Lessons from Future You

What if your future self already knows the way, and all you have to do is cultivate a relationship with her so she can guide the way?

In this episode, I’m sharing both soulful stories and practical tools to help you connect with future you—the woman you’re becoming on purpose. You’ll learn simple exercises (like “start, stop, continue” and end-of-day reflections) that can change how you show up today, plus hear how my own 70-year-old beach-granny self is guiding me right now.

Because here’s the truth: you can drift into the version of yourself life hands you, or you can choose to start becoming her today. Your future self already has lessons for you. Let’s listen in.

To book your own free coaching consult to take this work 10x deeper:

https://www.tamarcoaching.com/consult

Journaling Prompts:

1. Meet your older self:
   • Close your eyes and imagine yourself at 70 (or 92).
   • Ask her: What do you want me to start, stop, and continue doing?
2. One-year-from-now you:
   • Picture yourself one year from today.
   • Write down 3 things that version of you is so grateful you started now.
3. End-of-day self:
   • Tonight, when your head hits the pillow, how do you want to feel?
   • What choices today will get you there?
4. Future-you’s brainpower:
   • What is your future self not wasting mental energy on anymore?
   • What is she thinking about instead?
5. Dress rehearsal:
   • How does your future self walk into her day?
   • What does she wear, how does she carry herself—and how can you bring one of those details into today?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Hey, hey, friends. Welcome back to Brave Little Things. I'm so happy you're back here with us. I am, you know, currently sitting here in my bathing suit with my beach bag packed to the side, recording this podcast, because as soon as this is done, I'm heading to the beach to jump into the sea. Because the time of recording, my kids are in their second week of school. And my most favorite thing to do is to go and take a selfie of me at the beach swimming while they're at school in math class and send it to them while they're in school. I mean, listen, there are definitely some negatives about kids having phones, but the positives are that you get to completely tease them with what you get to do as an adult while they're in school. So that's what's happening next. Anyway, so I'll tell you a little, little, little thing here that we're going to be doing today, because we're gonna be doing some really cool future self work. Because here's the thing, my work, you know, my work, it's like half strategy, half soul, which actually, you know, it could be argued, I think that there's a lot of soul in strategy. But if I had to divide it into two different things, right, like strategy, and mindset soul. And And it's kind of like, you know, half faithful scheduling, like Google Calendar and everything, and then half all the woo-woo witchy goddess energy, right? It's a little bit of both. And if you're new here, maybe this is your first taste of my woo side. Or maybe you're like, oh, yeah, finally, someone's saying out loud my secrets, and I like it. Either way, I welcome it all. And we're going to get a little bit taste of it all today. So again, we're talking today about future self and our relationship with that guy or gal. And this is not some fluffy vision board idea kind of stuff. If anyone out there has, you know, created their own vision board, this is not this. This is a practice I use every day. My clients use every day. And it's one of the most powerful ways I know to change your business, your habits, your confidence, your joy, all the stuff. Because, you know, here's the deal. You're either going to drift Thank you so much. And just so you know, throughout the episode, I'm going to be sharing some really juicy questions and journaling prompts to help, you know, help you connect with your future self. But don't worry if you're walking or driving right now, you do not need to pull over and scribble notes. I've collected them all for you guys in the show notes so you can go back and really later and reflect. And I definitely encourage you guys to do that because, you know, it's really nice and really fun to listen to a good podcast. I know I do that all the time, all day But if you don't do the work of what we're talking about here, if you don't sit down and actually take the questions and reflect and process them and see how they apply to your life, then the real changes and shifts aren't going to happen. So I definitely encourage you guys to go to the show notes after the show, after the episode and go ahead and dig in. So You know, listen, I'm going to put a little background here because, you know, we got to know about our brains. Our brains love to use the past just to decide what's possible. I've never done this before, so I probably can't. Or last time I failed. So, you know, there's no evidence to see that I could even make this happen. Right. How many times have you said that to yourself? How many times maybe you it's probably not even conscious because you probably do it so often. Right. There are constantly like, well, I've never done this before, so I don't think I can do that like our brains just cannot like cannot use any of its energy to like try to stretch itself at all it's immediately like I've never done it so I don't think I could do it it's kind of like using last year's photo or like, you know, even 10 years ago's photo to determine what fashion style you're allowed to have now. Like, sure, it will feel easy for you because no decisions need to be made. You know, you just like see what's in the photograph and you go for it. But do you really want to be walking around in like acid wash jeans that are rolled up at the bottom your whole life? Do you guys remember that, by the way? Do you remember? I don't actually, I don't think I've ever worn But I definitely spent hours rolling up the bottom of my jeans. You know how you do it like that special, you know, not curve, but