Council Post: Emotional Forecasting And Your Future Self

Michelle is a financial advisor and the founder of MichelleAB, a lifestyle platform that enables change-makers to achieve financial freedom.

The year is 2035. Picture it: You’re 65. You’ve met your financial goals. You’re retired or working only when you want. You are building the “second act” business that will be your legacy, or you’re traveling the world going on fabulous adventures. How do you want to feel at that moment?

When you imagine this scenario now in 2021, you likely feel relieved, joyful and ready to do a happy dance. The feeling is similar to winning the lottery. But it’s rare that a person at 49 imagining how they’ll feel after having attained financial freedom actually feels this same way at 65.

Why? The short answer is that our future selves are strangers to us. Think about it. Between now and 2035, you’ll experience a lot of personal growth and a lot of change. Mentally and physically, you will be a different person in 14 years.

So when you answer this question, you’re probably answering based on how it would feel to go directly from your current situation to financial freedom. A better way to approach this question, though, is the way I encourage my clients to approach it: How do you imagine your 65-year-old self will feel upon attaining financial independence?

Why Is This A Better Approach?

This question prompts you to put yourself in the shoes of your future self. It invites you to imagine how your older, wiser, battle-tested, resilient self will feel. Your priorities may be different. Your obligations will likely be different. It’s important to take this into consideration. 

One tool I love to use with my clients is an app that takes a photo of you and shows you what you’ll look like when you’re older. Once you get over the initial pain of looking at yourself as an older person, you can more easily connect with your future self. 

Research backs this up. People using a similar aging tool contributed on average 6.2% of their earnings to a workplace retirement plan compared with only a 4.4% average contribution rate among workers who used a tool that included images of their current selves. 

I think the reason this works is that when you see your future self, they become real. You can more easily imagine how they are feeling. I call this “emotional forecasting,” and it’s an important step in the success formula I use to help my clients realize their financial goals.

Making Emotional Forecasting Work For You

I was recently working with a client — let’s call her Diana. Diana just retired. She worked for 40 years nonstop and was highly successful in her career. Her big question: How do I recreate the social structure and meaning that I derived from my work?

Now, Diana is one of the rare ones who feels the way her younger self wanted her to feel at this stage in her life. Through our work together, she feels secure, healthy, happy and at peace. She’s having a lot of fun, yet even she has realized that your wealth status and your state of mind don’t always match up when you’ve achieved your goals. Diana and I have more work to do, and that’s OK.

This also ties into the myth that rich people feel wealthy and secure all the time. When I discover a disconnect between mindset and money milestones, I know there’s a money story lurking in the shadows and that it’s time to bring it into the light so we can see it for what it is.

If you’ve felt a similar disconnect between how you expected to feel and how you actually feel once you’ve attained a big money goal, here’s a journaling exercise you can use to bring that money story to light. 

Write down your answers to the following questions:

• What is one make-or-break moment in your life? How did you persevere?

• How did you handle moments of doubt?

• How did you stay energized, focused and accountable?

• Did you make any course corrections?

• What were the micro-successes and exhilarating moments?

• How would you describe yourself during the tough moments?

Doing this exercise with Diana reminded her that she has an internal store of time-tested resources she can root into to build her way forward. The structure and meaning she once found in her work can be recreated for the current moment. The key is seeing her strengths through a new lens.

You’ve likely asked yourself how you want to feel when you attain financial freedom because those feelings understandably keep you motivated on your way to your goals. However, if you want your mindset to match your financial success, you have to let your future self in on the conversation.


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