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352: Stop deferring your best life to "Future You" and create your best life NOW. Tips to focus on your longer term goals over immediate gratification.

  • Writer: Ella
    Ella
  • Jul 22, 2024
  • 5 min read

Episode 352 - Parts I and II

On Air with Ella - live your best life now - episode 352 - "do it now" scrabble

We are wired for instant gratification. But creating our best life asks more of us.


Get episode 352 Part 1 transcript here.

Get episode 352 Part 2 transcript here.


What are You Putting off to Tomorrow?

Brian Moran's "12-Week Year" thesis is a game-changer. He says it's important for businesses to discard 'annualized thinking'; if you have annual plans, even if they're broken down into quarters, you essentially start to believe two things:


  • You believe that it's okay to fall behind a bit because you'll catch up - when in actual fact you fall behind a bit more, and

  • It's like committing to a fantasy: You believe that you're going to achieve greater things because you have the fantasy of more time and the magic of the end of year in mind. 


But, Moran argues, if you bring things much closer, you can usually achieve the things that you said you were going to achieve in a year in about 12 weeks.


This idea in business is entirely relevant to our own self-growth, self-development and self-regulation, especially when it comes to investing in our:


  • Health - diet, exercise, adherence to recommended practices, mental/physical/spiritual wellness, etc

  • Relationships - intimacy, connection, friendships, professional relationships

  • Growth - education, skill acquisition, learning

  • Financial Wellbeing - cutting debt, reducing spending, investing, saving, building, etc


There's some magical thinking involved when we “future cast” i.e., future us will be better at making this happen. "I don’t have the ability, the time, the wherewithal to do this now, but future me will nail this." From food, to relationship improvement, to doing your personal accounting, the truth is that only now matters when it comes to personal development.  


woman holding shopping bags

The Trap of "Present Bias"

There's a psychological concept called "present bias" that explains our tendency to prioritize immediate gratification over long-term goals. It's the reason for example, that we hit the snooze button instead of going for that morning run, or we might splurge on a new outfit instead of putting that money into savings.



model brain on green background

Your Brain is Conflicted

Your brain is wired to prioritize immediate rewards over long-term benefits. This phenomenon partly stems from the constant battle between two distinct regions of our brain: the emotional part and the logical part.


The emotional part, associated with the limbic system, responds positively to instant rewards, while the logical part, located in the prefrontal cortex, tries to reason with us about long-term consequences.


The emotional part of our brain is responsible for processing feelings and automatic reactions. It tends to favor familiarity and instant gratification, even when it may not be in our best interest. On the other hand, the logical part of our brain is responsible for planning, decision-making, and impulse control. It considers the long-term consequences of our actions and pushes us towards choices that align with our future goals.


This constant tug-of-war between the emotional and logical parts of our brain explains why we often find it challenging to stick to our long-term plans. When faced with the opportunity to obtain an immediate reward, our emotional brain tends to overpower our logical brain, leading to impulsive decisions that prioritize short-term gratification.


By understanding how our brain is wired to prioritize immediate rewards and implementing strategies to overcome present bias, we can make more informed decisions that align with our long-term goals and aspirations.


woman thinking

How to Make the Right Choices

4 strategies to help the logical side of your brain win when making decisions:

  1. Make the Right Decision Easier: Your brain seeks the path of least resistance. One effective strategy is to make the right decision the easier choice. By reducing the effort required to make the optimal decision, individuals are more likely to follow through.

  2. Manage Your Environment: Manage your environment to support the desired behavior. This involves identifying triggers or cues that lead to undesired choices and modifying the environment to encourage better decisions.

  3. Tend to Basic Needs: Taking care of basic needs such as sleep, nutrition, and overall well-being is crucial for making sound decisions. When basic needs are met, we are better equipped to resist impulsive choices and focus on long-term goals. Ensuring adequate rest, proper nutrition, and self-care can actually enhance decision-making abilities.

  4. Tie the Best Choice to Immediate Rewards (or Loss Avoidance): By associating the desired behavior with immediate positive outcomes or loss avoidance, we can leverage our emotional brain to make better decisions.



PART II


'Future You" Isn't Coming

In part two of episode 352, we delved into the concept of "future you," that idealized version of ourselves who always seems to have it together and will start making positive changes tomorrow. But here's the truth - future you is a myth. The only version of you that exists and matters is present you.


We discuss practical strategies to kick future you to the curb and start living your best life now. Key Takeaways:


  1. Ditch the All or Nothing Mentality: Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, be willing to take the next best step at any point. Reset and move forward from any setbacks.