you know what I mean? I'm talking about guys. If you know, you know, it was terrible. I can't believe that they allowed us to do that. Anyways, so the bottom line is if you want to repeat the past, you can. Right. Just run on default. Just keep on doing everything that you're doing and that will work. But if there's any part of your life where you want something different, you've got to redirect your brain. You've got to do things differently. Not everything, not all the things, but some places in your life, some habits that you're doing and change them up, change how you're doing them in order to be able to make real changes. There's like a little simple thing. I remember when I was like trying to I was really wanting to like feel healthier, and feel fitter, feel stronger, all those kinds of things. And I remember just looking like, okay, the only thing I'm going to do right now is I'm going to take out pretzels for my diet. I'm a huge pretzel fan. I love myself a good salty pretzel. I had like my pregnancy, every single night before to bed for all four, I'd have a bowl of pretzels and a bowl of green apple. And that's what I had. And it was like a perfect combination. But anyways, when I was like, I really want to step up this game of this health game, you know, like I eat healthy, but then I like snack all this, you know, all these different things. So I took out pretzels for my diet and I cannot tell you, and it was not immediate, obviously, but like over, let's say two months, it was like such a significant change in my, how I felt, how I looked, all those kinds of things. So the change doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be everything, but it has to be something. And listen, that's tricky because, you know, the future, our future is a completely blank canvas, right? Our past is like, you know, if you're thinking about like a painting, right? And you're looking over to your past, you'll see the colors and the pictures and the images and all the kind of stuff. But if you take a look over, you know, you turn your head and look over to the future canvas, it's completely blank. And it's just the bottom line. It takes more creativity. It takes more faith. It takes more willingness, right? To figure out what do I want on that canvas? What do I want that painting to look like. And again, going back to our brains, our brains freaking hate that, right? It's like, what? I have to work for something? I'm out. That's literally what our brains are like. They're like, but I have to do anything. Our brains are literally like, I think about kind of like my, my youngest kid, especially like a couple years ago, like any, if you ask a guy to do anything, he's like, no, I'm out. And it's just like, that's how our brains work. It's job is to be efficient. to do things that are easy and to have immediate pleasure. And if those things can't exist, they're not in. So it takes more work for us to really kind of pull out our adult version of ourselves to decide what do we want to paint on that future canvas. So for many of us, we don't go to this place of like our future selves. For many of us, we kind of stay in this present, mostly creating our present from what's happening in our past. And that's how our human brains work. And so today's episode is really about helping us kind of start to cultivate this relationship with our future self, to start feel safer, to start to warm up to her or him so that we can start to really think about what do we want for our future. The question, I guess, really comes down to is how do we do this, right? Sounds easy, but how do we do this? There are actually a few ways you could play with it because there are many different future self versions of ourselves as we know, right? There's millions of them, just as there are a million different versions of our past self, the same thing for our future self. So, you know, we can go to like the long-term self. Maybe you go all the way to your 70-year-old self, right? Or 90-year-old self. And some great questions I like to ask her are, you know, hey, what should I start? What should I stop? What should I keep doing? These are great questions. You know, for me, my seven-year-old self, she'll say to me often, like, keep taking those afternoon naps. Keep putting your money in family adventures and getaways and family time. Keep carving out time in the morning for those quiet, sacred time just to yourself. Keep putting on face cream at night and sunscreen when you're at the beach, right? Keep getting up in the morning and moving your body. Keep initiating girls night out with song circles and dance parties. Keep calling your parents. But stop pretending you don't know what you want. Stop second guessing yourself. Stop taking other people's opinions seriously. Stop pretending or stop needing things to work out in a certain kind of way. Keep working on the art of surrendering. She has a lot to say about this, my future self. She's got lots of different creative advice. So that's the long-term self. But there's also the midterm self, right? Picture yourself one year or five years from now. Maybe your business has doubled or even tripled. Your kids are a little older. I like to literally say the ages out loud. If I'm talking about me one year from now or five years from now, I'll go through my age, what I would be, what my kids would be? It gives like a clearer picture, right? Would I be more grounded, more confident? What would she thank me for doing today, right? What would she thank you for doing today to make happen? And then there's obviously the immediate self, right? And this is a really good one. I really love this one because you can ask your end of the day self. How, like, you know, meaning, so you'd ask yourself this in the morning about your end of the day self. How do I want to feel tonight when my head hits the pillow? Grateful, proud, peaceful. And then what you want to do is once you know how you want to feel, then you kind of reverse engineer it back and say, okay, if I want to feel grateful, what do I