96. Becoming Your Future Self: A Leadership Journey
In last week’s CEO Summer School episode, I introduced you to the concept of your business blind spots. The question I posed to help you identify your current blind spots uses a tool I lean on often in my own business and with my clients, and it’s called leading with your future self.
Leading with your future self is all about focusing on where you're going, rather than where you've been. By setting intentions and taking action in alignment with the version of you that has already created the vision you hold for your business, you can access a well of inner guidance and wisdom. While your future self isn't perfect, they are farther along the journey and can offer valuable insight about the now.
Tune in this week to discover how tapping into the wisdom and perspective of your future self can help you make better decisions, stay motivated, and achieve your biggest goals. You’ll hear why now is the perfect time to see what you can do to set your future self up for success, and how to lead with your future self to gain a fresh perspective on your role as CEO of your interior design business.
CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
How leading with your future self can help you make better short-term and long-term decisions.
Why gaining perspective from your future self creates resilience and releases pressure.
The power of using your future self as a filter for ideal clients and projects.
Strategies for receiving wise, caring support from your future self, just like you would from a mentor.
Questions to ask yourself to check if you're leading in the direction you want to go.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 96. In the last Summer School lesson we went deep into the topic of business blindspots, or the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are keeping you in your own way, sometimes consciously and often unconsciously. The question I posed to help identify your current blind spots uses a tool I lean on often in my own business and with clients.
That tool is called leading with your future self. It’s a great way of accessing your own internal wisdom. It is a mentor that is always available to offer, in this case insight, and in other times encouragement and advice. Today in this re-air we’re going to be revisiting the topic of leading with your future self and how you can use this tool to help set goals, make decisions, and build emotional resilience in your interior design business.
With the second half of the year in full effect, now is a great time to check in with yourself and see what you can do to set your future self up for success in the coming months. Start making decisions for that future version of you so that by the end of the year you’ll be looking back and thinking, “I am so grateful for past me.”
I’ll be back next week with a brand new CEO Summer School episode. And if you aren’t already signed up, head over to desiid.com/summerschool, enter your info and you’ll get started right away. I’ll send you those bonus resource guides straight to your inbox.
And if you have signed up and are loving the series, don’t keep this podcast to yourself. Share your favorite episode or forward one of my emails to your design friends and continue these conversations in real life.
I hope that you enjoy revisiting this topic of leading with your future self, and I’ll talk to you next Wednesday.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Let's dive into the topic of leading with your future self. So, first of all, what is future self? Future self is all about focusing on where you're going versus where you've been. Your future self is the version of you that has created the vision you hold for yourself and your business. This version of you may feel a certain way throughout their day, like relaxed or confident. They may spend their days doing a specific type of work or working with a specific type of client. They've achieved certain goals, maybe it's an income goal or a piece of press that you've secured, whatever it is for you.
When you're leading with your future self, you're setting intentions, making decisions and taking action in alignment with this future version of you that you're moving towards with purpose. Now, with that being said, there is one really important piece I want to mention here. Your future self is not perfect. They still have bad days. They still encounter obstacles. And they don't always honor their commitments to themselves, but they are farther along in their journey than present you when you picture them.
When you're accessing your future self, when you're leading with your future self and making decisions through that filter, what you're really doing is tapping into what's already in your brain. Thoughts you already have, but you just haven't taken time to listen for. Beliefs that maybe you could adopt, or perspective or thoughts on how your actions might need to shift in order to create the results you want. Your future self is just a well of wisdom, but we have to learn to tune into it and make decisions in alignment with that future self.
I thought this would be a great time to talk about future self heading into the end of the year and starting to think about what you want to create or achieve in 2024. I think often there's a lot of rigidity and perspective around short and long term circumstances and outcomes in relation to goals and planning. Meaning we get really stuck in the day to day and the micro, and we forget to zoom out. We forget to look at that broader perspective. And that's one of the things that leading with your future solve can offer.
This can look like wanting to avoid or put off doing the difficult thing you know would serve you because there's just so many distractions and quick fixes and quick hits of dopamine at our fingertips. Or in the short term, maybe you're prone to avoiding action taking that stretches you out of your comfort zone because often there isn't an immediate payoff. And so you don't get the reward of taking the action for a while.
Or sometimes how in the short term, a challenge or a disappointment can feel like the end of the world when in reality, it's a little blip if you have the perspective to look out farther than today and recover from whatever you encountered and bounce back. The solution to our brain's natural tendency to get tunnel vision, and sometimes even catastrophize the immediate moment really is leading with your future self.