  2. Celebrate Small Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate your progress, whether publicly or privately. Small victories build momentum towards bigger goals.

  3. Find an Accountability Buddy: Share your wins and hold each other accountable. Create dedicated check-in times to stay on track with your goals. *** NEED A BUDDY? DM me "buddy" and let's talk about my Accountability coaching program***

  4. Use the 'Future Self' Technique: Imagine your future self as a separate person and consider how your choices today will impact your future self. Think about how you want to be remembered and live a life you're proud of.

  5. Automate Positive Habits: Make the right choices easier by automating tasks that support your goals, such as setting up automatic savings transfers or scheduling workouts in advance.

  6. Break Auto-Pilot Habits: Identify and challenge habits that are on autopilot but not serving you. Take a moment to pause and make intentional choices instead of reacting automatically.


You have the power to create the life you desire. The only person standing in your way is the version of you that chooses the easy, familiar option. Today - right now - you have the ability to make positive changes and lead a fulfilling life.

TRANSCRIPTS

Click to expand the PART ONE transcript


Welcome. You're on air with Ella, where we share simple strategies and tips for living a little better every day. If you're interested in mindset and wellness, or healthy habits and relationships, or hormone health, aging well, and eating well, honestly, if you're into just living better and with more energy, then you're in the right place. Welcome to real, honest, no-fluff conversations about creating a better you. We're not here for perfect. We're here for a little better every day. Let's go!


