Category: Powerful Questions Series

What’s your future identity? – Who are you becoming?

When we decide to make bigger changes in our lives or when we start to move towards achieving new goals, we are not only starting to do something differently.

Before we can start to act differently, we need to learn to think and feel differently.

Imagine someone who’s retiring after 40 years in the corporate world. This person is not only going to change daily their lifestyle and activities but also in the process of switching identities – a process that’s often not easy to go through.

Because we can’t click just a button and say, ‘Yesterday I was a manager, and today I am a retiree.’ 

Becoming someone different, and building a new identity usually takes some time, effort – and thought work.

Thus, let’s not focus so much on what we are going to do differently, let’s instead focus on intentionally choosing how we are going to think and feel differently.

Let’s actively define and create our new identity.

We can ask ourselves questions like these:

• • ‘Who am I becoming? How will my new identity look like?’
  • ‘How does that person – the new me – make decisions?’
  • ‘What does that person think?’
  • ‘How does that person feel?’
  • ‘How does that person act?
  • What’s important to that person? And what’s not?

LITTLE EXERCISE

You can’t change your past but you can choose how you want to experience the future – because you can choose your future identity.

Play around with the questions above and find your unique answers – so that you can build a close relationship with your future you.

Focusing your thinking on your future identity will help you think, feel, and act like the person you want to become.

Step 1: Define your new identity

These are just a few examples of new-identity ideas:

• • ‘I am becoming someone who is really good at time management.’
  • ‘I am becoming a mindful person,’
  • ‘I am learning to be a conscious shopper.’
  • ‘I am determined to become the organiser of my mind, my home, and my life.’

Step 2: Describe how you will think, feel, and act differently.

Example:

My future identity: I am becoming a successful ‘declutterer’

What I will think: As an expert declutterer, I make sure that there is no clutter in my mind and no clutter in my home. I only ‘own’ thoughts and belongings that serve me. My mind and my home are clutterfree and organised.

How I will feel: I feel competent and confident.

What I will do: I practice mind-decluttering every day, and I create useful habits and routines that help me to keep my home clear and clean.’

Now it’s your turn!

Who are you going to be? And what will that person – your future identiy – think, feel, and do?

 

In a recent article of the Powerful Questions Series I discussed how defining our values and our purpose in life can give our mind and our soul structure, stability, and direction. We used a couple of questions to get a clearer idea of the priorities in our lives.

The following 3 little questions can also help us pay more attention to what’s important to us – this time the focus is on having fun and excitement in our life.

Ask yourself – and play around with the answers:

• • What am I currently excited about in my life?
  • What does it mean to me to have a full and rich life?
  • How could I have more fun and joy in my life?

You will probably not arrive at a final definition of your fun priorities and your idea of living more joyfully on purpose just by answering some questions.

But anything that helps us define our priorities in life will make it easier to move forward in a meaningful and intentional way.

Are you ready for some more fun, and excitement in your life?

If we aren’t getting the result we want it’s because of a thought.

Our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings drive our actions, our actions accumulate into results. – The trouble starts when we forget about this powerful cycle of results-creation.

If something is not as we want it to be, if we have a result in our life that we don’t like, we often believe that something is wrong with us. Or we blame certain ‘unfair’ circumstances in our life.

Feeling incapable, out of control and stuck is the consequence, and making any changes to the unsatisfying situation seems impossible.

However, we can do something about it.

We can change the results we currently have by changing the thoughts we currently think.

One of the many ways to test our thoughts – especially our limiting beliefs – is to ask ourselves powerful questions – AND answer them! For example:

• • ‘If I didn’t believe this, then what would I do?’
  • ‘What if I’m wrong about that?’
  • ‘What if this is just a story my mind made up?’

Click here to learn more about how we can declutter our limiting thoughts.

What can we do to ensure that we live and experience our life the way we want to live and experience it?

Deeply understanding what’s truly important to us and defining our values can give our mind structure, stability, and direction.

You can use this little exercise to become more aware of what you value:

Ask yourself questions like these:

• • What’s really important to me in the different areas of my life?
  • Am I currently neglecting important values?
  • What do I want to achieve in my life, today and tomorrow, in the next 5 years, etc?
  • Where do I want to focus my time and my energy right now?

Don’t rush through the questions.

To really benefit from the exercise, you need to be willing to invest some time. Consider the questions, one by one, and write down what comes to your mind. 

For example:

Before you answer the first question, you could make a list of the different areas of your life.

