Do What Your Future Self Needs

(upbeat music) Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host Rob Dyle. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you feel like you've been stuck in the same place for the past few years, you're stuck because of the patterns that you cannot see the unconscious patterns that you have lived since childhood. And in three days at my Freedom Live event in Austin, Texas, December 3rd, 4th, and 5th, we're going to find those patterns. We're gonna break them and we're gonna send you home with a 12-month plan to live as a new person to make 2027 the best year of your life. Prices are about to go up. This upcoming Thursday, November 12th, so make sure you grab your tickets now before they go up. So go to FreedomLive2026.com. Once again, FreedomLive2026.com. Today, I'm gonna be talking about doing what's your future self needs. Because if the next five years look like the last five years, are you going to be happy with the person that you become? Because you can genuinely want a better life and still spend every day making decisions to postpone it. And in my early 20s, I made one shift that completely changed how I approached my future and it changed my life. And so today I'm gonna show you what that shift was and how to stop letting what feels good right now, get in the way of the life that you actually want. And I'm gonna teach you how to stop making decisions from the person that you are right now and how to actually start making them for the person that you need to become. And I'm gonna give you my four ways to turn your future self into the filter for every decision that you make. So let's jump into it. There's a psychologist named Hal Hirschfeld. And years ago at Stanford, he and his colleagues put people into a brain scanner. And they had them think about themselves right now and then they had them think about themselves in 10 years. And then they had them think about somebody who they've never met before, like Nelson Mandela. And here's what they found. When people thought about their future self, their brain didn't light up like they were thinking about themselves. It looked more like they were thinking about somebody else, like they were thinking about a stranger, which means your brain treats your future self like a stranger. And the people whose brain saw the biggest gap between me now and me later were the ones that were least willing to wait and delay gratification. And they took immediate gratification every single time. Because why would you sacrifice for a stranger that you don't know? Which in this case is basically your future self. When you can do something for someone that you know really, really well, which is your current self. And what that means is that every time that you hit a snooze button or you skip the workout or you blow through your money, your brain doesn't feel like it's hurting you. It feels like it's handing the bill to some guy that you'll never actually meet. Now, let me pause real quick, because this is really, really important to understand. The reason why you don't do what you need to do to build a life that you want is because you see your future self as somebody else, a stranger. And I'm going to talk about how to change that in just a minute. But then, Hersfeld did something really cool. He showed people digitally aged pictures of their own face. And the people who saw their older self digitally age put more effort into delaying gratification instead of taking immediate gratification. In one way that they judged this in this study was how much money that they spent versus how much money that they saved. And people who saw their future self aged started saving twice as much money towards retirement. These are the same people as before. The same money as before. The only thing that changed is that that stranger actually got a face. That stranger didn't feel like a stranger anymore. It felt like them. So the problem isn't that you don't care about your future. I want you to understand that. It's that you don't feel like you know your future self. And it's hard to be honest to love and care for somebody that you just don't even know. And the most life-changing personal decision that I made when I was in my early 20s was to stop working and acting for myself and to start actually doing it for my future self, to learn to delay gratification versus always going for instant gratification. Because here's how most people make their decisions. They make almost every decision based off of what their current self wants. And you have to understand something about your current self. It only knows how to act for yourself currently. So it does what is easy. It does what it currently does. It does what it knows. Not getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself and doing something that doesn't really benefit you now, but will benefit you in the long term. You have to understand we are basically animals at our core. And all animals want instant gratification. So if you keep making decisions for the person that you are, you will keep getting the life that you've got. And so if you choose instant gratification, life will be comfortable now, but you will be stuck later. Or if you choose to make the hard decisions, it will be uncomfortable now, but you will be free later. Or as I always say, life is either hard now and easy later or easy now and hard later. And I know something, if you're listening to this podcast, you don't want the life that you currently have. It might be okay, but you want more. Like you want to be better. You want to do the uncommon things that common people will not do. You are wired differently than most of the population. And so we need a new filter. Instead of asking like, what do I want right now? We need to start asking ourselves, what does my future self need from me right now? And so how do you actually do that? When you put this into