Hello, you. It's Ella. Today is a solo show. I want to talk to you about something. Before I do that, I just have to check in. How's the summer going for you? If you're in the other side of the world, how's your winter going? How are things going for you? My summer over here, where I am, is going pretty well. It's hotter than the sixth ring of Dante's Inferno, but you will never hear me complain about that because I am solar powered after all. I do have a bone to pick with the universe. I went into Costco. It's mid-July in real time as I'm recording this. I went into Costco and they had Halloween decorations up. Yeah, so I obviously called the police. This is a crime and I won't stand for it. But you know what I will stand for? I will stand for voice messages from my besties being my favorite podcasts. Are you swapping voice messages with your besties? Because they are my favorite podcasts of all time. And recently, Tilly Harris, she's been on the show maybe, I don't know, somewhere between 4 and 40 times. Tilly left me a message about a book that she was reading. I don't think she'll mind me sharing this. And it's a business book. It's called, I think, The 12-Week Year. It's by Brian Moran. I do know that. And of course, you know that I'll link to it if after hearing this, that book becomes of interest to you. But here's the point. She sent me a message about this book. She's like, I'm reading this book. And his main thesis, Moran's main thesis in this 12-week yearbook is a game changer. And this is a book report by proxy. But she said that what his thesis is, is that it's important for businesses to discard annualized thinking. meaning having a plan that extends over 12 months. If you have annual plans, even when they're broken down into quarters, you essentially start to believe two things. One, you believe that it's okay to fall behind a little bit because you'll catch up, you know, you'll catch up later. You have a year, you'll catch up toward the end of quarter or later on in the year when the cycles improve. But in actual fact, you fall behind a little bit more. And she went on to say, it's basically like committing to a fantasy. Like you believe you're going to achieve things because you have the fantasy of the end of year in mind, right? Like future us will take care of this, even though present day us, you know, can't quite heck it. The book goes on to argue that if you bring things much closer, you can actually achieve the things that you said you were going to achieve in a year, in 12 months, in about 12 weeks. And so the idea is to look at your worldview, your planning scope, in 12-week stints instead of 12-month stints. Okay, so we were having this very intellectual conversation like we always do. Of course, our feed is almost always nothing but intellectual exchanges, I swear. But in any case, when she was sharing that with me, I immediately latched on to the idea that we do this all the time. This idea in business is really relevant to our own self-growth, our self-development, and even self-regulation. Basically, to our personal development. There is this magical thinking involved when we future cast when we think future us will be better at making this happen. Like I don't have the ability, the time, the wherewithal to do this thing now, but future me, she is gonna nail this. Whether it's food and eating in a way that nourishes your body or doing your personal accounting, right? But the truth is that only now matters. This concept really, really got me thinking and I wanted to share with you today the relevance of this idea of future us doing better than today us as it relates to personal development. But I also did some research on how we can break this cycle so that we stop putting off the best versions of ourselves to some mythical creature known as future us. In my research, I found that there's actually a psychological concept called present bias that explains our tendency to prioritize immediate gratification or immediate reward over long-term goals. It's the reason, for example, that we hit the snooze button instead of going for that morning walk, or we might splurge on everything in our cart Instead of putting that money into our savings, it is the bias toward immediate reward. What are we putting off until tomorrow? How does present bias become real in our own lives every single day? Well, it typically falls into one of four buckets. Each of these four buckets represents something that we know we want to be investing in. I hesitate to use the word should. I don't think I believe in the word should. But we know it will behoove us to invest in these four buckets, and yet they cost an effort today. So why not take the reward of not doing them, of not making effort, the path of least resistance, because the payoff is actually not coming until later. Those four buckets, if you want to look at the world this way, include our health. So these are choices we make every day about what we eat, about how we move our bodies, whether we adhere to recommended practices, like if your doctor told you to do something or to not do something. It is not smoking, not drinking, or over-drinking, all of the things related to our physical and mental health. Then, the second bucket is relationships. Investing in our intimate relationships, our friendships, our social network, our professional relationships into making the effort, taking the slightly harder, higher road sometimes, and making deposits into these relationships that cost us a little bit of effort today and maybe create greater rewards down the line. The third one is a broad category. We know we want to be investing in our growth. This is our education and our self-improvement and skill acquisition and learning that language. The fourth one is our financial well-being. This is when we want to invest in ourselves, literally, when we want to cut down debt, when we want to reduce our spending, when we want to do the research to get a better mortgage rate, a better cell phone plan, when we know that we want to build a financial portfolio for our future, when we know we want to invest in managing our tax burden better. So the list goes on, you get the idea, but generally I find that we have four big buckets that we want to invest in, and they are physical, mental, spiritual health, relationships, personal growth, and financial well-being. So those are some of the examples that I will use today when we talk about what keeps us from making the effort to invest in our longer term reward when we have immediate gratification, immediate reward in front of our faces. And frankly, it's just easier to do the thing that we've always done. How do we break the cycle so that we can start making the