E26: Your Future Self

Listen to the episode here: E26: Your Future Self - https://apple.co/41lQpdm

Hey there, it's Dr. Tiffany. I wanna welcome you to episode 26 of the podcast, Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. And I hope this mini update finds you doing well. I'm really hoping that you had a really connected and loving holiday experience over Thanksgiving and that you are in full swing here with all the December antics.

This podcast is your future self. So in the last few podcasts, I've talked a little bit about just intensive work with people and we explored the critic and we explored people pleasing. And I've been pleased that that has come up a lot more in conversation and appointments with people. So I'm glad y'all are listening and learning. And I wanna talk about the future self.

Now, let me give a little background or a foundation here for this. Ever since I started treating ADHD symptoms, ADHD fallout, navigating ADHD, the experience of living with Neurodivergency, being married to Neurodivergency, all of those things. ADHD.

Now a UDHD or I can't even say it, OUHD, OUHD, and really just, you know, my whole career here of dropping more into the neurological understanding that brain, body, mind were so important. Every since then, learning from Dr. Russell Barkley and from Ned Halliwell and Dr. Amen, you know, the greats of ADHD research.

I have always talked about giving a gift to your future self. And it was something I got from the willpower research that came out of Stanford. I was actually teaching on willpower for a while back in like 2018, 2019. And as I was kind of connecting that to the work of clients with ADHD,

I realized that there was this really big disconnect between the present self and the future self. And a lot of times when people would struggle with drive and motivation and reaching their goals and they would say things like, you know, Tiffany, Dr. Tiffany, I'm not manifesting. I'm not accomplishing. I'm always starting and stopping because this will be something that happens a lot in ADHD. I started to teach about...this idea of falling in love with your future self. Having a relationship with your future self. Not expecting that person in the future to be some superhuman that has it all figured out when you didn't set that individual up for success. Because that's what typically happens. People have some sort of, I don't know, fantasy about who their future self will be and that that future self will have saved all the money, invested all the money, overcome all the emotional challenges and blocks and lost the weight and changed the diet and gotten healthy. And that present self doesn't have to be different to set that person up for success. When actually nothing could be further from the truth. Okay? You have to work.

in the current moment to set that future self up for success. You have to think of giving him or her a gift. And so the future self intensive is really just working with the parts that kind of get in the way and also cultivating a vision of that future self, getting over the reactive narrative that you might have about your past that gets in the way of your future creating just an environment for success for that future self and getting out of, I don't know, like myopic perspectives, myopic decisions, and getting into more expansive, bigger choices and decisions to set your future self up. And really playing big instead of small, right?

Being have more courage. And when I say these kinds of things, people will often want to go with the safe, predictable path that they know that's in their current, I don't know, arena or I guess playing field and shrink. They won't want to be audacious and expand and do the thing that's gonna allow the future self to be. Who they envision, right? So a lot of the kinds of things that we are talking about are shifting a perspective in the current moment in small and big ways to allow for the future self to have all the things that you want. And then the other idea here around kind of getting that future self.

Set up and I'm talking to you about this in this episode as we start to look at 2025 and we're reflecting on 2024. I'm going to take a sip of water.

Is to just kind of do things a little differently than maybe you would have in the past, right? So there's often times this time of year as we get to the end of December, early January, New Year's resolutions. And what I would offer instead is a vision, a vision of who you see yourself as something that you can almost feel in your bones and you can embody instead of setting a bunch of future resolutions and running the risk of failing after three to four weeks of attempting that and being sharp and focused, picking maybe three things to deeply focus on over the next six months.

Nine months to a year. And that looking like, you know, if you wanna have increased faith or you want to invest more money or if you want to focus on your health or you want to improve your relationship with your spouse or your child or you want to travel more, you pick three things instead of five or 10 things because it's too many things otherwise, and you deeply commit to those, and you do some work around seeing what would that version of you need to do, to think, to feel, to be, and operate from this perspective of that version of you is going to be different than the current version of you. It is an iteration of you. And I want you to pause in this moment, I want you to think back.

Look at you this time last year. Same person, obviously, but think about all the things that are different in your perspective, in your emotions, in your spending, in your health. Same but different. Go back five years. Whew, life is so different, right? My life is so different right now than it was.

In mid 2020. I mean dramatically different than mid 2020. So many things are so different. And I as my current self know that my past self did not imagine I would be who I am right now. This is not who she was envisioning. And I won't waste your time going into all of those experiences, but she had a lot of hope.

But she would have never imagined it would look the way it currently does. Okay? Did she set me up for this? Yes, she set me up for this. She made a lot of scary choices. She made some sacrifices. She laid some boundaries down. She made some investments. She spent some money. She worked with some really smart people. So did she set me up for this? Absolutely. She gave her future self a gift, but did she know it would look like this? No. And that's what we're saying about like looking at the future self and that vision, okay? A couple of things that I want you to consider. When you're looking at current day, month of December, who you plan to be in the future actually drives your current moment, your present moment. I've already told you, your future self is different than what you expect it to be.

The more vivid, the more detailed, the clearer, the more succinct you can be about who your future self will be, the faster your progress will be. It can't be some airy-fairy nonsense. We gotta drill down, we gotta double down, we gotta dig deep, we gotta figure it out. And failing in the future is better than success as the present version of you.

Trying and failing in the future is better than you playing it safe. And I think that's why so many have such a hard time because playing it safe in the current moment is easier. And so many of us are afraid of failure. Failing is how we learn. It really is. Getting it right all the time is not how we learn. Okay?

So I want you to think about the future self, reflect on this year, what have your learnings been, reflect on four to five years ago, how different are you from back then, and then fall in love with your future self. Think about giving gifts to your future self and setting yourself up for success. Longer than I expected this to be, I love this topic, I love this time of year.

I hope this is helpful. Pass it along to someone you think could benefit from it. And until next time, be well.