Episode 237: What would you tell your future self?
We can't predict the future, but we can set intentions for what we want the future to bring us. In today's quick tip episode, Fiona shares a fun exercise that you can easily do to help your future self. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
What is Future Me?
How to use it
Conclusions
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Hello and welcome to episode 237 of the, My Daily Business Coach podcast. My name's Fiona Killackey and I'm your host. And today you are listening to a quick tip episode, and that's really where I share a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately. These are short episodes. So if you're in the mood, you can totally go back and binge on all of these, if you have not caught up. And if you have, if you are listening to every single episode we put out, Thank you! Thank you. Thank you. I just love, love, love, love, love hearing from people, meeting people and they're like, "Oh my God, I listened to your podcast. And I feel like I knew you.". That is just the best feedback ever. So thank you so so much. And if you haven't already, please leave a review for this podcast. It just really helps us get found and help other small business owners, which is really the whole purpose behind what we do.
As I said, it is a quick tip episode, but before we get stuck into that, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I live and work and record this podcast. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. All right, let's get into today's episode.
Okay. So if I asked you to think about where you were five years ago, like really just spend a little bit of time thinking about where you were five years ago. So I'm recording this in 2022. If I think back to 2017, what was I doing in 2017 in my life? I was really trying to get pregnant for the second time. It was not working and my mother had just passed away. And I was about, I was into my second year of business. And gosh, I have to say if I think about that time now, it was where I was transitioning much more into business coaching, but I was still doing a lot of corporate work. I was consulting one of the biggest companies in the country here in Australia, and I was going in and out.
I was driving a lot. I know it sounds superficial, but if I think about it, I was probably still dressing quite corporate. I remember certain dresses that I would wear a lot going in and out of those kinds of corporate places, a lot of tights, and a lot of time on the freeway. And when I think about that now, and I think about where I am today being able to work from home, having an office that is actually built out the back, looking out onto beautiful bushland, running my own hours. I rarely go into the city for work. I sometimes go in for pleasure. But yeah, I mean, it's just a completely different life. I have my much, much longed-for second child and my beautiful first child as well and things I've worked through a lot of grief counseling and other things to work through and manage the grief that has come from now. Not just my mother passing away, but my father as well.
Things have changed massively. And there are so many things that I would tell that person five years ago like it's going to get easier. It will work out. Things are gonna come and test you. You will get your much long for a second child, like all of these things, but we don't know that we really don't know that. And so today I wanted to talk about, you might be like, where is this going? This is supposed to be a quick tip episode, not a therapy session Fiona, so it just stays with me.
I think we can't predict the future, but we can definitely set intentions for what we want the future to bring us and where we wanna be in the future, both in our business and in our life.
And I'm definitely somebody who does the whole new year. I have my new stationery. I go for my vision boards. I do all of that stuff. I also grew up in a household that was, I don't wanna say religious. They were much more spiritual. I would say my parents are both Irish. And so we grew up Catholic and there was definitely a spiritual element to everything that we did growing up, even finding a car parking space, which I still use to this day. If I've lost anything, I will always pray to Saint Anthony, say it, pray to Saint Anthony. It will happen. And the more that I have grown up and have adapted and changed and, and looked at the different faiths and everything else so much of that is about literally putting it out to the universe and being like, help me, help me with what I need to do, whether it's finding a car parking space or whether it's something much bigger and more important.
And in business, what we can do is sometimes we can sit and we can do our five-year plan and we can do a projection and cash projection, look at our exit strategy and all the things. And they're all important. Believe me, that's what I work with people a lot on. But I think sometimes it's also worth just sitting down and thinking about where will I be personally. What kind of person do I wanna be? What am I happiest about? What's going to happen in my personal life in five years? Where do I live? What does that look like? And sort of envisaging that. And today I wanted to share with you, you a tool that I have found really useful for this. I've been using this for probably five years. And interestingly, I've used it in a couple of master classes that I've run.
