Discovering your Best Possible Self

0:04 This is Crappy to Happy and I am your host, Cas Doune. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Hello and welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Happy. We are coming to the end of another year. I actually can't believe that it's a year ago that I was planning what episodes who are going to release over the Christmas period so that I could take a little break, and we're here again. It just feels like this year flew by.

1:01 I don't know if that's how it feels for you. I know as we get older, it tends to years tend to feel like they go more quickly, but this one seems to have accelerated. Anyway. At this time of year, we tend to get a little bit reflective. You might not be there yet. Maybe you're still madly finishing things at work before you can take some time off over Christmas or maybe you are kind of starting to wind down now. You might want to save this episode for when you've got a little bit of space, because what I wanted to share with you today were a couple of exercises that can be really useful as you go into that reflective kind of space, reviewing where you've been and what you would like to create in the new year.

1:47 You all know I'm not a fan of New Year's resolutions. I'll do another episode about that just in case you're tempted to make New Year's resolutions. Let me just discourage that it's very, very unhelpful practice, which only leads to you feeling like a failure by about February if that. But it is a really useful time to be reflective and to be thinking, and it's quite natural, I guess, to start thinking about what you would like to create in the coming year. I tend to journal, and not daily by any stretch. In fact, sometimes I'll open up my journal and realize it's been two or three weeks since I've picked it up, so and then there are weeks when I'll journal every single day. It's not a regular thing that I do, and I journal for a lot of different reasons, And sometimes it's just to document what's happening so that i'll have a memory of that.

2:41 Sometimes it is focusing on things that I want to create in my life. You might have heard me talk on this show about my magic Manifesting journal. When I write things down, they seem to miraculously unfold in my life. I don't know how, but it works. And yeah, just things that I might be going through, or you know, using it as a tool to process my thoughts and feelings about particular things. But I just finished a journal just the other day, and this particular journal I had bought and I loved it. It's got a really pretty cover, and I remember holding on to it and telling myself that I couldn't open it and start using it until i'd finished the journal that I was already using. And so it was a really big moment when I actually opened up and started using this journal. And that date was the thirty first of December two thousand and twenty one, so it was New Year's Eve and we were at home.

3:35 We hadn't really gone out to do very much, and I used my brand new journal to write my thoughts about where I was, where we'd been and what I was envisioning for the coming twelve months in twenty twenty two. And so as I wrapped up that very journal just this week, I looked back to the beginning, to that very first entry and after really because not a single thing that I was planning for myself over the coming twelve months eventuated, because as we know now, three months or four months later was when this opportunity to move Overseas presented itself. And so literally everything that I had, even things that I had booked, travel that I had booked, concerts that I was going to see, not a single one of them actually happened, but a whole lot of different stuff happened. And so it was a reminder to me, I guess that we don't know what's around the corner.

4:31 At that point, I felt like we had literally just moved into a new house. So I felt pretty settled and pretty comfortable that I knew where I was at and I knew what I could plan for in the subsequent twelve months. I know that seems like a foolish thing to say, especially after we had just been through twenty twenty which taught us all that nothing is certain, that you can never anticipate what's around the corner. But I feel like by the end of twenty twenty one we were starting to kind of feel the ground under our feet again and start to regain some sense of control over our destiny. And so for me it was quite interesting to just remember and remind myself that, you know, we can make all the best, best laid plans, but we have to allow some flexibility for what might be around the corner, and it might be something better than we could ever have imagined. All we can do is set our intentions and set some goals, and I guess just hold them lightly and be willing to have some flexibility if you know, if things don't go to plan, I'll talk to you more about goal setting and what I think is some really useful things to keep in mind as we get closer to the first of January, is you really start to you know, when that instinct kind of kicks in and you start really thinking about what you want to do in twenty twenty four. For now, I wanted to share with you just a couple of exercises that can be useful for self reflection. And like I said, you might want to save these bod and you've got a bit of sl space. One is an exercise called your Best Possible Self. This is a positive

