Using Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Managing Up

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise, drawn from research on future self-concept, asks you to write two specific pictures rather than one vague aspiration: a hoped-for self, described concretely enough that you could describe a Tuesday in that person's life, and a feared self, the version of you that results if current patterns simply continue unchanged. The specificity is the entire point — "successful" is not a possible self; "the person other people come to when a project is falling apart, because I stayed calm and organized under the last three" is one. Once both images exist in concrete detail, the exercise asks a plain question: what is the actual gap between who you are right now and each of those two pictures, and what would closing the gap toward the hoped-for one, or widening the gap from the feared one, actually require you to do differently this week.

Managing Up

Managing up starts from a fact most people quietly resist: your manager is a person with their own priorities, working style, and blind spots, and the relationship goes better for both of you if you actively shape it rather than waiting for them to read your mind or hoping they naturally adapt to how you'd prefer to work. Concretely, that means learning how they prefer to receive information — a quick message versus a scheduled update, headlines versus detail — and matching it rather than defaulting to your own preference; it means volunteering relevant progress and problems before you're asked, rather than only surfacing information when directly questioned; and it means understanding what they're actually being measured on above you, so you can frame your own work in terms that matter to them, not just to you. None of this is flattery or manipulation in the cynical sense; it's treating the relationship with your manager as something you have real influence over rather than something that simply happens to you.

What you get out of pairing them

A hoped-for possible self is vivid and motivating in the moment you write it, and then, for most people, it quietly stops touching anything they actually do at work, because the exercise itself doesn't specify where in a normal week that future person would show up. Managing up is where it can actually land: it's a set of concrete, repeatable weekly choices — what you volunteer, how you frame it, what you ask for — that are otherwise easy to run on autopilot, reacting to whatever your manager brings up rather than moving toward anything in particular. Give those choices a destination and they stop being generic professionalism and start being the specific, weekly evidence that the gap between where you are and the hoped-for self is actually closing. What managing up gets back is just as real: most guidance on the topic is tactical — communicate more, be proactive — without ever answering why a person would keep doing something that mostly benefits someone else's convenience. The feared self supplies that reason honestly: if the version of you who never manages the relationship, stays reactive, and gets quietly passed over is a real, specific, unwanted future, managing up stops being etiquette and becomes something worth the effort.

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 Managing Up rests on

• Perspective taking expands frame randomised trials
  Deliberately adopting a vantage point other than one's own default view widens the range of interpretations or options available for a situation.
• Adapting to anothers style improves collaboration observational studies
  Matching communication frequency and format to a manager's stated preferences produces smoother collaboration than expecting them to adapt to yours.
• Proactive disclosure builds trust observational studies
  Volunteering relevant information and progress updates before being asked builds a manager's trust and reduces their need to monitor closely.

Where they actually meet

Both practices ask you to deliberately step outside your own default vantage point and look from somewhere else. The possible-selves exercise has you look at your current choices from the vantage point of a future version of yourself, hoped-for or feared, and ask whether today's pattern is actually heading where that picture suggests. Managing up has you look at your own communication and priorities from your manager's vantage point — what they're measured on, how they prefer information, what's actually useful to them — rather than from your own preferences about how you'd like to work. Neither practice is really about the other person or the other time; both are a deliberate exercise in temporarily leaving your own seat to see something your own seat can't show you.

The principle underneath both

Your own default point of view is a limited instrument — it shows you what's directly in front of you and misses almost everything else, including where your current pattern is actually heading and what someone else actually needs from you. Deliberately adopting a different vantage point, a future self's or a manager's, doesn't hand you new facts so much as it reorganizes which facts you're paying attention to. A choice that looks fine from inside today can look clearly wrong from ten years out; a request that looks reasonable from your own workload can look tone-deaf from your manager's set of priorities. Both practices work by relocating you, briefly and on purpose, to a seat you don't normally sit in.

What that makes the real goal

Once you see both as a deliberate change of vantage point, what each is actually trying to produce is the same kind of thing: present action that's informed by a view your normal daily seat doesn't give you access to. The possible-selves exercise wants your today shaped by an honest look from a future you're not at yet. Managing up wants your today shaped by an honest look from a seat — your manager's — that you'll never actually sit in either. Neither is asking you to become someone else; both are asking you to let a view you don't normally have inform a choice you're about to make anyway.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Perspective-taking of this general kind has real experimental support outside either of these two specific practices. Studies on negotiation consistently find that people instructed to explicitly consider the other party's interests and constraints before a negotiation reach better joint outcomes than people who prepare only from their own side, which is close to what managing up asks of you toward a manager specifically. On the future-self side, mental contrasting, a technique where you vividly imagine a desired future outcome and then deliberately compare it against the specific present obstacles in the way, has randomized-trial support for increasing follow-through on goals compared to imagining the positive future alone, which is a close cousin of what the possible-selves exercise's gap-awareness is doing. Both traditions arrived, independently, at the conclusion that a deliberately adopted alternative vantage point changes behavior more reliably than simply trying harder from your own.

