Using Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Commitment Contracts

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise, drawn from the psychological construct researchers Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius called ‘possible selves,’ asks you to write two specific future versions of yourself rather than one general goal. The hoped-for self is not ‘I want to be healthier’ — it is a scene: you at 6 a.m., already back from a run, making coffee before anyone else in the house is awake, a body that does not ache climbing the stairs. The feared self is the same specificity pointed the other way: you at the same age, having quietly stopped trying, telling yourself the same excuse you are using this month. The exercise works by making both futures concrete enough to actually picture, because a vague aspiration and a vague fear both sit too far outside any single day’s decisions to influence one.

Commitment Contracts

A commitment contract makes a future intention binding by attaching a real cost to breaking it, arranged in advance, before the moment of temptation arrives. Concretely: you name a specific, checkable action — five job applications by Friday, a run logged three times this week — put money or a public pledge behind it, and name a referee, a friend, a coach, or a platform such as StickK, whose job is to confirm whether you did the thing and release the stake, or not, accordingly. If you fail, the money often goes somewhere that stings — an organization or cause you actively dislike, sometimes called an anti-charity — rather than back to you, which removes the option of quietly letting yourself off the hook the way an ordinary resolution allows.

What you get out of pairing them

What the Possible Selves Exercise buys you is a reason that is actually yours, felt rather than merely stated — a picture specific enough to want, and a second picture specific enough to want to avoid, both pulling in the same direction as your stated goal but with more force than the goal’s abstract version ever had on its own. What a commitment contract buys you is protection from the version of yourself who will show up later, tired, unmotivated, holding a perfectly reasonable-sounding excuse — because the contract does not ask that future self to feel like following through; it makes the cost of not following through higher than the discomfort of doing the thing. Neither buys you the other’s strength on its own: a vivid future self with no enforcement fades by Wednesday; a stake attached to a target you do not really care about becomes a chore you resent and eventually find a way around.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What Commitment Contracts rests on

• Accountability to others increases follow through observational studies
  Having another person witness or enforce progress raises the likelihood that a commitment is kept.
• Loss aversion strengthens commitment randomised trials
  Framing a stake as a loss to avoid rather than a gain to earn increases adherence because losses loom larger than equivalent gains.
• Precommitment constrains future choice randomised trials
  Binding oneself in advance to a costly consequence removes the option to yield to in-the-moment temptation.

Where they actually meet

Both practices take the relationship between your present self and your future self seriously as something to be deliberately managed rather than assumed. The Possible Selves Exercise works on what that future self should want — it gives your future self a destination concrete enough to recognize when it is drifting off course. A commitment contract works on what that future self will actually do when the moment comes, regardless of what it wants in the abstract, by removing its ability to quietly renegotiate the deal. Neither practice trusts your future self by default. The exercise assumes it needs a clear enough picture to want the right thing; the contract assumes that even wanting the right thing is not sufficient, and that behavior needs a mechanism that does not depend on how that future self happens to feel on the day it matters.

The principle underneath both

Your future self is not a guaranteed extension of your present intentions — it is close enough to a separate person that it needs to be given both a reason and a reason that survives its own reluctance. Researchers describe the psychological sense of overlap between your current identity and your future one as ‘future self continuity,’ and people who feel less continuity with their future self tend to treat that self roughly the way they would treat a stranger, discounting its needs accordingly. Neither vivid imagery nor precommitment belongs to one lineage; both are separate answers to the same underlying problem, that the person who has to act next week is not fully under the control of the person deciding today.

What that makes the real goal

The possible-selves exercise makes your future self vivid enough to feel like someone worth keeping a promise to; a commitment contract makes breaking that promise cost something concrete. Both are working the same gap between a present intention and a future self's actual behavior: reliably getting your future self to do what your present self, thinking clearly, actually wants — not once, in a moment of inspiration, but on the specific ordinary day the behavior is due. Stated this way, the objective is not owned by future-self psychology or by behavioral economics; it is a general problem anyone pursuing a goal across time eventually runs into, and any method that closes that particular gap is a candidate, regardless of which field produced it.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Implementation intentions — deciding in advance a specific ‘if X, then I will Y’ plan, such as ‘if it is 6 a.m. and my alarm goes off, I put on running shoes before I open my phone’ — pursue the same objective by removing the need for future-self motivation altogether, replacing a felt decision with an automatic one, and carry strong randomized-trial support across dozens of goal domains. Temptation bundling, pairing an indulgence you want now with an action your future self needs, such as only allowing yourself a favorite audiobook while at the gym, pursues it by making the present self’s incentives briefly line up with the future self’s goal instead of fighting it. Mental contrasting, imagining the desired outcome against the specific obstacle in its way rather than the outcome alone, targets the same gap by making the obstacle concrete enough to plan around rather than be surprised by. None of these three were built with the Possible Selves Exercise or commitment contracts in mind; each is an independent answer to the same problem of a future self that does not automatically cooperate.

