Ready to become the woman you’ve dreamed of being? I got you. In this episode, I’m diving deep into what it truly means to create your Future Self—because it’s more than just setting goals or planning for the next milestone. It’s about stepping into the identity of who you want to be, and it starts right now. Whether it’s how you show up as a mom, how you prioritize your health, or the career you’re building, your future self is already out there waiting for you. 

In this episode, I explore why your brain resists change, how to break free from past patterns, and why imagining your Future Self is one of the most powerful tools you have. I’ll show you how you’re already shaping your future every day—whether you’re aware of it or not—and how to start making intentional choices that align with the person you want to become.

If you’re a mom, you’re in the right place. This is a space designed to help you overcome challenges and live your best life. I’d love for you to join me inside the Mom On Purpose Membership where we take this work to the next level.

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Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome to this episode of the Mom On Purpose podcast. We are going to be talking about your future self. I love this topic. I know many of you who are my students love this topic, and inside the Mom on Purpose Membership this month, there is a brand new class called Future Self Tools. I thought, what better way to start the new year off than with an entire kit of tools teaching you how to create your future self on purpose.

And with that, I want to offer you this podcast episode that kind of is complimentary. And I’m going to go through, you know, lots of things that aren’t in the course in today’s episode. And at the end, I’m going to leave you with some really helpful, questions that you can ask yourself. Whether you answer them kind of just in journaling or to yourself, it doesn’t really matter, but I find that these questions are really powerful when you’re doing future self work. So what I want to start off with today is why your future self matters. And what am I even talking about when I talk about future self? So future self is more than just a vague idea of what you want in life. It’s about consciously choosing who you want to become in the future. It’s deciding, it’s intentionally thinking about and planning your future self.

And that is transformative because it will help you break out of default behaviors and past decisions that are no longer what you want for your future. So you are already shaping your future self, and I’m doing it too. We all are, we do this subconsciously, but oftentimes it’s not intentional. It’s based on what other people in society tell us we should do. A really easy example to understand this is saving for retirement. So if you save for and plan for your retirement, or maybe you already are, are retired or it’s coming up, you have thought about your financial future and you have prepared for that financial future you’ve prepared for retirement, that is planning your future self. So we don’t talk about it typically in that way, at least we never did when I was a financial planner or an attorney. And yeah, that’s exactly what it is.

That’s all we’re talking about here. So it’s not something that’s more, woo or mystical than that. It’s just broader and more comprehensive so that it includes all other areas besides, you know, your financial life. Because, you know, as kids, we’re taught to think about our future in terms of education, maybe in terms of family, in terms of home ownership, in terms of our health to some extent. But beyond that, we are not taught to reinvent ourselves. We are not taught what to do to create a better, more delightful, happier future when we find ourselves kind of in the middle of life and we want something different for our future. And that’s really what future self planning is all about. So right now, you are already shaping your future self through your daily habits, through your choices, through your routines. So if you get up and you shower and you get ready every single day, it is very likely that you’re going to continue to do that. So just ask yourself, what will staying in the routine that I’m in look like in five years? Taking care of yourself every day is a beautiful gift to your future self. Now, if you like me, grab a few peanut m and ms every day. Maybe a couple might not be a big deal, but if I grab more, what’s the compound impact of that over time in five years? Do I like that?

So I think just thinking about the habits that you’re already in, the choices that you already make, the routines that you’re already in, if they continue the way that you’ve set them up, what does that look like for your future? Doing this process and the process that I teach inside the Membership is so important for one main reason. And that reason is because it will not happen on default because of the primitive brain. Your brain automatically on default likes to do what it has always done. This is why we don’t like change unless it’s change that we ourselves have decided we want to go through the discomfort for. We definitely don’t like change that is pressed upon us. And when you think about creating your future self, you might find that nothing comes to mind. And again, this is one of the huge benefits of doing this work inside a program with guided materials, because that’s normal.