practice, how do you take a stranger and turn them into somebody that you would do anything for? So let me be a four step process, okay? Number one is to meet them. Most people's future self is like a blur. People say, I want to be healthier. I want to be more successful and I want to be happier. I want to make more money. That's not a person. That is a wish. And remember, the moment that that stranger got a face, people started saving twice as much for retirement. And so I want you to give your future self a face. So pick a date 10 years in the future from today. And I want you to write out, what is a normal Tuesday look in their life? Like what do they, what are they, what time do they wake up? How does their body feel when they get out of bed? What does their bank account look like? How does their spouse look at them? What do they no longer tolerate? How do they talk to themselves? How do they talk to other people? Start to build this person out onto a piece of paper. And the more specific that you get, the less that this person feels like a stranger. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. But you have to understand like knowing them isn't just enough. You have to actually start to care about this person. And the beautiful thing is with AI now, you can see your older self. So take a picture of yourself today and upload it into cloud or chat GBT and say, hey, age this picture of me 10 years in the future. And now you can actually see this person that you're working hard for. And you could put them in your phone background and try to use them as somebody that you're trying to take care of. So that's the first thing. The second thing is to love them like you love your kids. If you have kids, think about three o'clock in the morning when your babies would wake up. Like nobody needs to motivate you to wake up at three o'clock in the morning to take care of a crying baby, right? Like you don't lie there negotiating with yourself. Is it a struggle? Yeah, but guess what? You get up. You get up. Why is that? Because you love for them. You care for them. You know that it is your job and it is your responsibility as a parent to be there for them. You will do anything for that baby. Love removes the debate. It removes the negotiation. What do you do? You just do it, right? And so now flip that. Would you rather your children make bad decisions or would you want your children to be $20,000 in debt or do you want your children to be 40 pounds overweight? Do you want them to work a job that they hate? Of course you don't. But you do it to yourself constantly, don't you? You get into debt, you get overweight. You might work a job that you don't enjoy or it doesn't fill your soul. You do it to yourself constantly. You settle, you settle for normal, for average, for just getting by, right? So that one like stings a little bit when you really start to think about it, doesn't it? So I want you to start seeing your future self as somebody that is in your care like your children, somebody who's counting on you, someone that you will do anything for because they are counting on you. So I want you to treat yourself like someone that you are responsible for taking care of and for loving because nobody else is coming to take care of that person. You're the person who has to do it. So that's number two, number three. I want you to now run every decision through this filter. The practical part of this is to have every decision to go through the filter of your future self because every decision has two voices. Your current self asks you, hey, what do I feel like doing right now? Your future self asks you, what do I need to do right now? And most people only ever listen to their current self. And so when there's a fork in the road, I want you just to sit there for a second and close. Close your eyes and take a deep breath and ask yourself, what does my future self need from me right now, right? So your alarm goes off at 5.30 in the morning. Your current self wants 30 more minutes, right? Your future self needs you to get up. It's time to go. So you ask yourself, what does my future self need for me right now, right? My future self needs me to get up. That's it. So ask the question, what do they need for me and make it really simple? And it's not, I don't need you to make all of the decisions for today. I just need you to make that one decision right now. What do they need for me? What do they need for me right now? And you'll notice the answer is almost never confusing. Like it's very, very clear. You know what they need. To be frank, you've probably always known what they need. The question just takes away your ability to pretend like you don't know what it is that you need. Your current self picks what you want, your future self picks what you need. And if you're going to change your life, you need to start listening to your future self, which then brings me to number four, let them coach you. That sounds kind of weird. You're going to let somebody who doesn't exist yet, a future version of yourself 10 years from today coach you. But most people think like this relationship only goes one way. It's me looking into the future and seeing what my future self needs. But the relationship really does go both ways. Your future self that has everything that you've ever wanted, this life that you want 10 years from today has already been through what you're going through right now. They've already made the hard decisions. They've already survived the failure. They already woke up early and hit the gym for years. They already know how this chapter that you're currently in is going to end if you make the right decisions. And so when you're scared or when you're stuck or not motivated or you're overthinking everything, like just take a second and ask them, what should I know about this moment? Like what should I know about this moment? And I promise you your future self is