Coaching practices for I've Got These Very Different Visions of My Life on Paper and I'm Staring at Them Wondering What's Actually Me Underneath All of Them What Keeps Showing Up No Matter Which Future I Imagine the Thing That If it Were Missing Would Make Any of Them Feel Hollow
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I've Got These Very Different Visions of My Life on Paper and I'm Staring at Them Wondering What's Actually Me Underneath All of Them What Keeps Showing Up No Matter Which Future I Imagine the Thing That If it Were Missing Would Make Any of Them Feel Hollow, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve got these very different visions of my life on paper and I’m staring at them wondering what’s actually me underneath all of them
- 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 my future it stays abstract and far away
- I’ve quietly decided there’s only one acceptable version of my life and I’m white-knuckling toward it
- There’s this constant background sense of not being enough, but I can’t even tell what kind
Practices that may help
- Build a coherent narrative across your three plans
Find the values and themes that appear across all three plans — they are your non-negotiables.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Write vivid imagined future scenes
Extend your life story into the future with specific, felt scenes — not just goals.
Narrative Identity, Made Practical - 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 - Draft three genuinely different five-year plans
Sketch three distinct five-year lives — not variations on the same theme, but genuinely different directions.
Odyssey Plans: Designing Three Alternative Futures - Map your actual, ideal, and ought selves
Write separate descriptions of who you are, who you want to be, and who you feel you must be — then compare them.
Self-Discrepancy Theory, Made Practical - Draft three Odyssey Plans
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - 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 - 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 - 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 - Update and revise possible selves over time
Revisit and rewrite your possible selves at least twice a year — the self you need to become changes as you grow.
Possible Selves, Made Practical
Related concerns
- How To Imagine Your Future
Write a detailed story of your life in 10 years if everything went as well as it possibly could.
Write a best-possible-life narrative
- When Designing Your Life Odyssey Plans
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Draft three Odyssey Plans
- Odyssey Plans Designing Three Alternative Futures As A Caregiver
Odyssey plans are a practice from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s "Designing Your Life" framework in which you sketch out three distinct five-year life plans — not ranked by desirability, but genuinely different in direction. The exercise exploits prototyping logic from design thinking: holding alternatives in parallel prevents premature commitment and reveals assumptions you did not know you were making.
- Possible Selves With My Team
Hazel Markus’s possible-selves framework holds that motivation is driven not only by who we are now but by vivid mental representations of who we could become — including hoped-for and feared future selves. These cognitive structures provide direction and energy for behavior, and deliberately developing them is a tractable approach to sustained motivation.
- When Odyssey Plans Prototyping Conversations
Talk to people already living your Plan B or C before you decide whether to pursue it.
Run prototyping conversations before committing to a plan
- Future Self Visualization
The more specific and sensory your image of your future self, the less you discount their wellbeing.
Vividly visualize your future self in concrete detail
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