It’s normal because the part of your brain that creates stories for the future pulls from what it knows about reality. IE it pulls from your past. So your brain has this, um, really great way of coming up with ideas and predictions about the future based on what you’ve already done. And that is amazing if you’ve been getting up and getting ready every day, and you want to continue to do that into the future where it’s not amazing and where it limits you is in the areas that you want to change. So if you want to change some of your relationships, if you want to change your parenting, if you want to become more calm, if you want to change your identity, change your life in any way. That will not happen on default because of the primitive brain seeking comfort in familiarity because of survival. It knows that if you do what’s familiar and what you’ve done in the past and you continue to do that, you are safe and going to survive.

It quite literally thinks that you might die if you create something different in the future. This is why it’s called your comfort zone. Getting outside your comfort zone is a saying because it’s so hard for your brain to do. But when you know that and you understand what’s happening internally in your body, you gain awareness over it, you gain control over it. So the anxiety, the fear, the worry isn’t in the driver’s seat. You get to decide the fear of change, the fear of, you know, the unknowns don’t create decisions that don’t serve you. So if you are driven by fear or if you are reluctant to change and you let that lead your life, that fear is making decisions for you. But when you do this work, you can notice this is just my primitive brain doing what primitive brains do and I’m not going to die.

We’re talking about changing careers or moving homes or not yelling at our kids, staying calm. Whatever change that you want to create in your future is ahead of you. You can create a new more empowering mindset to help you, to help you live into that identity when you envision your future self. It’s not just daydreaming with false hope. It is not, oh, wouldn’t it be nice if it’s not that at all? This is actually a proven way to create change in the same way that we do it for retirement planning, in the same way that we teach our little ones to continue to get educated and go to school and you know, go to college in the same way that we talk about kind of those stereotypical norms in our society. We can do that very seriously with the change that we want to create. But if you’re doing it kind of from false hope, like oh yeah, that would be nice if I could change careers, if I could move across the country, if I could actually stop yelling at my kids.

It’s, it’s not serious. It’s that false hope where you’re not actually thinking it’s possible for you. And so instead what you can do is you can do, what most successful people do is they visualize and they imagine themselves creating the result that they want. You can practice this, it will feel weird and uncomfortable at first because the future is completely blank. And so some of my clients in the membership will say, you know, I’m just coming up blank. I don’t know what my future self looks like or dresses like or what her home is like. And I say, yes, of course not, because this is like getting out the crayons and a blank piece of paper and coloring for the first time. It’s a little bit clunky. And so you had to practice every single day visualize who you want to become. If you really struggle to access what you want for yourself and for your future, it’s likely because of two reasons.

The first is that, well, you actually know what you want, but you don’t think you can have it. And the second is because you just don’t know yourself well enough. We have a Journaling course inside the Membership, and part of that journaling course teaches you how to get to know yourself better. It’s so important. How can you create a plan for your day if you don’t even have a direction for your life, right? You will be just saying yes and no to random things that you are invited to and what your kids come home asking you for. And it’s just not a very, intentional way to live. It’s very reactive. And I think that’s why so many of us wake up in the middle of life, like, okay, there has to be something more. This isn’t exactly what I want. Everything’s fine. I’m, you know, you’re grateful for what you have. And also let’s see what’s possible for the future. And really successful people do this so well. And success just means success as you define it. I’m not talking about necessarily career success, but it can be. But success as a mom, success as a wife, success as a homemaker, success as a yogi, success as a coach, success as whatever you want to be.

The most successful people use visualization and imagination to move towards their goals. And so I’m offering that to you here because I want you to know that if you want to create real change in your life, I know that it is available to you. And I really want to encourage you to use visualization and imagination to do that. Your prefrontal brain is more powerful than any AI, okay? And I mean that so seriously. You have no idea how powerful your brain is, you just have to put it to work. I love the analogy of the crayons and the paper. It’s like for the first time when you’re coloring, you don’t really know what you’re doing. And yet if you color every single day, you start to create art. And you figure out the types of drawings and the types of colorings that you like. And that is what creating your future self is like.