need to be thinking today? What do I need to be doing today? And I kind of fill my days with that because, you know, listen, guys, I What's happening outside in our world does not determine how we feel, how we think and we feel. We do that. So we get to get up and decide, hey, how do I want to feel today? Oh, I want to feel proud. Okay, great. What do I want to be thinking if I want to feel pride or proud, no matter what is happening, right? I want to think I am doing the best job that I possibly could. I am such an asset. People like being around me, whatever it is. And then from there, all of your actions will pour forward. It's a really great little trick. And it doesn't have to be complicated. It just requires you to ask these questions. So let me give you a couple more tools and questions that I've borrowed from various different mentors and coaches and friends and I've adapted, which is, you know, one of my coach shared this about imagining her healthier future self. She was like on a, you know, really working on her health and getting stronger and all those kinds of things. And so she realized that healthy women don't spend brainpower up to about food, obsessing about any of that kind of stuff. And so that frees them up in their energy for creating more, connecting more, contributing more. And so I think that's a really great way to think about like, okay, this person that you're, this future you version of you, right? What is she doing and not doing? Right? I do this with my clients in the very beginning of our coaching. We really, we talk about kind of a, what I call a winning goal, winning result for them. Like who do they want to become along the way towards their goals. And then we'll put it into a frame of like, as a woman who... So for example, I have one client working on as a woman who... What was hers? As a woman who stays committed, even when it gets hard, she did it. And you get to fill in those answers. And then as you're going about your day and going about your week and your month and your year, you are thinking about that woman as a woman who does these things. This is what she believes. This is what she does. This is the fun things that she does. This is where she spends her money. And you're slowly start to become her, which is an amazing, amazing thing. You also can think about how does she dress, right? The physical details of what does she look like? How does she dress? What does your future, you know, CEO or boss self wear? Does she just like, you know, roll into work where, you know, wearing her pajamas, her slippers, her hair up in a bun, which by the way, bring it on. That is totally fine. But is that who, can you imagine? Is that what your future self is wearing? Maybe she is, maybe she's not, right? Or is she wearing like really like slick clothes, funky jewelry, you know, maybe some really cool red lipstick, you know, because she's now getting ready to host a workshop of over 200 people all over the world. Like, who is she? And how does she dress? How does she wear? Why does she hold herself? Because you can start doing that right now, actually. You know, I remember reading about an author who would like dress like her characters when she was writing the book. So that she could really get into character. This is the same idea, right? You are like getting into character of your future self. And you want to borrow her thoughts and her feelings, right? Instead of waiting for your future self to magically feel more confident or calm, right? We can ask, what is she thinking that I can practice thinking today? What emotions does she walk around with that I can start cultivating right now? We don't have to wait to become our future self to think and feel these things. We get to do it right now, which is so amazing and which is not only a fun thing to do, but it's actually the way you will get yourself to the finish line, quote unquote, because when you are, you know, feeling confident or feeling pride or feeling grateful, that helps you fuel you to take the actions that you need to take in order to have a booked out practice, sell all of your paintings, show up on Instagram with real, you All the kind of stuff, right? Because the real trap here is believing that once you hit the number, lose the weight, land the clients, then you'll feel different. But your future self feels that way because she's been practicing it all along, just as I was saying, right? Let me just like circle back actually to my seven-year-old self for a moment because she's really fun. And I think that helping describe her to you guys might actually help also get your like juices going of like imagining what your future self could be. She was very vivid in my mind. I think about who I'm going to be at 70 years old very often. I don't know why 70. It just kind of came to me maybe because my own parents are around that age. And it just feels like it just feels like not too far away, but far away, you know, like I can already see her and I can hear her. And I imagine her being a woman of the sea, a woman of the sea, spending her days taking long beach walks. going for even longer swims and meeting up with her other beach tribe grannies, you know, for midday lunch of feta cheese and pesto sandwiches on my fresh sourdough bread that I just took out of the oven with big mugs of lemongrass tea and some fierce games of spike ball and stop boarding, you know, on the beach. I mean, yes, guys, I'm like so specific. I can feel her like I can't wait to be here because I want to hang out with her like This is the kind of image I have in my mind. I see her as like, you know, very tan, very free, very like just very loved. She's got a lot of love. She's giving out a lot of love. She's, you know, proudly walking around bikini sharing her stretch marks and her roles and her love for life, like really with like no care in the world. I see her going back and forth between enjoying the simple things in life and then also flying all over the world. Thank you so much for joining us. out with my beach grannies