A tradition that already does this

The oldest version of this exact move has a name in the commitment-device literature: the Ulysses contract, after the moment in the Odyssey where Ulysses, knowing the Sirens’ song will override his judgment once he is close enough to hear it, has his crew bind him to the mast in advance and orders them to ignore any command he gives once the singing starts. That is a commitment contract in its purest form, arranged by a present self who does not trust a specific future self, enforced by a referee, the crew, who cannot be talked out of the terms. It did not arrive with a possible-selves exercise attached, but the underlying reasoning — that this particular future self needs to be constrained rather than persuaded — is the same reasoning a modern financial commitment contract runs on.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Commitment Contracts

A commitment contract is only as good as the target it is bound to, and ‘exercise three times a week’ or ‘apply to five jobs’ is a checkable action but not necessarily one you actually care about at 6 a.m. when the alarm goes off. Before writing the contract’s terms, spend fifteen or twenty minutes writing the hoped-for self in full sensory detail — not the outcome (‘I have a new job’) but a scene you could step into, the specific desk, the specific relief in your shoulders, the specific sentence you say to a friend about it. Pull the contract’s checkable action directly out of that scene rather than out of a generic goal list, and write one line from the feared-self scene into the contract itself, visible to your referee, as the stated reason the stake matters. This does two things a contract alone cannot: it makes the target something your future self actually recognizes as its own, rather than an assignment handed to it, and it gives your referee language specific enough to hold you to something more real than a checkbox.

Using Commitment Contracts to enhance the Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise is unusually good at producing motivation in the room where you write it and unusually bad at surviving the following Wednesday, because a mental image, however vivid, has no mechanism for making itself heard on an ordinary tired day. Fix this by translating one specific, weekly behavior implied by the hoped-for self into a small commitment contract with a real stake and a named referee — not the whole vision, one checkable action a week that the vision clearly implies. The contract does not need to carry any emotional weight on its own; it is there for exactly the days the image has faded into background noise, doing the work the picture was never going to do by itself. Revisit the hoped-for and feared scenes roughly monthly to keep the contract’s target aligned with what actually still matters, since a stake attached to a stale goal becomes something you resent rather than something you use.

Wednesday night, five outreach emails still unsent

On Sunday you sat with a blank page and wrote the hoped-for self in real detail: the converted garage, coffee gone cold by ten because you were absorbed in your own work instead of someone else’s brief, the specific relief of not checking a manager’s calendar before you could start. You felt something reading it back, enough that you also wrote the feared self — still at the same desk in five years, having quietly stopped trying, using the same excuse you are using this month. It moved you. It is now Wednesday, an ordinary night, and the task you set is five outreach emails, due Friday, tied to a fifty-dollar stake going to a political cause you dislike if your referee has not received a screenshot by then. You are tired in a boring, unremarkable way that has nothing to do with either scene — the images do not feel like anything right now; they are just words you wrote three days ago. You send the emails anyway, not because the garage scene is pulling at you in this moment, because it is not, but because you do not want to explain to your referee why fifty dollars is now funding something you cannot stand. The scene chose what you are working toward. The stake is what got the emails sent tonight.

When this is worth reaching for

You can already picture the goal you want. You've failed to follow through on it more than once. Direction was never the problem — Wednesday-night follow-through is. A contract locks in a target, though, so if you're still genuinely unsure what you want, wait: the wrong target wastes both the stake and your referee's patience.

Where this does not apply

If you are early in figuring out what you actually want, run the Possible Selves Exercise alone first, more than once, before attaching any stakes — committing money or a referee to a target you are still testing tends to produce resentment of the contract rather than progress toward the goal. And for someone who already reacts to external stakes and being watched with disproportionate anxiety rather than useful pressure, a commitment contract can make the whole effort worse, not better; the vivid-imagery half of this pairing still works fine on its own for that person, the enforcement half does not.

What the evidence does and does not support

That imagining a vivid, specific future self increases motivation and behavior aligned with it is supported mostly by observational and correlational research on future self continuity, not large randomized trials, and effect sizes vary by how concretely the self is imagined. That awareness of a gap between a current and hoped-for or feared self motivates action toward closing it is a plausible, well-reasoned mechanism more than an isolated experimental finding on its own. On the commitment-contract side, loss aversion — that a stake framed as a loss to avoid holds more power than an equivalent gain to earn — has strong experimental support going back to foundational behavioral-economics research, and precommitment devices with real financial stakes have randomized-trial evidence, including field studies on savings and smoking-cessation contracts, showing measurably higher follow-through than unstaked goals. Accountability through another person’s involvement is mostly observational. No study has tested writing a possible-selves scene specifically as the basis for a commitment contract’s target; this is a reasoned extension of two separately evidenced practices, not a finding about the combination.