A tradition that already does this

Executive coaching practice already runs a close version of this pairing routinely, without naming it as either lineage here: a common early coaching exercise has a client describe, in specific detail, the leader they want to be seen as in three to five years, and then walks through their current stakeholder relationships, manager included, asking whether their present behavior with each one is consistent with that future description or working against it. The exercise wasn't built by combining possible-selves research with managing-up literature deliberately; coaching practice arrived at the same shape independently, because a future identity with no connection to the actual working relationships in front of a person turned out, in practice, to be inert.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to enhance Managing Up

Most managing-up advice is a list of tactics — share updates proactively, learn their communication style — that's easy to agree with and hard to sustain, because none of it answers why you'd keep doing something that mostly smooths someone else's day. Bring your hoped-for self into it directly. Take the specific picture you wrote — the person other people come to when a project is falling apart, say — and ask what that person's relationship with their manager actually looks like in that picture. Almost certainly, that version of you isn't someone their manager has to chase for updates or guess at the status of; proactive, well-framed communication is usually part of the picture whether you wrote it in explicitly or not. Once you see that connection, a specific weekly action becomes obvious rather than generic: before your next one-on-one, write one sentence connecting whatever you're about to raise to the hoped-for self directly — "the person in that picture would flag this risk now, not wait for it to become a problem in three weeks." It turns managing up from professional etiquette you're supposed to perform into a specific, weekly rehearsal of becoming the person you already said you wanted to be.

Using Managing Up to enhance the Possible Selves Exercise

The possible-selves exercise is usually done alone, on paper, and the images it produces can stay entirely private — vivid, real to you, and completely disconnected from any actual relationship where the gap could close. Managing up gives it the most concrete, recurring venue most people have: the relationship with their own manager, revisited on a schedule, with real stakes and real feedback. Take the specific gap your exercise surfaced — say, the feared self is someone who stays quiet about problems until they're unavoidable, and the hoped-for self raises them early — and translate it into one specific managing-up behavior to test in your very next interaction with your manager: naming a risk a week before you'd normally mention it, in the format you know they prefer. Unlike the exercise's private reflection, your manager's actual reaction is real-time evidence of whether the gap is closing, not just whether it feels like it is. A hoped-for self that has to survive contact with an actual person twice a week stops being a private story and starts being something you're either living or not, with real, external feedback either way.

Tuesday, before the one-on-one, deciding whether to mention the risk

You've noticed for two weeks that a vendor is slipping on a deliverable that feeds into your manager's own quarterly commitment, and you've been telling yourself you'll mention it once you have a fuller picture, which is mostly true and also mostly a way of not bringing up something uncomfortable before it's forced. Your feared self, written out weeks ago, is specific: someone whose manager is always the last to know when something's going sideways, and who gets quietly excluded from bigger projects as a result, not because of the work itself but because they can't be trusted with early, uncomfortable information. Sitting with your one-on-one notes open, you write the one line connecting the two: this is exactly the moment the feared self stays quiet. You draft three sentences — the risk, what you're already doing about it, what you'd need from them if it gets worse — in the short, headline-first format you know your manager actually reads before a meeting, rather than the longer narrative version you'd naturally default to. You send it twenty minutes before the one-on-one instead of waiting to mention it live. It isn't a big moment. It's the small, specific evidence, this week, that the gap moved instead of staying exactly where it was.

When this is worth reaching for

The possible-selves exercise is already done, with specific enough images to work with, and there's a manager relationship active enough to actually practice against — regular one-on-ones, or at least regular contact. A highly distant or intermittent reporting line leaves little real venue for the practice to land.

Where this does not apply

If your manager relationship is actively dysfunctional — a manager who takes credit for proactive updates, punishes early disclosure of problems, or is simply unresponsive regardless of format — running this pairing risks reading your own reasonable managing-up behavior as evidence you're closing a gap, when the actual obstacle is a manager who won't respond to good-faith effort no matter how it's framed. In that situation, the possible-selves work is still valid on its own, but the manager relationship is the wrong practice ground for it right now, and looking elsewhere — a mentor, a different working relationship — is likely to be more honest than continuing to test it against someone who won't engage.

What the evidence does and does not support

Possible-selves research has a reasonable observational base connecting a vivid, specific future self-image to increased motivation and goal-directed behavior, most of it from academic and personal-development settings rather than workplace-specific studies. Managing-up guidance draws mostly on organizational-behavior research and practitioner consensus — the specific claims about proactive disclosure building trust and style-matching improving collaboration are observational findings from workplace studies, not randomized trials, though they're widely replicated across different organizational settings. No research has tested using a written possible-selves exercise specifically to structure managing-up behavior; this page connects two separately grounded ideas because they solve related problems, not because a study found the combination works.