Your list might include important relationships, your work, your finances, your home, your hobbies and interests, your personal development, your fitness and health, etc.

Then you can go through your list and write down what’s most important to you in each area. 

At the end of the exercise, you can take your notes and decide how you could use your insights to now truly ‘value your values’. Ask – and answer:

• • How can I pay more attention to what’s important to me in my daily life?
  • Could I start a new personal or professional project, here and now, that’s closely linked to my values and my goals?
  • What else can I do to truly value what’s important to me?

Knowing what’s important to us helps us value and fully live our life, the way we want to live it. 

The secret to creating the life you want: Talk to your Future Self.

A conversation with our future self brings us clarity.

This little exercise can be fun. And it can be extremely helpful if we feel a bit stuck.

EXERCISE – Talk to your much older future self

Imagine your future self being much older than you are now. You can expect her to be much wiser and more mindful and knowledgeable at this stage of life. 

Picture yourself sitting together with your future self, having a relaxed conversation with her. Don’t forget to take notes while you are talking with her.

STEP 1 – Choose a topic

Choose the area of your life you want to discuss with your future self. Tell her what you wish to change, improve, achieve.

STEP 2 – Ask powerful questions

Now ask her these 3 questions:

• • What does she recommend you should stop doing?
  • What does she want you to start doing?
  • What does she think you should continue doing?

Don’t judge or evaluate, just write down whatever comes up in her(your) mind.

Don’t push away what you don’t like to hear. Take your time to think it through.

STEP 3 – Create an action plan

Choose one or two of her recommendations about what you should stop, start, or continue doing.

Compile an action plan: List all the things you want to think, feel, and do differently.

Then start realising your goals.

Don’t postpone, take the first step – now.

 

Each day in our life offers numerous opportunities to learn something new, to gain helpful insights, to think in a different way, to benefit from an experience.

Unfortunately, we often miss these opportunities because we rush through our day. We are in a hurry to start, manage, and complete tasks, projects, processes, activities. We want to get it done so that we can move on to the next thing.

We don’t take the time to look back at what we have been doing, we don’t pay attention to the results we have created, we don’t stop to evaluate, review and adjust – we just move on, and on, and on.

How can we become more aware of learning opportunities and use them deliberately for our personal development?

A set of 3 little questions can help.

As soon as a job, task or project has been completed, at the end of an event, after any success or failure experience, at the end of the day/week/month/year month, we can ask ourselves:

• • What worked?
  • What didn’t work?
  • What am I going to do differently?

GIVE IT A TRY

At the end of today, pause for a moment, and see what you can learn from your answers to the questions

• • What worked out today? What did I do successfully? What positive results have I created today?
  • What didn’t work? What feels like a failure? Why? What went wrong, or not as expected/wanted?
  • What can I learn from this? What can I do differently tomorrow?

Do you truly appreciate what you have in your life?

Daily practicing our appreciation of the good things in our life helps us strengthen our positive-feeling ‘muscle’. It makes us feel better. And stronger.

The purpose of the ‘Treasure Chest’ exercise is to come up with positive thoughts about the things we value and appreciate in our life, all the stuff we are grateful for and happy about.

These thoughts in turn will help us fill up our personal ‘treasure chest’ of positive and powerful feelings.

All the appreciation, gratefulness, happiness and contentedness that we add to our ‘treasure chest’ does not only make us feel good in that moment, it will also keep our heart warm during cloudy or stormy periods that might come up in the future.

How do you fill up your personal treasure chest?

Invest 10 minutes each day and write down what comes up to your mind when you ask yourself questions like these:

• • What am I grateful for today?
  • What am I happy about just now?
  • What are the people in my life that are particularly valuable to me?
  • What are the things in my life (personal belongings, money, space, time, etc) that I really appreciate?
  • What have I done/am I doing that I am really proud of?
  • Etc.

The nice thing about this treasure chest is that it’s not heavy and it can’t be stolen. We can carry it around with us all day, we can open it any time, and we can share it with others if we want to.

Enjoy what’s in your personal treasure chest!

The main problem with worry is that it’s not a very useful feeling.

Worrying – usually about things that might happen in the future and are outside of our control – is not helpful and often makes us feel helpless. And it doesn’t help us change what we worry about.

Thus, it might be a good idea to decide to stop worrying, or at least to reduce the amount of worry we are willing to feel.

If we want to ‘delete’ feelings of worry, we first have to uncover worry-producing thoughts in our mind.

We can ask ourselves:

• • What am I thinking right now that makes me feel worried?