Of course you don’t know right away, you know, what your future self dresses like or what kind of home she’s in, or, what a normal day is for her versus a vacation day or you know, any of those kind of questions. But the more that you get to know her, the more that you get in touch with yourself and accessing your own desires, the easier it will become for you to visualize and for you to imagine that. And then you can live into her. And by living into her, I mean that you get in the feeling state of becoming her and then you take actions from her. It’s identity first. So we’re creating your future identity and then actions. When you do it this way, it’s the fastest way to get results. Alternatively, you can just say, okay, I’m going to set a 30 day goal and take some actions.

And you do no mindset work and you do no feeling work. You do no future self work. It’s really, really hard to achieve that goal because the primitive brain is going to, kinda be all over the place. Self-sabotaging, telling you you’ve tried this before, it’s not any different this time. It’s not working. You’re stuck. You can’t figure this out. But if you do it the opposite way, if you work on your identity first and who you want to become, then you can live into that version of yourself. It’s just so much easier to create the result you want. It’s so much easier to get into alignment. And this really brings me to the difference between goal setting and future self work. So goals are often task oriented specific achievements that you would want to reach. Like let’s say you want to lose 10 pounds or you want to get a promotion, it’s more focused on checking off boxes and reaching destinations.

Future self includes, you know, maybe reaching a goal, maybe being a certain weight or having a certain promotion, but it’s changing your identity to be the person who achieves that goal. Why this works is because it guarantees long-term success. If you practice becoming someone who weighs a certain weight or who has a certain job title, then that is who you are. When you achieve the goal, it’s like exciting that you achieve the goal, but it’s not shocking versus, you know, if you kind of willpower your way to lose 10 pounds, let’s say, you can get there and not understand how to maintain it and how to be someone who is that new weight. And so you yo-yo and you go back and you gain the weight back. And so that’s the difference. And I think most people, just regular people out in the world focus too much on goal setting instead of doing the future self work first to become the person who achieves the goal.

So if you will power your way to lose 10 pounds and you hate yourself doing it and you yo-yo and ultimately regain the weight and it’s an awful process and your brain remembers that, it’s simply because you were focusing too much on the goal, not on truly changing your identity and who you’re becoming. Future self work works so much quicker than traditional goal setting. You’ll get results faster this way and they’re long lasting. That’s the most important part. It’s about a true inner transformation because the person who has the promotion that you want or the person who weighs the weight that you want has completely different thoughts and feelings that got her to those actions to that result. And that is who you want to work on becoming as you are working on your future self. I love doing future self work. It is one of my favorite tools, that’s why I constantly teach it and talk about it.

But I also constantly use it in my life. So I remember feeling like there was no way I could ever be anything than like an alpha female strong, dominant woman. I thought this career version of myself was like the only way that I could be. I didn’t know that femininity and calm and patience and flow were available to me. I just thought I was, you know, someone who was type A. I would say yes, my name’s Natalie, I am type a alpha female. That’s it. Like, it was like a blood test and it just wasn’t true. You’ve heard me talk about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again how I think about it now. Like a spectrum or like a dial where I still have that part of me. I still love the ambitious type a part of me, but now I know how to turn it up and down because I’ve expanded to include the more feminine, the softer, the easygoing, the calm.

And I take pride that I can just leave some loads of laundry sitting there and be completely unbothered by them and navigate any sort of tantrums, meltdowns, whining, calmly. That is because I did future self work to become someone completely different. I used to drink as a part of kind of my social life and I remember thinking that there was just no way I could not drink and still have friends and still have a social life. I didn’t have a problem drinking, I definitely wasn’t an alcoholic, but my social life definitely included happy hours going out on the weekends, drinking. And I couldn’t see myself as someone who like still had friends and a social life but didn’t drink alcohol. And when I started to think about becoming a mom and wanting to create a family and just for the record here, I wasn’t even married at the time.

I had just met my now husband, Steve, but I really got clear about my future self and I knew that she was just a non-drinker. So I just quit drinking boom immediately, haven’t drank since. And I don’t identify as sober. I’m not counting days. I just have chosen a conscious drinking lifestyle. I also give myself permission. Maybe one day I’ll do this future self work and say, you know what? I tried not drinking and now I want to drink again. But so far I haven’t so far I just want to keep not drinking. And so I don’t, and that has been such a gift to my future self that keeps on giving ’cause I keep not drinking and I have friends and I have a social life and all of the things I was worried about, seems so silly right now, right? And, and thinking I couldn’t participate in cheersing and and cocktail hour and that is just not true.