decisions that suit our bigger goals, our vision for our life? you know, all of the heady stuff that we secretly want and then sort of berate ourselves on a day-to-day basis when we can't quite get there. I think it's useful to first talk about why this happens, because there's no place here for shame. There's no place here for self-flagellation. I think it's important to know that this is an extremely human tendency, and that starts with how our brains work. What I am learning is that our brains are wired to prioritize immediate gratification over long-term benefits. I've explained to you that that's called present bias, but I'm not sure if you knew that you were wired for it, okay? This tendency stems from a constant battle between two distinct regions of our brain. The emotional part of our brain, which responds positively to instant rewards, and the logical part, which tries to reason with us about long-term consequences. It's a little bit like having the angel and the devil on each shoulder, and the angel is long-term future you. Who knows that that third drink isn't going to help you. And then you have this little devilish present day you who's like, oh, it'd be so good right now, right here, right now. This emotional part of our brain, which is associated with the limbic system, in case you're interested, is responsible for processing feelings and automatic reactions. And this is the part of your brain that responds well to familiarity, even when it's not in your best interest. Have you ever found yourself dating the same person over and over again? Have you ever found yourself sucked into the same conversation with your mother over and over again? No? Okay. But if you did, that part of you that leans toward the familiar is associated with the limbic system, the emotional part of your brain that is going for more immediate reward. And sometimes familiarity is enough of a reward. So when we're faced with an immediate reward, this area of our brain actually lights up with activity and it releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that you've heard of many times associated with pleasure and reward. And it creates a powerful urge to indulge in short-term gratification. Your brain in this way is kind of working against you if that choice that you're making isn't serving you. Now, on the other hand, you have this angel on your shoulder. Metaphorically speaking, the logical part of your brain, this is the prefrontal cortex, okay, the logical thinking part of your brain, and it's responsible for planning for decision making and impulse control. Doesn't that sound so boring? I'm kidding, sort of, not really. This region right here, prefrontal cortex, it tries to consider the long-term consequences of our actions and it pushes us toward choices that align with our future goals. That is, by the way, why I say it's so important to identify your future goals, to identify your values, to identify what's important. for you, to you, so that your brain has something to latch onto. When you have done that sort of introspection, then you are giving your prefrontal cortex something to latch onto so that the logical part of your brain can argue against the shorter term, less beneficial decision. The struggle between these two brain regions explains why every single one of us at times can find it challenging to stick to our long-term plans. When we're close to obtaining a reward, our emotional brain tends to overpower our logical brain, and that is what leads to those impulsive choices. Let's talk about this in real life, okay? I'm gonna use a really base example, forgive me. But the emotional part of your brain responds really positively to instant gratification, right? When given the choice of having one glass of wine or the third glass of wine, whatever version of that works for you, in feeling like too much more than serves you, then you've got that part of your brain pushing you, the emotional part of your brain pushing you toward the instant gratification, the immediate reward of that first, second, third glass of wine in this example. The logical part of your brain tries to reason with you. It might tell you that, you know, less alcohol or no alcohol is better for your long-term health and that you really don't need the wine. There's no real need for it. And the emotion and the logic parts of your brain are constantly in this battle trying to show you why you should choose one option and not the other. So, okay, so which part of the brain wins in the end? It depends. So what I'm going to share with you today are some ways to help the logical side of your brain win when you find yourself in those situations. But before I do that, I've got to share a really interesting study that I found when I was researching this concept. I came across the work of a gentleman named David Laibson of Harvard University. And he says, our emotional brain wants to max out the credit card, order dessert, and smoke a cigarette. Our logical brain knows that we should save for retirement, go for a jog, and quit smoking. Our emotional brain has a hard time imagining the future, even though our logical brain clearly sees the future consequences of our current actions." And then he shared the results of an experiment. I think this is fascinating. Wait, let me open this for you. Sorry if you hear clicks, but get this, okay? They gave a group of people the following choice. They said, if you were deciding today, would you choose fruit or chocolate in your pantry for next week? Okay, nobody puts fruit in the pantry. I'm sorry. There's a flaw in this study, but if you can stick with me. So you're deciding today, would you choose to stock up on fruit or chocolate? Okay. Today, subjects typically chose fruit for next week. 74% of them said, yeah, you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and stock up on the fruit for next week, thank you so much. Then they asked them, all right, but if you're deciding for today, right, today we're making this decision, still, that part didn't change. If you're deciding today, would you choose fruit or chocolate to be handed to you today? So you're not only choosing today, you actually receive the item today. 70% of them chose chocolate. 70% of them chose chocolate. Let me just synopsize that for you. They wanted future them to be served oranges because future you is always going to make the better choice. When it came down to it, they wanted present day them to receive the chocolate. 