like already, you know, like I'm heading there. So, you know, we must know about shedding old identities and becoming a new is that doesn't happen overnight. I don't go to sleep as someone who can't safely swim to the deep end and wake up as an Olympic swimmer, right? That transformation takes commitment, dedication, right? I have to go to sleep early, no matter if some amazing neighborhood party is happening in my backyard I have to wake up early. I have to pack a bag filled with change of clothes and endless energy snacks for pre and post swim. To force myself into a cold pool, you know, at 5 a.m. Put all my effort into swimming laps, no matter how much I'm not in the mood. And then get up early the next day to do it all over again. I actually did all this, by the way, guys. I was in swim team when I was like, I don't know, eight years old or whatever. That actually all brought back major memories. And I have to say that is a damn good metaphor. actually, of what I'm talking about. Well done me. But yeah, like it takes a lot of work and a lot of, like I mentioned, stretching our brain to do this kind of work, to think about this person, to take action even before we are them yet. But it's all incredibly important because we must plan for this kind of transformation. Most folks I know throw up their hands in the air, leave it up to God or the aging club fairies or whoever will take the responsibilities But if we really want to get what we want in the end, you guys, we must know what we want. And we must take small incremental steps towards it daily, right? They just mean small things. So, you know, for example, let me give you an example of me and what I'm doing, kind of how I'm moving towards 70-year-old self, my 70-year-old future self, right? Present me spends time on the beach weekly. I take walks. I go for swims year round. Doesn't matter, summer, fall, winter, spring. spring, fall, whatever, wherever the order goes, I'm just swimming all the time, right? Going swimming all the time, speaking to random strangers who equally have cool beach stories to share with me as I walk, you know, walk down the beach, watching like real 70 year old and 80 year old women stroll back and forth endlessly. I don't stalk them per se, but I do smile to myself every time I pass them on the sandy path because it just feels like this very sweet connection. Like I've been walking these beaches with these women already for a few years now and it feels like so sweet. I also spend significant time becoming this relaxed woman who has a deep connection with myself by waking up at least an hour before my house wakes up like internal. I have some outdoor time and movement time is really important to me. And I nurture myself before I go and nurture anyone else in my life or my kids or my clients. I take care of me first. And I will tell you that I was not always this. This was not my reality for so, so long. I really lost myself. And when I started to practice this, I slowly day by day was coming closer back to myself. I became her, right? So she is now my future me of my past me, right? So I can like already see that. I also, as you all know, probably by now I nap daily, right? My kids, my clients know, everybody knows at 2.30, between 2.30 and 3, I'm flexible. I'm mapping. So like I'm making like a grand gesture to myself that I matter and slowing down matters. I also decide in advance that I do not want to be remembered as a woman who always puts life joys second to her to-do list. I don't want to be that woman. And I don't want my children to see me as that woman. I want to be remembered as that woman who always puts life's joys first. I do not want to be remembered as a woman Thank you so much. of becoming her, the more I get clarity in how to become her. And that's how I do the dance towards becoming the woman I wish to be and not the woman I guess I'll be. Is that who I'm going to be? I guess so. We have to be intentional about it. So guys, this is your invitation, right? This is your invitation to pick one version of your future self. It could be your seven-year-old sage self, right? Your holy, sacred, wise, elder self. Right? Your one year from now boss self. Maybe that's who you want to connect to. Or just the woman you'll be at 9 p.m. tonight. Right? Maybe that's a beautiful place to start. Who do we want to be at the end of the day just today? And we want to ask her, what do you want me to start? What do you want me to stop? And what do you want me to continue? Because we either drift into a version of ourselves, right? Or we become her on purpose. Like I said from the very beginning, I'm not about the drifting. I'm not about who I'm just at the end of the day, at the end of my life. That's just who I am. I want to be intentional about who I become because I want to stay in it. So if you want help, closing that gap, helping plant those breadcrumbs and following them into your next chapter. This is exactly, guys, what I do. This is what a coach is for. And I have a free coaching consult. It is totally no strings attached whatsoever. It is a very meaningful conversation. I've many people have walked away really feeling like that was life changing that one hour in itself. And we'll talk through where you are now, where you want to go and how to start becoming That link will also be in the show notes as well. And remember those journaling prompts I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, they're waiting for you in the show notes as well. So when you are ready to grab a notebook and actually do this work, go check them out. And that's really guys where the magic is going to happen for you. Listening to the podcast is a really fun thing. Getting the guidance is amazing. Hanging out with me the best, but doing the work and really like making it a personal, intimate experience for yourself. All right, my loves, that is it for today. Continue to go on and be brave, be kind, allow your future you to be your present you's dream come true. You've got this. Love you all and I will see you next week.