One of the questions you can always be asking yourself is am I leading myself in the direction I want to go? Another one would be, am I taking action in support of the version of me that I want to become? Am I staying focused and committed to my goals to set myself up for success in creating that future that I want? These are all really powerful questions to start asking yourself.
And that's why it's part of the Out Of Overwhelm process, is to learn to lead with your future self. And there's so many tools to support this shift, not just in your mindset, but in your action taking within your business, like creating your CEO vision, or making empowered decisions, or using the daily planner to create plans that are in alignment with what your future self would want for you. Or the bonus courses on goal setting and self-accountability.
There are so many tools that support you in leading with your future self. And, of course, I'd love to support you in the program, if that feels like a fit. But I want to give you some things today to start thinking about and really start to see the impact of starting to look to your future for guidance and wisdom about the now because so much of leading from your future self is centered on decision making, something we do day in day out.
One of the areas that shows up in is planning. The idea of a runway, scheduling some time before and after your time off to give yourself a little bit of cushion and breathing room, is actually something that I came up with when I was asking my future self about how I'd want to set myself up for returning from being out of the office. My future self, I knew, was not going to be happy if I had something scheduled at 9am that I had to be ready and at my computer and on Zoom for.
For some of you that might not be the case. Your runway might look different. But we don't know that until we ask. Another way planning decisions come up with future self is that you can consider, is the schedule I'm planning for myself today one I'm going to be happy with at the end of the day, or am I setting myself up to be totally overextended?
Or looking ahead and asking yourself, am I going to be happy that I booked two presentations in one day? Just because it fits on the calendar, maybe I don't want to do that. Again, for some of you, that might be totally doable and within your capacity. And for others of you, that might feel completely draining and you're going to regret having filled those spaces the way that you did.
But you wouldn't know that in the moment when it looks like the jigsaw fits on the computer screen of your calendar, without looking out to your future self and leading from that future position.
Decision making with your future self also is really evident with clients. In Out Of Overwhelm we talk about lots of strategies for setting client filters. Meaning how do you attract and also help people self-select or filter them out before they even talk to you when it comes to serving your ideal clients, which saves you, of course, time and energy. And you could also use your future self as a client filter. Let me give you an example of this.
It might sound fun and exciting to take on a new project right now. And you also want to check in, what does your future self think about your project deadlines a few months out? Will you be glad you chose the excitement in the moment? Another example of this could be you have a feeling after meeting with a client that maybe it's not the best fit, but you're tempted to say yes anyways because, let's face it, sometimes we're uncomfortable about saying no. Before you make a decision, check in with your future self. What would their leadership advise?
For me, it might feel hard to say no to a non-ideal client right now, but when I look to the future and I lead with my future self and picture myself working with that person in an intimate relationship for the next few months, or even longer, the no becomes a lot easier.
Marketing decisions are another one you might want to think about. When you're getting going with something new and trying to layer in new strategies and approaches, it can be hard to stay motivated if you're not getting an immediate response or feedback cycle of, hey, this is working. Because sometimes strategies need to compound over time, I think often they do. But when you look to your future self and see compounding results of your efforts and see that if you continue on the path, you're moving closer and closer to your goals, it can be a lot easier to keep going.
Decisions around your investments and purchases is also another great way to lead with your future self. The future you who has what you want or has achieved the goals that you've set, what does that version of you think about the investment you're considering? Maybe it's in a program or someone that you're thinking about hiring. What does your future self think? Are you glad you made the move?
You could also use the concept of leading with your future self when it comes to what goals you pursue and how you pursue them. If you were to think of someone who's already achieved the goal and ask them, hey, how did you do that? What were some of the things you did? Who did you ask for help? This can give you a lot of insight into your next steps and how you might achieve the goal that you right now don't have access to when you're just thinking about the day to day.
And lastly, leading with your future self is about receiving wise, caring support, whether it's in decision making or any other area you're navigating. Business can be kind of tough and so I want you to think about leading with your future self as leading yourself as would a wise mentor. This version of you has wisdom, guidance and reassurance to offer at any moment when you learn to tune in.
When you learn to lead with your future self, there is so much perspective you gain. And perspective will always help you get unstuck. It's going to help you see solutions that you didn't see moments before. Things often seem like a really big deal in the moment, but when you start to see the trajectory and compounding impacts of your decisions and actions, you really can start to use that information to inform how you're living and working today. And you can use this to build confidence in how you're progressing and how you're making decisions and how you're setting goals.