70% of them chose chocolate for today, whereas 74% of them chose oranges for a later date. Does this sound familiar to you? Can present day you relate to this concept of future you doing much better? We are going to have a go at future you in just a minute. But first, I want to deliver as promised and talk to you about how to make the right choices when you become aware of this tension between your limbic brain and your prefrontal cortex, duking it out before you make the decision that serves you. Okay, guys, I'm trying something new and I want to share it with just you, just you. I am going to be offering a limited amount of slots for accountability coaching, if you will. It's not really coaching. It's just having me as your accountability buddy for 30 days. So you pick the goal, you determine the thing you are trying to do or not do for 30 days and connect with me as your accountability buddy. And every single day you check in on that goal. You check in when it's done or you check in to be accountable if it's not done. and you do subject yourself to the occasional question and voice note from me, and you get an acknowledgement every day. This is much less of an investment than one-on-one personalized coaching. This is a few minutes out of your day to commit to consistent action for yourself toward the thing you are trying to do or stop doing. So maybe you want to go 30 days without smoking. Maybe you want to go 30 days with walking every single day. I don't know what you're trying to start and I don't know what you're trying to stop. Whatever it is, I think it will help you enormously to have an accountability buddy. DM me buddy. DM me the word buddy or hit me up anywhere you can find me with the word buddy and we can connect on this. Consistent action, consistent accountability, be responsible for your results every single day for 30 days. Let's see what happens. I look forward to hearing from you. And the word is buddy. How to make the right choices. Well, there are three key things you need to remember. One, the brain wants the least resistance. It wants the path of least resistance. Number two, the brain loves what's familiar. Doesn't matter if it's good, doesn't matter if it's bad, the brain loves what's familiar. Finally, number three, the brain will act from emotion, the limbic part of your brain, unless we can activate our logical brain, our prefrontal cortex. So the brain will default to emotion unless we can activate our logical brain. So let's talk about four things that you can do, four hacks, if you will, to help your brain make the right choices for you in the long run. Number one, make the right decision easier. Make it more convenient. Make the right decision more rewarding. Make it less hard to make the right choice for you. One of the ways to do that is to make the easy decision, the emotional decision, harder. The instant gratification decision, make it harder. Create friction for the decision you don't want to make. Some ways to make the right decision easier or the wrong decision harder include putting your workout clothes out the night before you go to sleep, okay? Moving your alarm clock to where you have to get out of bed to turn it off, right? Create that friction. Enroll in auto savings, any auto deposit, auto savings accounts. Your retirement account at work can be funded automatically so that it takes absolutely no effort from you to make the right decision for you. Keep wine out of your house. Create much less convenience for the habits that you are trying to break. Whatever it is, make the right decision easier and the less optimal decision harder. There are so many ways that you can do this. Number two, manage your environment. Let's say you're snacking at night, okay? What are some simple changes that you can make to your environment? Can you move the snacky items to a different spot? Can you brush your teeth and floss after dinner? Can you take up something else to do in front of the TV? Oftentimes you're just acting an autopilot and it's almost like a ritual for you. Where can you break the rituals and do something with more intention? What else can you do instead of mindless snacking? Design your environment around that. Drinking, for example. If you're trying to change a habit, what environment, what circumstances do you avoid? If you're trying to drink less, if you're trying to spend less, if you're trying to complain less, anything that you're trying to turn the dial down. What environment, what circumstances do you need to avoid, and what environment do you want to create for yourself? What circumstances do you want to actively seek? If I want to read a book, for example, I will put the book on my nightstand to create a little environment, reduce the friction, and make it much easier for it to be right there beckoning me at night to put my phone down. Manage your environment. Number three, tend to your basic needs. If your brain is pushing you towards something, it might be an indicator of your energy levels, of how well you're taking care of yourself. If I'm tired, for example, you can forget about me focusing on nutrition, right? I'm eating what I grab. If I'm not sleeping, I am certainly not building up the reserves to tackle the harder parts of my day. Remember, we talked about the things that you want to invest in, be it your health, your relationships, your growth, your financial wellness, any of those big buckets. I am doing zero long-term thinking in any of those areas when my basic needs aren't met. When your basic needs aren't being taken care of, when your tank is on empty, your mood drops and your reasoning skills worsen and you do what is easy and effortless and more familiar to you. So when we aren't sleeping, when we aren't taking care of our fundamental needs, it just creates an enormous hurdle to get over to be able to then switch into the logical side of our brain. Okay, we're just running around limbic system monkeys. Number four, tie your best choice to immediate rewards to activate that emotional side of your brain. What I mean by that is the optimal choice, the one that we often don't make, tie that to an immediate reward. So you're hacking your desire for instant gratification. Let me break it down. Our emotions can easily overpower any logical deduction skills that we have, right? We already talked about that. But if you can tie the better choice to something else to make the reward more immediate, or frankly, the pain of not doing it more immediate, then you can start to use our tendency toward that emotional side of our brain to make the longer term good decision. So let me tell you some really small ways that I do this. My husband and I needed to do our estate planning, which is just a fancy way of saying we needed to do our wills. And they were all wrong. We needed to completely redo them. It had been years since we even touched them. We talked about how we needed to do that for like two years. Okay. And then finally I