6:06 psychology exercise. It's been used and researched since about two thousand and one, and a range of studies have found it to be really effective in terms of improving mood and well being, particularly if you do this exercise more than once, so if you do it once a week, or if you do it and then you spend some time going back and rereading it or adding to it. So I'm going to share with you now what that exercise is. So the idea is that you visualize yourself at some point in the future. Now, for the purpose of this exercise, you may like to think about a year from now. You might like to think about the end of twenty twenty four, or the way this exercise has more traditionally been used is to go further than that, push yourself out to maybe five years. You might push yourself out to ten years, but push yourself out to some date in the future where and you know, almost imagine yourself, this older version of you, and imagine that life has turned out really well. All of the things, all the things that you aspire to achieve and do and become. It's all turned out exactly like you would want it to. So you would be thinking about your personal life, the personal goals and things that you might aspire to achieve, whether that be learning a skill, running

7:37 a marathon, learning a language, pushing yourself, doing some personal development kind of work, or just personal goals. You might have travel goals, So thinking about the personal things and things turning out really well. And the thing about pushing this out a little bit longer, it means it does give you that kind of time and space to put in the planning and the preparation or this thing to come to fruition. You know, it could be buying a house or renovating a house. When you think about then your career, your professional life, what might that look like. And again by pushing it out a little maybe to five years, that allows space if you, for example, thought you might want to retrain into a different career, get a degree, get a qualification, some promotion, some a job that or role that you aspire to to do, training skills, professional goals in general, where do you see yourself if things have turned out really well and you've fulfilled your goals in that area. This really does force you to think really deeply about what it is that you would like to achieve, Like where are you headed in these areas of your life? And the third is relational, So thinking about your relationships with your partner if you don't have one, who might that be, what qualities might they have?

9:03 Where might you be in your relationship in five years time, And not just your primary relationship, your friendships, your social life, your contribution to community, all of the various relationships that you have, the people in your life, what might that look like if things have turned out really well. Who are the people you have around you, how do you connect with them? What do you do together? What's the quality of those relationships? Like, So, as you reflect on these three areas of your life, and I'm going to leave it up to you to really think about what time frame you choose to put on this, and don't overthink that. I would encourage you to just kind of go with your gut then flesh this out in as much detail as possible, and then spend about twenty minutes or so writing down, writing down what is that vision if you imagine yourself at this date in the future and everything has turned out really well. The goals that you have upset for yourself, the aspirations that you have for yourself, for your life, for your relationships. What does it look like? Bring some emotion into it, and bring as much detail as possible into it. Where are you living, who with? How do you spend your day? Where do you go for work? Do you leave your house for work or do you go somewhere else? What's that like?

10:30 What's that environment like? How do you spend your free time? Who do you spend your spare time with? What do you do for holidays? What are your creative outlets? How's your health, what's your financial situation? Like all of these areas like really get detailed and create this vision for your future. Research would indicate that when you're able to do this exercise and if you're able to revisit that, perhaps do it again. Read it daily over the course of a couple of weeks. It's a really great way to start to get some clarity about where you want to be in life. And like I said, it gives you enough lead time that you can start. You can then peel that back, kind of reverse engineer that and bring it back to well. If I wanted to do this.

11:28 If I want this to become a reality, then what steps do I need to take to get there? What research do I need to do, What planning do I need to start to do. How might I start to make some forward progress towards this ideal version of my future. So I'm going to leave that one with you. I might see if I can link to a pdf in the show notes or on my website, if you go to my website where I host all of these podcast episodes, I'll link to an exercise that you can this exercise so that you can download that and do that yourself. And I hope you find that really useful and inspiring. And it's you know, it's an exercise that's widely used and like I said, well researched and proven to improve your mood, increase optimism, improve well being. It's good for you.

12:19 It's good for you, and hopefully it's a fun, inspiring thing to do. And the second exercise I wanted to share with you is another one which is a little more personal. This one is kind of about the qualities. I guess, the qualities in yourself and how you give yourself the best opportunity to be the best version of yourself. So we've talked about your life and what you might like to create in your life. Thinking in a little different way now about yourself, the question is who are you when you are at your best? So what are your best qualities? What are the qualities that shine forth from you when you are really on your game, like when you are your best version of you. For some people that will be maybe something like they're really creative.

13:10 Some people are just witty, have a great quick sense of humor, patient, always have time for other people. It might be that you're really a great problem solver, great in a crisis, generous with other people, always have something to give or some wise words to share. What are the qualities that you bring, what are your strengths, what are the values that you kind of embody? And you know, knowing that this is going to be different for different people, so you know, it might seem like, well everybody would have, you know, if we listed off all of the best qualities in humans, But we all are unique individuals. We've all got our own kind of unique strengths and contributions.