This creates so much resilience when you zoom out and lead with your future self. And you're able to see that no success in you, in your business is made or broken in one day or one interaction. Can we just release the pressure? That's so much of what I think with future self. We can release that pressure valve, putting so much on any one thing, and get the long-term perspective from the inside.
We can release the pressure. We can create internal motivation. We can see things we could not see. And so this week, I invite you to play with this concept of leading with your future self. You can ask it for advice, get that perspective, check in on how they did something you're trying to figure out in your business right now, and see what opens up to come through you and to you.
So that’s what I’ve got for you today. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you'll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won't take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you'll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can't wait to select a winner and it might be you. I'll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
That tool is called leading with your future self. It’s a great way of accessing your own internal wisdom. It is a mentor that is always available to offer, in this case insight, and in other times encouragement and advice. Today in this re-air we’re going to be revisiting the topic of leading with your future self and how you can use this tool to help set goals, make decisions, and build emotional resilience in your interior design business.
With the second half of the year in full effect, now is a great time to check in with yourself and see what you can do to set your future self up for success in the coming months. Start making decisions for that future version of you so that by the end of the year you’ll be looking back and thinking, “I am so grateful for past me.”
I’ll be back next week with a brand new CEO Summer School episode. And if you aren’t already signed up, head over to desiid.com/summerschool, enter your info and you’ll get started right away. I’ll send you those bonus resource guides straight to your inbox.
And if you have signed up and are loving the series, don’t keep this podcast to yourself. Share your favorite episode or forward one of my emails to your design friends and continue these conversations in real life.
I hope that you enjoy revisiting this topic of leading with your future self, and I’ll talk to you next Wednesday.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place. I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Let's dive into the topic of leading with your future self. So, first of all, what is future self? Future self is all about focusing on where you're going versus where you've been. Your future self is the version of you that has created the vision you hold for yourself and your business. This version of you may feel a certain way throughout their day, like relaxed or confident. They may spend their days doing a specific type of work or working with a specific type of client. They've achieved certain goals, maybe it's an income goal or a piece of press that you've secured, whatever it is for you.
When you're leading with your future self, you're setting intentions, making decisions and taking action in alignment with this future version of you that you're moving towards with purpose. Now, with that being said, there is one really important piece I want to mention here. Your future self is not perfect. They still have bad days. They still encounter obstacles. And they don't always honor their commitments to themselves, but they are farther along in their journey than present you when you picture them.
When you're accessing your future self, when you're leading with your future self and making decisions through that filter, what you're really doing is tapping into what's already in your brain. Thoughts you already have, but you just haven't taken time to listen for. Beliefs that maybe you could adopt, or perspective or thoughts on how your actions might need to shift in order to create the results you want. Your future self is just a well of wisdom, but we have to learn to tune into it and make decisions in alignment with that future self.
I thought this would be a great time to talk about future self heading into the end of the year and starting to think about what you want to create or achieve in 2024. I think often there's a lot of rigidity and perspective around short and long term circumstances and outcomes in relation to goals and planning. Meaning we get really stuck in the day to day and the micro, and we forget to zoom out. We forget to look at that broader perspective. And that's one of the things that leading with your future solve can offer.
This can look like wanting to avoid or put off doing the difficult thing you know would serve you because there's just so many distractions and quick fixes and quick hits of dopamine at our fingertips. Or in the short term, maybe you're prone to avoiding action taking that stretches you out of your comfort zone because often there isn't an immediate payoff. And so you don't get the reward of taking the action for a while.
Or sometimes how in the short term, a challenge or a disappointment can feel like the end of the world when in reality, it's a little blip if you have the perspective to look out farther than today and recover from whatever you encountered and bounce back. The solution to our brain's natural tendency to get tunnel vision, and sometimes even catastrophize the immediate moment really is leading with your future self.
One of the questions you can always be asking yourself is am I leading myself in the direction I want to go? Another one would be, am I taking action in support of the version of me that I want to become? Am I staying focused and committed to my goals to set myself up for success in creating that future that I want? These are all really powerful questions to start asking yourself.
And that's why it's part of the Out Of Overwhelm process, is to learn to lead with your future self. And there's so many tools to support this shift, not just in your mindset, but in your action taking within your business, like creating your CEO vision, or making empowered decisions, or using the daily planner to create plans that are in alignment with what your future self would want for you. Or the bonus courses on goal setting and self-accountability.