was like, look, we, I mean, we agreed that before we plan our next trip, our next adventure, before we plan any kind of vacation, we are not even, we're not touching that. We're not opening Google flights until we have completed our estate planning paperwork. So we tied the pain which frankly, talking about it for 18 months is much harder than actually just doing the paperwork, by the way. That's everything though, right? Like talking about how you need to start walking, it just takes so much more effort than like going for a 12-minute walk. But anyway, I digress. So once we tied the estate planning to the freedom to be able to plan our next adventure, we knock that sucker out. Okay, it took three days. I need to change our cell phone plan. Okay, I know that I'm overpaying for our phones. What reward can I create to make that incentivizing? How can I create a reward that I can tie to the effort of inconveniencing myself or doing the adult boring long term thing now? All these bills, all these utility bills that if you don't look at them for five years, then you're definitely overpaying on them, right? We knew we needed a whole new cable internet plan that we were overpaying, whatever, that we had been neglecting it for too long. So I canceled Netflix. I canceled Hulu. I canceled Apple. I canceled all the things. until we revisited it and revamped it. Now, I'm not a dictator. I didn't go around and just unplug everything in my house. We talked about it and I was like, let's cancel everything. It'll motivate us to get it done. So guess what? We got it done and we're saving like 50 bucks a month or something. And then we turned one of them back on. If you've listened to me before, you know that I rotate those services anyway. We do Netflix for three months, we cancel it, we pay for another one, we rotate them. All right, what if you're trying to eat better or exercise consistently? What is the reward of doing so? What is the cost of not doing so? Can you find anything in there that helps you use your need for instant gratification and tie it to the better decisions for you? I bet you can. For example, this is embarrassingly true, I am motivated by fear. Some people are really motivated by reward and positive feedback. I am often motivated by fear or cost. If I find myself in some kind of rut physically, I will sign up for a race, okay? Then I am completely motivated by not embarrassing myself and it gets me out of that rut and it gets me going. I am actually motivated by fear and I leverage that when I feel stuck, when I feel like I'm in a rut? Are you trying to avoid that second drink? What reward can you create for that choice? What can you tie it to that gives you satisfaction in that moment to help you make the better choice so that you're not relying on willpower? And alternatively, it has to be said, what cost can you tie to falling short? Cost is another word for fear, really, but what cost can you tie to falling short? If you're trying to avoid that second drink, maybe you can think about how you don't want the puffy eyes and the bloated face and maybe even a headache or some sort of physical discomfort the next day. Maybe you say, I don't want to drink at this work event and the cost of falling short is compromising your credibility in front of your co-workers. Now you can find fault with all these examples. It's not my gift coming up with the absolute ideal optimal example. Work with me here. But I hope these anecdotes help you see that in our day-to-day life, wherever we feel like we're falling short, We continue to repeat the same patterns, we get frustrated with ourselves, that there are actually things that we can do to hack our own systems and to lean in to the way that we're built, but get a different result with just a modicum of intention and forethought. At the end of the day, our decisions are often driven by factors outside of reasoning. Distractions and emotions, they lead us away all the time from where we want to go. So we rely on future us to do better. Remember future us? But if you can find ways to get your brain to cooperate and behave according to your goals now, then you are so on your way to tipping the scales back in your favor. Okay, I don't know if you noticed the difference in the sound a few minutes ago, but here's the truth. As I was recording this episode, we lost all of our power. I am actually talking to you now, future me is talking to old me and joining these different parts of the episode together to make one episode. The power went out, I had to restart and it made me realize something. I am throwing so much at you. We started off by talking about how present bias makes us believe that immediate gratification is much more important than the longer term view, right? We're predisposed to lean toward the thing that we have in our immediate grasp. I told you about Tilly's observation about how when you think of things that you can accomplish in a year, for example, then you feel like it's okay to fall behind because future you will take care of it. And that at the end of the day, that is committing to a fantasy that you're going to achieve things because you have the fantasy of later you doing it. I told you about how people when given the choice, they want to order the oranges for themselves tomorrow, but they want the chocolate today. Thank you. I told you that your brain is wired to do this, that your brain has the limbic system competing with the prefrontal cortex and half of you wants the thing and it wants it right now and it has an urge, a powerful urge that you have to be extremely intentional about overcoming if you leave it to making decisions in the moment. I also shared with you that at the end of the day, there are lots of small ways that you can set yourself up for success. You can make the right decision easier. You can manage your environment better. You can tend to your basic human needs so that your guard is not down. And then finally, I shared with you some of the ways that I tie the best choice to a more immediate reward to activate the emotional side of my brain to work for the better longer term decision for me. I am going to take a break right now. I'm going to drop both episodes at the same time, but I'm going to leave this with you for you to marinate on it. And then I want to talk to you in part B about future you, the mythical superhero who will always do better and some very specific ways, maybe six, five or six ways that we can tackle the myth of future us and bring our goals, our aspirations, our objectives, our best choices into present day. So I'm going to stop, I'm going to drop this one, and then I'm going to immediately finish this off and drop part two. I'll see you there.