never going to say play it safe or stay in your comfort zone or don't grow. I promise you that they're probably going to say take the risk. They're probably going to say do what's hard. They're probably going to say take care of yourself better. They'll probably give you the advice that you need. And it will be very clear what the right action is to take to build the life that you want. And I want you to make this like a daily conversation, try to develop a relationship. And I know this sounds weird, but try to develop a relationship with this future self that you have. Build the relationship with them. I promise you, it sounds crazy, but it really truly does work, build a relationship with your future self. And then every night, right when you go to bed and you put your head down and your eyes are closing, just ask yourself one question, did I give my future self what they needed today? If the answer is yes, then you are moving in the right direction. If the answer is no, which sometimes it will be, don't be an asshole to yourself, don't shame yourself, don't guilt yourself, just make adjustments tomorrow. That's it. You get another shot tomorrow to be better. And it's like my favorite quote that James Clearhouse says every action that you take is a vote for the person that you wish to become. And in a vote, you don't have to have 100% of the votes to win. You just need the majority to win. And so another thing that he says is never miss two days in a row. And so if you've been saying you're going to work out and you happen to have a hard day today and you missed a workout today, okay, well then don't miss tomorrow. If you said you were going to make 10 calls to grow your business and you didn't get those 10 calls, just don't miss tomorrow. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be better. You just have to get the majority of the actions in the right direction. And so build this relationship through contact, you know, you don't get close to somebody by thinking about them once a year on New Year's Eve when you're setting your New Year's resolutions. That's not the way that you build a relationship with your future song. You get close to somebody by checking in with them every single day by developing that back and forth relationship. And if you do this for a few months, something strange is going to happen to you. That stranger actually starts to feel like you, like someone that you care for, like someone that you love, like someone that you're responsible for taking care of. And if you were to measure your brain before doing this and after doing this for a few months, that gap that your brain scanner picked up starts to actually close and you're going to see this as someone that you're responsible for taking care of and you're going to see this as yourself. And when that gap closes, the right decisions stop feeling like sacrifices that you're making for a stranger and they start feeling like taking care of someone that you actually love. And now I want to basically throw a warning out here, right? There's one way to really mess this up and I don't want you to do this. Some of you are going to take this and turn your future self into like a drill sergeant. Like my future self would be so disappointed in me. My future self hates that I didn't take the action that I was supposed to take today. No, no, no, no, don't do that. Your future self isn't disappointed in you. They're grateful for you because you're the one who started this. And remember, they need you to actually live to, like they need you to enjoy your life. They're not going to be a drill sergeant say don't enjoy your life. They need you to rest. They need you to have some laughs. They need you to have some fun. They need you to go on dinners with your family. Your future self wants you to build an amazing life. And so you don't, you don't raise somebody by screaming at them. You do this from a place of love. I want you to do this from a place of love and developing a relationship and developing care. Don't do it from a place of fear and having a drill sergeant because fear is, you know, going to get you to start. But love is what gets you to keep going and really finish this. And so I want you to write this down, I really want you to think about this today. Ask yourself this question. What does my future self need from me that I keep refusing to give them? What's my future self need from me that I, I keep refusing to get them. Maybe it's to, to work harder and to grow the business so you create an amazing life. Maybe it's to start taking care of your body more. Maybe it's to have deeper relationships with the people that you love and like answer that question, honestly, and whatever that answer is, give it to them today. Because whether you think about them or not, your future self is coming. God willing, we will all be here in 10 years. And that future self is going to live with every decision that you make today and for the next 3,650 days. And so you have to understand you are the one that's writing their past right now. Just make the story that you're going into right now, one that they will be proud of. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, you will absolutely love my event called Freedom Live in Austin, Texas. And if you've been stuck in the same place for the past few years, it's not because of talent or drive. It's because of the patterns that you cannot see that have been driving you since childhood. And in three days in Austin, we're going to find them. We're going to break them and we're going to send you home a new person with a 12 month plan to make 2027 the best of your life. Once again, the prices are about to go up this upcoming Thursday, November 12th. So grab your ticket now at freedomlive2026.com once again, freedomlive2026.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way and leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.