Then, we can start to search for new thoughts – different ways to think about the current or potential future circumstances and developments.

We now ask ourselves:

• • What would I be thinking if I didn’t worry about this?

---

EXAMPLE:

This is the future event I am currently feeling worried about:

We have invited some friends for dinner on Saturday. We will be sitting outside in the backyard. It’s getting colder in the evenings.

What am I thinking right now that makes me feel worried?

I am worried because I am thinking: Our friends might get cold and feel uncomfortable the whole time. This would spoil the evening.

What would I be thinking if I didn’t worry about this?

I wouldn’t worry if I was thinking: Our friends know the weather condition and will bring a warm sweater along. And we have lots of blankets to keep them warm. We’ll have a nice evening.

---

Read more about the background of our worries and to find some inspiration for worry-dissolving thoughts.

If we want to make changes in our life, we have to make changes in our thinking – because what we think on a regular basis determines our life experience:

Our thoughts create our feelings, which fuel our actions, which create the results in our lives.

Before we can think about changing our thoughts, we need to become aware of what we are actually thinking.

The mind-decluttering model (based on ‘The Model’, The Life Coach School) is a great took that we use in coaching and self-coaching to gain greater awareness of what’s going on in our mind. CLICK HERE to learn more about the mind-decluttering process, OR HERE to read about the similarities of mental and physical clutter.)

Whenever a result in our life is not what we want it to be, whenever we don’t feel or act as we want to, we can ask ourselves powerful awareness-creating questions like these:

• • What’s going on in my mind right now?
  • What am I thinking?
  • Does it serve me?
  • How does it make me feeling?
  • And acting?
  • Do I like the results created by my thoughts, feelings, and actions?

TIP 

It’s always good to write down the questions and our answers.

We get a clearer view into our mind and a better understanding of our thinking if we ‘take everything out’ and put it on paper.  

Don’t let your mind run on default – Use powerful questions to direct your thinking.

In the first article of the new ‘Powerful Questions Series’ we talked about the tendency of our mind to always focus on the bad, difficult, negative parts of our daily life experience – if we allow it to run on default.

We also discussed how we can use powerful positive questions to counter the negative and limiting tendencies of our mind and open it up to the opportunities and possibilities that our life has to offer.

Questioning our current thinking can help us become more aware of the effects our current thoughts have on our feelings, actions and results. It becomes easier to consider new and potentially better ways of thinking.

The powerful question in Part 1 of the series was, ‘ How do I want to feel just now?’

It’s a very helpful question and we should definitely keep it in our toolbox of mind-empowering questions. We can take it out whenever we are in a situation where we wish to actively take control of what we are feeling in that specific moment.

A similar question that can serve us very well is

‘What do I want my top feeling to be today?’

The purpose of this question is to give our thoughts and feelings a clear direction for the whole day, not just for the current moment/situation.

Asking ourselves what we want to feel reminds us that we don’t have to feel whatever comes up.

Our thoughts create our feelings. And we can always decide what we want to think about the circumstances in our life.

If we don’t like how we feel, we can explore what we would have to think to feel the way we want to.  

DAILY EXERCISE

• • Take a few minutes in the morning and think about the day that has just started.
  • Consider the activities and tasks you are going to do, the people you are going to meet or get in contact with, the things that might come up during the day, etc.
  • Then choose the top feeling for the day. How do you want to feel throughout the day, not matter what exactly is going to happen or not to happen?
  • Choose just one feeling as your favourite feeling and decide to give that one feeling your full attention and support during the day.
  • Find ways to remind yourself of the chosen feeling at different times of the day, and in different situations. (Write it on post-its, put it in your calendar, send yourself an email and put it in the subject line, set the timer on your mobile phone to remind you regularly, …)
  • And the following morning, when you choose the top feeling for the new day, take a few minutes to evaluate your experiences with the top feeling of the day before.

The answer to the question (What do I want my top feeling to be today?) is probably a different one for each of us. It might also be a different one for you each day, depending on your specific situation and plans at that time.

On some days, your favourite feeling might be ‘confidence’. Or ‘peacefulness’? On other days it might be ‘courage’. Or ‘strong’? Or ‘excited’? ‘Curious’? ‘Loving’? ‘Compassion’?

You choose. You just pick the feeling that seems to be best for that time being. And then you stick to it, for the whole day.

Other feelings might come up, don’t judge them but don’t let them take over. Just redirect your attention to your top feeling, and explore what you want to think to create that feeling.

Enjoy your day and your top feeling!