This is Optimal Living Daily, honoring your future self by Steve Pavelina of StevePavelina.com and your narrator, Justin Molick. Welcome back or welcome for the first time if you're new here. This is where I read to you every day of the year from the best blogs or articles on the web. We have other shows where we do this covering different topics, just search for Optimal Living Daily and your podcast I have to find our other shows, but for now let's get right to our next article as we optimize our life.
Honoring your future self by Steve Pavelina of StevePavelina.com. This is my 61st day in a row of blogging, so I'm flowing along nicely with a daily blogging challenge for this year. My biggest concern with this challenge isn't that I'll intentionally skip a day or give up. I'm more concerned with accidentally missing a day, especially since I like to blog with a flow of inspiration, which often means writing at different times each day.
It feels good to honor this challenge. Most days it's no problem, but I will say that it isn't easy to do this every day. Some days I get pretty busy, but I've never attempted to skip it. When I was younger, I couldn't have made this kind of commitment with the expectation that I'd follow through.
If I made a promise to myself, I'd have broken it shortly thereafter. I didn't have the ability to make serious promises to myself and keep them, and developed the kind of character who could do that. One of the things around and made these types of challenges possible was that when I was 21 years old, I decided to work on getting aligned with the value of honor. This transition was important to me because it was part of my recovery process from a rough time in my life.
I'd gotten into much trouble in the previous years, including four arrests and expulsion from college due to exceedingly low personal standards. Back then I reveled in doing what was exciting, thrilling, risky, or illegal. When I wasn't doing such things, I felt bored, depressed, or numb. The few activities that helped me feel alive were shoplifting, gambling, drinking, some kind of scheming, or hanging out with friends.
There was however one activity that gave me solace, and that was going for long walks, especially late at night. Sometimes I'd go for a walk at 1am or 2am and wouldn't return till dawn. I loved the night time because it gave me solace. There were hardly any people around, and I could walk wherever I wanted in my own undisturbed space of being.
Even though my life was a bit of a mess back then, I found the night energy comforting, accepting, and non-judgmental. Somehow it felt like the night treated me well no matter what, as if it covered up all my problems and just let me be free of them for several hours. As I gradually pulled myself out of the funk I was in, I continued this habit of going for long nighttime walks, but not as late or as long as before. During some of those walks, I thought about my future.
The future was a fresh field of possibility, much like the night itself. I enjoyed letting my thoughts wander forward in time. I wasn't sure what I'd end up doing with my life, but I thought a lot about what kind of person I could become. Partly, this was due to curiosity.
I was immensely curious about what it would be like to be me in the future. I think that was largely because I knew that my past self would have a hard time predicting all the trouble I'd eventually get myself into. This made me realize that I could be a very different type of character in the future. Eventually, I got to thinking about the value of honor, and I began projecting that value into my future, imagining what my life could be like if my future self embodied this value somehow.
When I assigned this value to my future self, I liked how that felt to me. It was pleasing to think of my future self as an honorable guy, as someone who lived by a set of personal standards and ethics. The feeling of this future vision as a person of honor stood out to me as different and special. I wasn't in a place to care about the well-being of others at the time, but I liked nurturing this vision of my future self as someone who had higher standards for his code of conduct.
The standards that I assigned to my future self were the standards that I would have prevented my recent problems. So, partly, my vision was about imagining what kind of person would have avoided those problems altogether. What kind of person wouldn't have fallen into the traps that I did? In the months ahead, I kept thinking about this future self now and then, and this started to influence some decisions.
When I felt the temptation to do something that didn't feel honorable, it pulled me away from the vision of my future self that I really liked as if I was pushing him away. But when I leaned towards this standard of honor, it felt like the future me had moved closer, so this vision combined with my feelings helped to serve as an interesting compass for making better decisions. Later in life, I realized that I could expand upon this idea by imagining other character qualities I wanted to develop, then I just had to keep honoring the vision of my future self, keeping him in mind when I made important decisions. For many years of my life, I often saw my future self as being confident and relaxed, even faced with big challenges.
Holding this vision helped me lean into honoring it, too. When I felt overwhelmed or stressed by life's challenges, I remembered that my future self was cool as a cucumber, and he would be phased by the same problems. This vision kept encouraging me to reframe my problems and challenges until I saw them from a perspective that made them look manageable. If I let my problems beat me down, that wouldn't feel good because I'd be dishonoring my future self.
I still use this model today, although perhaps not as much as I did in the past. It's empowering to ponder what kind of future self I want to become and then to think about how to honor his presence by leaning into actions that make him feel closer. You have lots of options for what kind of future self to imagine. I recommend playing around with different possibilities though you find a future self that feels good to you.
Then when you make important decisions, think about which direction would honor your future self. When you create a vision of your future self that feels good to you, you won't want to betray that vision. You want to move towards it. This desire to honor your future self enables you to commit to bigger challenges and expect that you'll follow through.
To be able to handle more discomfort and take more action because you won't want to push away a future self that you really like. You just listened to the post titled honoring your future self by Steve Pavelina of StevePavelina.com and I'll be right back with my commentary. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take, hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it.
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We often think of self improvement as a journey of pushing forward, using willpower and discipline to make changes, doing things we don't really want to do, but this was a different take on it. We're instead envisioning who we want to be, but letting that pull us into a new direction. I think that's the power of visualization. If you have a really clear picture of your future self and it could be like Steve's honorable or whatever you like, then you can sort of have an emotional connection with them and get closer by making those good choices or the opposite push that version of you away by making some not so great choices, and this can be applied to pretty much every choice in life from big things like job decisions to tiny things like scrolling on the phone.
So nice one to consider from Steve for today, thank you for making the choice to be here and listening. I think it's a great choice. These articles have definitely helped me over the years and hopefully they're doing the same for you. Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you tomorrow where you're optimal life awaits.