13:57 And it might help you to think about this when you know that you're not at your best when you know, and this might be you right now, if you're feeling like really worn down and tired, like you're crawling to the end of the year and you're kind of at the end of your rope, you might notice that you are not at your best, and so that can be a useful way to reverse, you know, if you think about where you're not being at your best, and you can can kind of help remind you of what you would prefer like, how you would prefer to be showing up and the qualities you would prefer to be demonstrating. Because maybe sometimes you know, at your best, you're a very patient person, you're a great listener, and you're finding that you're really short, and you're irritable and you're impatient with people at the moment, and you know that that's not who you are when you're at your best. Maybe you can't find the humor and you're normally really lighthearted and take things pretty easily and can find the humor in most situations, and you've just lost that because you're too exhausted. Perhaps you know, maybe you are that creative person, always coming up with new different ideas and inspiration, and you're feeling really blocked and stifled and stagnant because you don't have the space for that. So you see what I mean, You think about who you are at your best, and then how do you know when you're not? Like what are the sort of the qualities that you start to come out in you, the things that you don't feel proud of, and you know that that's not really you.

15:21 So when you've got that picture of who your best version of yourself is, the kind of person that you really aspire to be when you are at your best, then thinking about what needs to happen for you to be at your best. What are the conditions required for you to be at your best? And perhaps it is you need to be getting seven or eight hours sleep every night. Maybe you're at your best when there's white space in your dary, you're not back to back to back to back with meetings and deadlines and feeling stretched and pressured. Maybe it's when you know you have help. Maybe when you've got people you can share the load that really helps you to be at your best. Maybe when you don't drink alcohol, or maybe when you drink less coffee or eat less sugar. Maybe there are certain sort of things that you know, traps that you fall into that ultimately kind of undermine your chances of really showing up as your best self. So what are those conditions?

16:24 Maybe it's when you get to the gym, when you actually get time to go and exercise, when you have time to have outlets and see your friends or whatever it is. And if for whatever reason that's not happening and that's not able to happen, you know that that really affects you. And then once you know that, how can you start to set up your life so that you give yourself the best chance to be your best self? So if you know that you need to be getting enough sleep, that you need to be not drinking, if you know that five cups of coffee a d ay is just making you agitated and irritable and then keeping you awake at night, whatever it is for you, how can you put things in place so that you can make sure that you can kind of create those conditions to give yourself the best chance. And again, this is why this is a useful exercise to do when you do have a bit of a break, when you've got time to stop, which for many of us, I know it's not everybody, but for many of us we get a little bit of that gap between the Christmas New Year period, even if it's just the public holidays, that you can actually stop and take a break and have a moment to step back and reflect. These are just some useful things that you can reflect on so that as you go forward, when you get back into the swing of things again and things start to pick up and get busy again in the new year, then you can be thinking about what are the non negotiables for you? What do you need to make sure is in place so that you can continue to show up as your best self at work, for your partner, for your kids, for yourself, for your friends, for the people around you, so that they're getting the best version of you. It's not selfish.

17:57 It's good for everybody. If you are at your best more of the time, certainly is better for you though. So they're just two little exercises that can be really useful. I hope that it gives you something to think about to reflect on. If you're a journaling type, then I would encourage you to grab your journal and to spend some time on those. Like I said, as we get closer to the new Year. I will come back and I'll have a little chat with you about some of the helpful ways that you can set goals for the new year that do not involve making New Year's resolutions. Don't do that. And I do hope that you get some space, that you get some nice quality time with the people who matter most to you when you get through to the end of the working year. I hope that you are able to be with the people that you enjoy. I hope that you're able to set boundaries so that you're able to manage your energy, manage your time, try to manage your expectations. Don't set yourself to achieve such a high standard with whatever food presence. I don't know whatever it is, do you know, I just relax.

19:02 None of it really matters. All that matters is being with the people that you love the most, that you enjoy the most, or being on your own and enjoying that. If that is where you're at and that is your preference. Don't be with people you don't want to be with. That's always an option too. For a lot of people having solo Christmases this year and actually really looking forward to them. So that's you then try to find a joy in that as well, and enjoy that solo time, whatever it is that you're doing, Be safe, be happy, and I will catch you on the next episode of Crabby to Happy