There are so many tools that support you in leading with your future self. And, of course, I'd love to support you in the program, if that feels like a fit. But I want to give you some things today to start thinking about and really start to see the impact of starting to look to your future for guidance and wisdom about the now because so much of leading from your future self is centered on decision making, something we do day in day out.
One of the areas that shows up in is planning. The idea of a runway, scheduling some time before and after your time off to give yourself a little bit of cushion and breathing room, is actually something that I came up with when I was asking my future self about how I'd want to set myself up for returning from being out of the office. My future self, I knew, was not going to be happy if I had something scheduled at 9am that I had to be ready and at my computer and on Zoom for.
For some of you that might not be the case. Your runway might look different. But we don't know that until we ask. Another way planning decisions come up with future self is that you can consider, is the schedule I'm planning for myself today one I'm going to be happy with at the end of the day, or am I setting myself up to be totally overextended?
Or looking ahead and asking yourself, am I going to be happy that I booked two presentations in one day? Just because it fits on the calendar, maybe I don't want to do that. Again, for some of you, that might be totally doable and within your capacity. And for others of you, that might feel completely draining and you're going to regret having filled those spaces the way that you did.
But you wouldn't know that in the moment when it looks like the jigsaw fits on the computer screen of your calendar, without looking out to your future self and leading from that future position.
Decision making with your future self also is really evident with clients. In Out Of Overwhelm we talk about lots of strategies for setting client filters. Meaning how do you attract and also help people self-select or filter them out before they even talk to you when it comes to serving your ideal clients, which saves you, of course, time and energy. And you could also use your future self as a client filter. Let me give you an example of this.
It might sound fun and exciting to take on a new project right now. And you also want to check in, what does your future self think about your project deadlines a few months out? Will you be glad you chose the excitement in the moment? Another example of this could be you have a feeling after meeting with a client that maybe it's not the best fit, but you're tempted to say yes anyways because, let's face it, sometimes we're uncomfortable about saying no. Before you make a decision, check in with your future self. What would their leadership advise?
For me, it might feel hard to say no to a non-ideal client right now, but when I look to the future and I lead with my future self and picture myself working with that person in an intimate relationship for the next few months, or even longer, the no becomes a lot easier.
Marketing decisions are another one you might want to think about. When you're getting going with something new and trying to layer in new strategies and approaches, it can be hard to stay motivated if you're not getting an immediate response or feedback cycle of, hey, this is working. Because sometimes strategies need to compound over time, I think often they do. But when you look to your future self and see compounding results of your efforts and see that if you continue on the path, you're moving closer and closer to your goals, it can be a lot easier to keep going.
Decisions around your investments and purchases is also another great way to lead with your future self. The future you who has what you want or has achieved the goals that you've set, what does that version of you think about the investment you're considering? Maybe it's in a program or someone that you're thinking about hiring. What does your future self think? Are you glad you made the move?
You could also use the concept of leading with your future self when it comes to what goals you pursue and how you pursue them. If you were to think of someone who's already achieved the goal and ask them, hey, how did you do that? What were some of the things you did? Who did you ask for help? This can give you a lot of insight into your next steps and how you might achieve the goal that you right now don't have access to when you're just thinking about the day to day.
And lastly, leading with your future self is about receiving wise, caring support, whether it's in decision making or any other area you're navigating. Business can be kind of tough and so I want you to think about leading with your future self as leading yourself as would a wise mentor. This version of you has wisdom, guidance and reassurance to offer at any moment when you learn to tune in.
When you learn to lead with your future self, there is so much perspective you gain. And perspective will always help you get unstuck. It's going to help you see solutions that you didn't see moments before. Things often seem like a really big deal in the moment, but when you start to see the trajectory and compounding impacts of your decisions and actions, you really can start to use that information to inform how you're living and working today. And you can use this to build confidence in how you're progressing and how you're making decisions and how you're setting goals.
This creates so much resilience when you zoom out and lead with your future self. And you're able to see that no success in you, in your business is made or broken in one day or one interaction. Can we just release the pressure? That's so much of what I think with future self. We can release that pressure valve, putting so much on any one thing, and get the long-term perspective from the inside.
We can release the pressure. We can create internal motivation. We can see things we could not see. And so this week, I invite you to play with this concept of leading with your future self. You can ask it for advice, get that perspective, check in on how they did something you're trying to figure out in your business right now, and see what opens up to come through you and to you.
So that’s what I’ve got for you today. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you'll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won't take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you'll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can't wait to select a winner and it might be you. I'll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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