Okay, if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with someone you care about. And be sure to check out our new YouTube channel and head to onairella.com for today's show notes. You can also learn about how to work with me there, onairella.com. And I would love to hear from you, so if you DM me on Instagram, I promise I will reply. P.S. All the links you need for us to connect are right here in your podcast app, in the description for today's episode. Check them out. Thanks for listening, and thanks for inspiring me. You are, quite simply, awesome.

Click to expand the PART TWO transcript


Welcome! You're on air with Ella, where we share simple strategies and tips for living a little better every day. If you're interested in mindset and wellness, or healthy habits and relationships, or hormone health, aging well, and eating well, honestly, if you're into just living better and with more energy, then you're in the right place. Welcome to real, honest, no-fluff conversations about creating a better you. We're not here for perfect. We're here for a little better every day. Let's go!


Okay, we're in the future now. I hope you just listened to episode 352. This is part two of episode 352. I wanted to leave you with some of the concepts that we discussed there from present bias to the emotional side of your brain competing with the logical side of your brain for each decision that you make in your everyday life. And I wanted to come back on in part two and talk about future you, the mythical superhero who will always do better. You know that person, right? The idealized version of yourself who's going to start that healthy lifestyle tomorrow, learn a new language next year, and definitely for sure start paying attention to her retirement accounts. Like absolutely happening someday. Future you is awesome. She is a master of all habits. Future you, she will always do better. So present you doesn't have to. The truth is, and you know this, the truth is we are always, and I could not mean this more literally, we are always present us. The only version of you that exists and that ever will exist is present you.


As always, I want to talk to you about this in practical terms. How many times have you caught yourself saying, I'll start that plan, that project, that practice, whatever the thing is. I'll start that when things settle down. Or idealize the time in your future when things are easier to balance or easier to stick to or easier to start. Future me will handle it, right? I probably haven't said those words literally, but I have lived those words, literally. Future me will handle it. We've all been there, constantly pushing things off to some mythical version of ourselves that's going to have it all figured out. Hell, I buy a bunch of fresh produce at the grocery store and then I come home and unwrap a protein bar because I bought the fresh stuff for future me. That stuff has to be washed and prepped and cooked and prepared and blah. And future me, she is really going to enjoy the effort to eat well, but present me is hungry. So I'm unwrapping something. But here's the cold hard truth. Future you is a lie. She doesn't exist. She never shows. And she's not the person you think of as the best version of yourself. She is not it.


In his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear says that each action you take is a vote for the person you want to become. But I would say, I would say this, every action you take or don't take today is who you are now and who you will be. Because tomorrow is just the next today. Who are you now? That is it. That is the only you that matters. There are loads of ways to resist punting your best work to future you. We have covered a lot of them on the air before. I promised you to name five or six ways to kick future you to the curb and bring your best life into the present. I'm going to share this with you now. In no particular order, number one is ditch the all or nothing mentality. I was just talking about this recently with Taylor Elise Morrison in a recent episode, right? Ditching the all or nothing mentality. From saving money, to exercising, to eating in a way that helps us and doesn't harm us, we tend to have a 100% or fk all mentality. Right? Full bore or fk all, as my friend says. I did this with my eating. When I had a disordered relationship with food, if I had had a bad event, I let that be a summary judgment of the day. It determined my entire day. I figured future me would do better tomorrow. The truth is we can turn around a bad choice within the hour. You can reset in one minute. You can stop acting out of habit and flip on the intention switch in one second. So yeah, ditch the full bore or fuck all, all or nothing thinking and be willing to take the next best step at any point. Be willing to reset. Number two, this sounds like flimsy positivity, but I recommend that you find small ways to celebrate small wins. Brag about your progress. Brag about it on social media. Ask for a high five. I am on threads, Instagram's threads, right? And I love seeing people say, hey, you don't know me, but I haven't had a drink in 80 days. They're just out there posting this to the world. I haven't had a drink in 80 days. Or I ran my first 5K today. Or I guessed it on someone's podcast for the first time today. They're just throwing it out there. And they are getting accolades and high fives and hearts and likes from people and words of encouragement. You know why? Because we're human. And everybody loves a gold star. And maybe that's not the number one way to motivate yourself. But let me tell you something. No matter how small, telling someone right? Telling someone that you made progress in some way is motivating. Or simply, if you're uncomfortable with the public nature of it all, simply pause and tell yourself, good job. When's the last time you did that? Celebrate the small wins. All right, number three, you want the easiest way to make a change stick? Find an accountability buddy. I'm serious. Take it seriously. Share your wins. Hold each other accountable for the fails. Maybe create consequences for yourself if you don't meet your intended goal. That's up to you. Don't clog up this chat with other stuff. Dedicate a separate text thread or time with your partner, if this is face-to-face, time with your partner or your bestie to check in that is dedicated to your accountability check-in. This can be three minutes of your day. In general, I recommend that you take it as seriously as you are about making the change that you have in mind. Number four, use the future self technique. We've talked about this before. Remember 86-year-old me? She's very bossy. She's very feisty. And she helps me make a lot of decisions. And she helps me settle down when I'm like kind of spiraling out about something. Try to imagine your future self as a separate person. When making a decision, ask yourself, how will tomorrow me feel about this choice? Like if we're going to have a future me, right? Then use that hypothetical to your advantage. How will tomorrow you feel about this choice? How will you feel about the choice you're making one year from now? Here's a stretch, but it's a high-impact one. You might think it's morbid, but ask yourself about post-mortem you. That's terrible. But really think about this. Like, is there a habit that's really like dominating your landscape right now? Something that is eating you up inside or frankly just keeping holding you back? Have you ever asked yourself, when I'm gone, what will I want people to celebrate about me? What what do I want to have done? Who will I have wanted to be? What kind of life will I be proud to have lived? If you're able to indulge in future me that way, as a mirror, then maybe she can serve you. That's the future self technique. Okay, two more, two more. Number five. This is just really practical.


