you can do to practice future tripping, to practice this Episodic Future Thinking to engage your brain in all of this juicy good stuff that we've been talking about last episode.
And this one. Now because I know that some of y'all are driving and I want to keep your bodies and your mind safe, I am not going to actually walk you through this, but here is my offer to you if you reach out to me through my Instagram DMs, or if you have my email, or text, or whatever information you have of mine and you want to ask me for this, I will send you this visualization recorded with my voice leading you through it so that you can just follow along.
But for now, on this podcast, I am just going to describe it. So, here's the exercise to practice future thinking.
You want to relax your body. So what you're going to do is you're going to close your eyes and picture the number 10 in your mind, and take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Breathing out for twice as long, and then let the number 10 fade out of your mind. As your body becomes really relaxed, then you're going to open your eyes, close your eyes, and do it again with the number nine. You're going to keep doing that all the way down to the number one. So, you're going to picture the number, then let it fade from your mind as you breathe in and out, and then open your eyes and close your eyes. When you get down to the number one, you're going to feel so relaxed. You're just going to notice how relaxed you feel. You're going to have been continuously relaxing yourself, counting down ten to one, and then you're going to picture a movie screen in your mind.
And visualize what you want to experience until you can actually feel the emotion of it. The more detail, the better. Visualize yourself on the movie screen 10 years from now, as you want to be. You can visualize yourself waking up in the morning and what you see around you, what you feel, what you hear.
We did a little bit of that in the last episode. Or you can visualize yourself actually doing something specific. That you want to be doing, running your own business, or having the family that you want, or in the body that you want to create in that time through your health practices, you can visualize whatever you want.
Just visualize yourself as you want to be. Spend some time doing that. Spend a few minutes doing that. Get into it. Enjoy it. Feel how good it feels, and then merge yourself with that movie that you're watching of the future. So, you're going to just float over and let you and the future you become one. And then just notice how good it feels to be you, just as you want to be.
And then when you're done, you'll feel yourself wanting to stretch and you can just open your eyes and smile. So do that every day. And as you do, watch yourself beginning to take one small step and then another, and then another toward that future that you want to create, that you and I are creating right now, together one week at a time.
We're taking that idea that you have for your future and we're making it real, but it's always just by taking the next small step. All right? Have fun with your future rehearsals, my friends. Text me if you want my visualization recording, and I will see you next week.
Thanks for hanging out with me, friends. If you like today's episode and you want more of them, please take two minutes right now to subscribe and give me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, then send this episode to a friend. See you next time.
