The Time Traveller Exercise: Letter from My Future Self

Finding creative insight for planning our lives can sometimes be tricky. Sometimes we are simply too involved and too close to our situation. A bit of mental distance can help you find more original ideas and thinking.

So, imagine meeting your 90-year-old self, who has travelled back in time. What would this wise oldie from the future advise you?

Imagining how your experienced 90-year-old future self gives you advice, will help you to create psychological distance. This exercise allows you to shift your perspective and to see approaches you might otherwise overlook.

What insights would your time travelling advisor share?

Start from the Finish

When we start from the finish, we have the opportunity to align our lives with what we want to be remembered for and stay true to our personal values as we go through the journey of life.

This exercise is a powerful tool. It is all very well to say you have to dream, but some of us don’t even know what our dreams are and can’t say exactly what they want from life. By writing a letter from your future self, you can help yourself to tap into the issues and achievements that are important. The letter from the future helps you create a bright future for yourself priming you to notice opportunities. Once you set these expectations for yourself, you are more likely to achieve them.

Just having a vision or a dream of a future life is not enough to get us there. We need to set goals and targets and chart our progress towards them

Writing yourself a letter allows you to look at all aspects of your life and identify the things that are important to you.

Writing down your goals from the perspective of the future – as if you’ve already succeeded in achieving them – is surprisingly therapeutic.

Writing a letter from your future self will challenge you to think about who you are and who you want to be. This exercise can be extremely emotionally freeing and will help you to think critically about how you might choose to live now.

How Do You Write a Letter from Your Future Self?

• Write it as an actual letter.
• Be honest – it’s a pointless exercise otherwise!
• Refer to yourself as ‘you’.
• Be compassionate and empathic.
• Tell yourself what you wish someone had told you.
• Take your time. It does not have to be completed in one sitting, and in fact, the exercise would benefit from having a sleep or two on it.

Ask Yourself the Following Sorts of Questions

• How would I like to be remembered?
• How would I like to have spent my time?
• Who do I want to have been?
• Where do I want to have been?
• What do I want to have done?
• Who do I want to have been with?
• Which hobbies have I developed?
• What friends do I still see?
• What kind of new friends have I developed?
• In what sorts of places did I meet these new friends?

Read through your letter. Do you want to make any changes?

Further Questions

Then ask yourself these further questions:

• Are you on track to reach your goals and desired achievements?
• What changes do you need to make right now to make your letter a reality?
• What are the first steps?
• What resources do you need?
• How will your strengths help you?
• How will your weaknesses hinder you?
• What steps could you take today?

This exercise is about looking back at the person you were with the information you have now in the future. It will give you a focus on what advice you would give your past self.

Yet Another Batch of Questions

• What are some of the main things you have learned?
• What should your past self look out for?
• What is the best advice you could give you past self?
• What would you tell yourself to get through some of the challenges that you have faced?
• What would you tell yourself about your successes and the way you dealt with them?
• What kind of people have helped along the way?
• What kind of people made life harder?
• Who do you wish you had spent more time with?
• Of the advice you have given to your past self, how much of it are you following today?
• How could you follow that advice better?
• What else can you take away and better apply to your life and your immediate future?

Take as much time as you need to answer these questions.

It’s All About Your Hopes and Dreams

Looking to the future is a hopeful thing to do. By writing yourself a letter from the future you are encouraging yourself to make quite explicit the hopes and dreams that you carry around inside you. Once you have set them down on paper they are harder to ignore. Of course, your wishes, your dreams, your desires may change, but by writing down your hopes you breathe life into them and move yourself close to realising them.

Dreams on their own are not enough, but they are a starting point. Your dreams are the vision that you need to make a plan and start building.

The letter from the future is for you. You can use it to explore any part of your life. You need never show it to anyone. The closer you can get to your real feelings, the greater result you will experience.

Further read, Letter To My Younger Self.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

When was the last time you wrote a letter to yourself? Was it to a past or future self? What did you write about? If you were to write such a letter today, what would you include?