And I also used it recently when I started a business mentoring program for the council here. And yet it's not something that I probably bring into a lot of my client calls. And I was thinking about it today thinking, "Oh, I should totally be reading this in more than I do." But I first came across this tool maybe like five years ago, I heard somebody mention it. And then I don't even know if it's five years ago, but it's hard to know with the pandemic, but sometime in the last little while, and basically it enables you to write a letter to your future self digitally and have that letter arrive in your inbox however many years or months later. So in a way, it's almost like journaling, but then kind of sending it out into the digital ethos. And then when you get it back, it's like, oh my goodness.
I guess today is really about thinking, where have you been in the last five years? Cause sometimes we don't see that we forget how far we've come, but then also where do you wanna go? And it may not be five years. It could be two years or one year or six months, and then fleshing that out in a letter to yourself. So writing a letter. When I did the business program, recently, they were going to be finished by the end of July, which is not too long ago. And so I asked them to go to this tool, which I'm gonna share in a second, and put in your email write this letter to yourself about what you want from this program and what is going to change as a result of this program. What are you gonna take away from it?
Why have you turned up today and then by the end of this program, you'll get that email sent back to yourself and you'll be able to assess, did I get that from the program? How have I put in the work to get what I wanted out of it? And so the tool is literally called Future Me. And if you are in a position where you can type things into a Google search or a search engine, you can literally just go to Future Me, or you can look up futureme.org, And we'll link to this in the show notes. But basically, you just sign in, it's free to sign up and you can put in anything, you can write a letter, you can send it to yourself, you can set a date. If you just sort of scroll to the bottom or to the down below the fold, you'll see a date.
You can change the date. You can change the year. I mean, it could be like three years in advance. What's really nice about that is it's, it's getting things out of your head. And it's also for you to realize what is actually really important to me. Like, what do I want to happen in the next few years? I find that a really interesting exercise to do with clients, but also to do myself and to think about. Because you might think, "Oh yeah, I just wanna make more money or I wanna do XYZ." But when it actually comes down and you're writing that letter to yourself, it's really interesting to see what actually comes out. So the tool is the Future Me. And it is basically a way of sending yourself an email, a digital letter of what you want to achieve.
It can be anything. It could be about your kids. It could be what sort of study you wanna do. But in terms of business, if you take this as a business exercise to sit down and think about, okay, firstly, what's the time period? Is it 12 months? Is it five years? Is it 10 years? Is it two years? And as long as you've got the same email address, that's one thing you don't wanna change the email address and you won't get it. But sending that letter to yourself and putting things into like motion really, and being like, this is what I wanna achieve. I'm gonna send it out. And maybe you've also made note of it in a journal or elsewhere or a post-it note. And just sort of putting that out into the universe.
And I'm definitely not somebody who's like, "Oh, you just need to put it out and do no work and it will come to you." But I do think that once you put it out, you start sewing the seed in your mind of what's actually possible. And especially if you're having that visually or you get this email to you in six months, it's just gonna reiterate all these things that you want to achieve and that you are telling yourself that you're going to achieve. And you are your greatest cheerleader. Really. It doesn't matter how many people are on your sidelines, cheering you on. You ultimately need to believe in yourself. If anyone's read my book, passion, purpose, profit. That is the kind of final thing that I talk about. I'm like, you can take all this advice that I'm giving you, but if you don't believe in yourself, and if you don't believe that your business is going to work, how is it possible for anyone else to get behind you?
And one example of you believing and setting things in motion is to use a tool like Future Me to send yourself this digital letter and see what comes back and see how you feel about it when it does. So that is it for today's quick tip podcast, just a tool, futureme.org. Signing in sending yourself a letter and seeing what comes back.
All right. Oh, I've actually, I've just literally had a flashback to where I first saw this, which was in a group that I was in about health meditations. And this was like, I think it was after I just lost my mum. And we used this as a tool. And I remember when I did get that letter just how powerful it was. So I hope it'll be powerful for you as well. We will link to this in this show notes and you can find them over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/237. So really? Yeah. Think about what would you tell your future self? What would you like to know? What would you have liked to have known five years ago? And then what would you like to know five years from now anyway, a really fun exercise to do so I'll leave it there, but thank you so much for listening and I hope you found this useful and I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