Remember when I said in part one that the brain likes the path of least resistance? One way to reduce the friction of the right choice for you is to automate it. Remove the opportunity for choosing immediate gratification that doesn't serve you by automating important tasks. So set up automatic transfers to your savings account. Use apps that limit your phone after a certain time, right? Or prep your meals in advance. Basically, ask yourself, what can I automate? Make that right choice before present bias kicks in. For me, this is everything from auto payments to pay all of my bills and to never, ever carry a balance on a credit card, auto deposits to savings, to retirement accounts. But it's also as simple for me as calendaring my workout time so that there's an automatic block that isn't booked than for something else. It's creating a shortcut on my phone to turn the screen to grayscale at night. If you want to stop scrolling at night, set up a shortcut to turn on grayscale. Your phone will no longer be in color and it is so much less enticing. I might get my workout kit organized and set it up in my closet so it's easy to get caffeinated and get going rather than wasting my time looking for my biking shoes the next morning. You get the idea. Where can you make things frictionless so you have a greater chance of doing them? Reduce the friction. Reduce the thinking. Reduce the effort required to make the choices that serve the best version of you. Okay, finally, number six, this is the exact opposite in different contexts. I will reverse this and look at where I am doing things automatically and it's not serving me. You can ask yourself, where am I acting on autopilot? And it's not serving me. You know, are you buckling your seatbelt on autopilot? That's outstanding. Are you flossing without debating the effort every single day? That's good. Okay? But are you auto-spending? Are you auto-drinking? Are you auto-complaining? Are you staying up too late because you're too tired to go to bed? Are you mindlessly snacking at night and you don't even taste what you're eating? Am I scrolling my phone without even thinking? Can I replace that with a book? Am I automatically ordering that second drink at a dinner? Am I automatically responding to a negative experience? weren't expecting that one, were you? Am I automatically triggered? Am I automatically responding to a negative experience? I'm an adult, I can break the auto cycle. What happens if I take a beat on any one of these scenarios that might be dogging you? What happens if you take a beat? What happens if you turn off cruise control and make your bad habit harder or at least delay them so that they become a choice and not a reflex? This one's harder. This one's elite level, right? It's pro.


You can always, always choose. instant reward. Always. You're a grown-up and that is an option. You can have ice cream for dinner. We're grown-ups here. But if you're someone who is hungry for more, hungry for the best version of you, someone who wants to be proud of the life that you've made for yourself and the choices that led you there, then congratulations. You are elite level. You want the best for yourself. Well, guess what? You deserve it. You deserve the three seconds it takes to switch from emotional baby lady to logical intentional woman. You deserve the compound effect of making great choices that serve you. So make them. Choose you. Compile a series of great decisions for yourself and be amazed. Listen, I challenge you to pick one of these principles and apply it to your life this week. The show notes for this episode, for both part A and part B, will be the entire transcript of the show, so you can just grab what suits you. Those will both be linked in the episode description. I'll leave you with this, though. The only person standing in your way of your best life is the version of you that keeps choosing the easiest, most familiar option now. The great news is that the only person you need in order to create your very best life is you. Awake, intentional you.


Yes, embracing the absolute power of present you takes intention. It takes effort and it takes practice. Don't leave that practice to future you. Don't start tomorrow. Future you, she's not coming. Today you has the power to make the change happen. And she is pretty freaking amazing. So give her a chance. Okay, if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with someone you care about. And be sure to check out our new YouTube channel and head to OnAirElla.com for today's show notes. You can also learn about how to work with me there, OnAirElla.com. And I would love to hear from you, so if you DM me on Instagram, I promise I will reply. P.S. All the links you need for us to connect are right here in your podcast app in the description for today's episode. Check them out. Thanks for listening, and thanks for inspiring me. You are, quite simply, awesome.




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