Coaching practices for When I Try to Picture Things Going Well I Get Nothing a Blank or a Shrug Because My Mind Only Ever Fills in Detail for How it Falls Apart and a Good Future Stays Vague Enough That I Can't Really Want it

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For When I Try to Picture Things Going Well I Get Nothing a Blank or a Shrug Because My Mind Only Ever Fills in Detail for How it Falls Apart and a Good Future Stays Vague Enough That I Can't Really Want it, 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 things going well, I get nothing
• When I try to picture my future it stays abstract and far away
• When I picture this one thing going wrong it swells up to fill my whole future, like nothing else will exist afterward
• I’ve got goals on a list but the future feels flat and far away, nothing I can actually feel pulling me
• I’ve set the goal but it still feels flat and far away, like words on a list

Practices that may help

1. 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
2. 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
3. Identify the other things that will also be true of your future life
   Focalism makes future events seem bigger than they are by ignoring all the other things that will still be present.
   Affect Forecasting: Why You Mispredicted How You’d Feel
4. Write vivid imagined future scenes
   Extend your life story into the future with specific, felt scenes — not just goals.
   Narrative Identity, Made Practical
5. Outcome — vividly imagine the best result
   Picture the best outcome of fulfilling the wish, and feel what it would be like.
   WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan
6. Preferred Future: Describing Life When the Problem Is Solved
   Ask the person to describe in concrete, behavioral detail what life looks like when things are better.
   Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: Building On What Works
7. Define your nightmare outcome before your ideal outcome
   Write a vivid description of the life you don’t want — this clarifies the anti-goals that protect you from sleepwalking into it.
   Anti-Goals: Defining Success by What You Refuse to Accept
8. 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
9. Build a vivid, concrete future orientation
   Make the future feel real and close by describing it in sensory, specific detail.
   Time Perspective Therapy
10. Elaborate your hoped-for possible self
    Build a detailed, sensory-rich mental picture of a concrete future version of yourself — not an abstract goal, but a person.
    Possible Selves, Made Practical

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