“The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence.” –– Roy T. Bennett
Today’s letter was prompted, in part, by our podcast guest this week, Hal Hershfield, in part by a conversation I had with Tanya Dalton, and in reading Benjamin Hardy’s The Future is Now.
Tanya has been our podcast guest, and the research I will share is from my conversation with her in that episode. (We’ve also had Benjamin Hardy on the podcast before, so a trifecta of podcast guests inspires this newsletter. Thank you, all.)
Here’s a synopsis of the research that Tanya shared with me back when:
In a study of participants in an FMRI machine, when the participants would talk about themselves in the present, a certain part of their brains would light up.
Then, they would talk about their future selves, and a different part of the brain would be activated. It was the part of the brain that was also activated by having the participants talk about Matt Damon and Natalie Portman. The conclusion was that our future selves are like people we may know about, but who are basically strangers to us.
Because our present self is a friend, not a stranger, our brains are wired to prioritize the present. This helps explain why we spend in the present and shortchange retirement savings. Or why we eat what is delicious to us instead of what is good for us. Now is what matters to us. The future self, who must deal with the consequences of today’s choices, isn’t truly real to us.
And yet, as Benjamin Hardy shares in his book, The Future is Now, it’s not really the past, but the future that drives our behavior and our actions. What we do is based on what we believe about the future. Do our actions indicate we have little hope for the future, or are they full of hope? Ben writes, “The first and most fundamental threat to yourself is not having hope in your future.”
Another threat to your future is focusing on the past: what happened in the past and/or how we felt in the past and letting that dictate how we behave in the here and now.
Which is why my future self recently wrote a letter, thanking my present self for doing a number of things, like how I take care of my body.
Here’s a snippet––“I am grateful for what you have done over the past twenty years to be physically and emotionally healthy, improve flexibility and balance, adjust my diet, and I am glad you continued skiing because this has given me so much pleasure.”
I invite you to do this as well.
Your future self is going to be your place of residence, so, what will you do today?
For more inspiration on tapping into your future self, listen to this week’s episode of the podcast with Dr. Hal Hershfield, who has written a book titled Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today.
Here’s to Future You, Today!
All best,
Whitney
P.S. There’s still time to join our last certification for the year, which is LIVE in Denver, Colorado, on October 10-12; register now!
