Coaching practices for How to Imagine Your Future

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Imagine Your Future, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I try to picture my future it stays abstract and far away
• I’ve got goals on a list but the future feels flat and far away, nothing I can actually feel pulling me
• When I try to picture myself old it’s just a blank, fuzzy outline
• I’ve looked back at the arc of my life and now I want to extend it forward
• I keep running this other life in my head, imagining how amazing or how awful it would be, but it’s all guesswork

Practices that may help

1. Write a best-possible-life narrative
   Write a detailed story of your life in 10 years if everything went as well as it possibly could.
   The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
2. Write vivid imagined future scenes
   Extend your life story into the future with specific, felt scenes — not just goals.
   Narrative Identity, Made Practical
3. Vividly visualize your future self in concrete detail
   The more specific and sensory your image of your future self, the less you discount their wellbeing.
   Future Self Continuity, Made Practical
4. The future life line
   Extend your timeline forward and sketch the peaks and turning points you want to create — then work backward to today.
   The Life Line Exercise
5. Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
   Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
   Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures
6. Write a letter from your future self
   Have your 80-year-old self write back about the decision you’re facing now.
   The Regret-Minimization Framework
7. The best-possible-self exercise
   Regularly write a vivid picture of your life going as well as it realistically could.
   Optimism Training: Building Realistic, Flexible Optimism
8. Build a vivid, concrete future orientation
   Make the future feel real and close by describing it in sensory, specific detail.
   Time Perspective Therapy
9. Ask people who’ve been there instead of imagining it
   Other people’s actual experiences predict your future feelings more accurately than your own imagination.
   Affect Forecasting: Why You Mispredicted How You’d Feel
10. Draft three Odyssey Plans
    Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
    Designing Your Life, Made Practical

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.