There are lots of ways to do that, that I continue to do that and have fun and have a social life. And I really didn’t know that until I became that person. And that’s why really identifying your desires matter so much because it requires you to connect with them and understand your purpose and your why so that you can live into who you want to become without knowing the how I think about my transformation from being this, you know, single Chicago city girl to now being happily married as a suburban mom and how different my life was then compared to how it is now. And that happened because I thought about who I wanted to become. And I think a lot of you listening may be able to relate to this transformation. And you may have not ever called it like a future self transformation, but that is what happened.

You thought about what you wanted, you decided you wanted to get married or have a family, you made those decisions, you moved to the suburbs and you had kids. And your life is so different than say, you know, when you were in your twenties or when you were in college. That type of transformative change isn’t once in a lifetime. It can be every time you want it to be. So I like to think of my life as like a three outta 10. And I don’t mean that from a place of dissatisfaction. So most people think, well that is a very scarce way to think about your life, but that implies that the three is something I’m thinking about negatively, but that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, what I’m doing is thinking about my capacity and my potential. So my former three outta 10 self in the past, let’s say 10 years ago, thought about what she wanted and then she went after it and she created it.

And now I have it. And instead of thinking about my life now as like a 10 outta 10 to be kind of complacent with, I can be very satisfied and in love with my life and realize that this is just the next three outta 10. And what does a 10 outta 10 look like in my next evolution, in my next 10 years? It is such a gift to give myself, my family and just my life by thinking about it in this way. And I want to encourage you to do the same. Another transformation that I had was with respect to money and how I used to identify as a spender. And I always thought that I would have student loan debt and kinda all of these negative identities around money and none of them served me. And for those of you who have been around for a while, you know my story.

And if you’re new, I had $206,000 of student loan debt. I paid it all off, started an online business. And I am in a very abundant place with money. I love having money and I want to create more money. And it’s so fun to have money and to save money and I like to spend money and I like to invest and keep my money and it’s all of those things. And so my money transformation really set me up for future success. So I’m so grateful to my past self for doing that work. And the last transformation I want to mention here is a fun one that I don’t think I’ve ever even talked about. Definitely not on the podcast, but I used to identify as a rule follower and my peers and my family would have validated that I was first born, you know, of three; female.

Just always liked to follow rules and that kind of goes in line with being that like type A person. But as I started studying personal development work and became an entrepreneur and realized that all of these rules are just like made up. Like there’s no magic person who’s making the rules, even the government right, is, is ruled by us. We have a democratic government here. And so I love breaking rules. Now, I do not identify as a rule follower. Something really simple as an example that I can give you is when I’ll go to an event and it might be like a conference or something where there are, name tags on the seats and like a big auditorium, I will just move mine. Like I just don’t care, I’ll just move mine past self. Natalie, as a rule follower would have never done that and I’m so proud of that transformation and it’s just a little one that I think is fun to talk about and think about because you can become anyone you want to become. You’ve heard me talk about becoming a dog person before. I was never a dog person. And really getting in touch with who you want to be and getting to know yourself, it is so worth it, my friend, because your life is worth it.

And emotions play a critical role in becoming the person who you want to be. Because when you can emotionally connect with who you want to be, your actions align with that vision. This is why I recommend doing the identity work, the mindset work, the work that we do inside the Mom On Purpose Membership in this future self tools course, doing that so that you get the long-term results, the long-term success that you want. Alright, now I want to leave you with some questions that will help you get started with this work. And then you can come on inside the Membership over at momonpurpose.com/coaching to get the class and do this work with us as we start off this new year.

Question number one, how has your past self hooked up your current self? Number two, how are you hooking up your future self right now? Number three, how are you making it harder for your future self right now? Number four, what does your future self do on a daily basis that’s different than your current self? Number five, what do you really, really, really want in your future? And number six, are you willing to decide to believe it’s possible for you to get it? All right, my friends, happy New Year. Let’s create your future self on purpose. I’m ready. Are you? Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.

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