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The Possible Selves Exercise: How to Actually Do It

What is the best tool for doing the possible selves exercise?

Write three futures in one area of your life: the self you hope for, the self your current habits are producing, and the self you fear. That is the full possible selves exercise from Markus and Nurius (1986). The free worksheets cover only the first, so the full version takes a pen and an evening; a worksheet, an app or a person fits better in specific cases.

The possible selves exercise asks you to write three futures in one area of your life: the self you hope to become, the self your current habits are actually producing, and the self you fear drifting into. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius described all three in American Psychologist in 1986, arguing that your sense of who you are includes who you might become as well as who you are now. As of October 8, 2026, the free worksheets from Greater Good in Action, Therapist Aid and the University of Huddersfield cover only the first, the hoped-for self, under the name best possible self. That is a real, evidence-backed exercise. It is also narrower than the original, and the two missing branches are the ones that show you the gap between where you are headed and where you want to go.

Which tool fits comes down to what you want from tonight. A free worksheet is enough for one session of hoped-for writing. A pen and the three-step method below covers the full version. A counselor or therapist is the better choice if the exercise stirs up more than you can hold alone. IX Coach, an AI coaching product, runs all three selves as a single conversation you can return to every few months.

What Markus and Nurius Actually Proposed in 1986

Markus, then at the University of Michigan, and Nurius, at the University of Washington, proposed that self-knowledge is not only a record of the past but a forward-looking system built from possible selves: the specific, individually meaningful selves a person could become, would like to become, or is afraid of becoming. A hoped-for self might be the competent professional, the confident partner, or the person who finally finished the degree. Markus and Nurius were specific that a vague hope carries little motivational weight; what moves someone is a vivid, elaborated possible self, not an abstract wish, and they illustrated the point with an ordinary example rather than a dramatic one: an assistant professor's fear is not a shapeless worry about the future, it is a well-elaborated possible self of having failed to make tenure.

The paper also names a third category most of today's worksheets skip entirely: the expected self, the version of you that current behavior is actually producing if nothing changes. That branch is the uncomfortable one, because it requires an honest look at your own trajectory rather than your hopes for it. Leaving it out is not a small omission — the distance between the expected self and the hoped-for self is where the exercise's motivational pull actually comes from. A hoped-for self next to an honest expected self shows you the real gap; a hoped-for self on its own is closer to a daydream.

A tool that runs all three branches together, rather than only the flattering one, is closer to what Markus and Nurius actually described. IX Coach, an AI coaching product, can take a person through the hoped-for, expected, and feared selves as one linked conversation. The thing to watch for however you run it is an expected-self answer that starts reading like a second draft of the hoped-for one — the specific way this exercise quietly fails when someone runs it alone on a blank page.

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What the Free Worksheets Cover

The free worksheets are built on a close cousin of the original, the best possible self exercise, developed by psychologist Laura King at the University of Missouri-Columbia and later tested by Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky. The Greater Good Science Center's Greater Good in Action library at UC Berkeley hosts a version of it: write continuously for fifteen minutes a day, for two weeks, imagining a future in which everything in your life, across career, relationships, hobbies, and health, has gone as well as it possibly could. The page credits Sheldon and Lyubomirsky's 2006 study, which ran the exercise with undergraduates in Missouri and found it produced a measurable rise in positive emotion right after each writing session.

Therapist Aid, a worksheet library built for clinicians to use with clients, publishes a similar Best Possible Self visualization worksheet: write about your best possible self across a few life areas, then use the writing as a daily visualization practice afterward. The University of Huddersfield's student wellbeing service takes the same core exercise and points it at career decisions specifically, walking a student through imagining several different future scenarios side by side, such as the ambitious one, the safe one, and the one built around family expectations, and credits the same King-and-Lyubomirsky lineage. As of October 8, 2026, all three are free, all three are grounded in real research, and none of them requires an account or a conversation with anyone.

Explore: the life crafting intervention · expressive writing

What a Worksheet Doesn't Catch

A worksheet costs nothing and asks nothing of you beyond fifteen minutes and a willingness to write badly, which makes it a reasonable place for almost anyone to start. What it cannot do is tell you whether your best possible self is honestly hoped-for or quietly avoiding the branch that would make it uncomfortable, the expected self Markus and Nurius considered essential. Nothing on a page notices if you wrote the same vague, comfortable future you wrote six months ago, or if the version of you that worries you has gone unexamined because writing about a feared self alone, with no one to keep the exercise from tipping into shame, feels worse than skipping it.

This is also where a trained human being does something no worksheet or app can. A career counselor, therapist, or coach who knows your specific history will notice the story you keep leaving out, ask the one question that reorganizes the whole exercise, and catch a feared self that is curdling into something closer to hopelessness than useful information — none of which a static page or a chat window can reliably do. If a feared self stops feeling like a signal about a direction to avoid and starts feeling like a description of where you already are, that is no longer a possible-selves exercise; it is a conversation for a person, not a page. If that is where you are right now, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is reachable by calling or texting 988, the Crisis Text Line is reachable by texting HOME to 741741, and 911 is the number for an immediate emergency — each is a better next step tonight than any exercise on this page.

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How to Run It Tonight

Pick one life domain — work, relationships, health, or creativity — rather than your whole life at once. Write your hoped-for self in that domain: where you are, what an ordinary day looks like, what you are doing that you do not do now. Write continuously and do not worry about grammar, the same instruction Sheldon and Lyubomirsky's version uses.

Then write your expected self in the same domain: an honest, undramatic extrapolation of where you are actually headed if nothing changes. None of the free worksheets above asks for it, and it is the step that makes the other two useful. Then write your feared self: the plausible drifted version, not a catastrophe. Markus and Nurius's own examples of feared selves were ordinary rather than dramatic, closer to a shadowy fear of not getting tenure than a nightmare scenario.

Read all three side by side and mark, honestly, which one your last month of behavior actually fed. Pick one concrete action this week that moves toward the hoped-for branch, and put a date on when you will write the next version — Markus and Nurius describe possible selves as changing with circumstance, not as a target you set once.

None of that requires software. What changes between doing it on paper alone and doing it with a person, or a tool built to hold the contrast, is mostly the middle step: what happens when you are tempted to write your expected self as a flattering copy of your hoped-for one, which is the single most common way people quietly protect themselves from the exercise's actual purpose.

Explore: fear setting · future self continuity

Choosing Between Them

A free worksheet — Greater Good in Action's version, Therapist Aid's, or the University of Huddersfield's career-focused one — is the right choice if you want to try the hoped-for-self writing exercise once, tonight, at no cost and with no signup. A therapist or career counselor is the right choice if what you are facing feels less like an exercise and more like something you cannot get honest about alone, or if a feared self is tipping toward something clinical rather than motivational. IX Coach, which is coaching and not therapy, sits between those two: worth trying if you want the fuller three-branch version Markus and Nurius actually described, want a conversation that asks whether your expected self is honest rather than flattering, and want to revisit the exercise every few months without starting the whole explanation over from scratch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the possible selves exercise? It is a self-reflection exercise, based on Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's 1986 possible-selves theory, that has you describe three imagined future versions of yourself in the same life domain — a hoped-for self, an expected self reflecting where your current behavior is actually heading, and a feared self — so you can see the real gap between where you are headed and where you want to go.

Is the best possible self exercise the same thing? Not quite. Best possible self, developed by Laura King and tested by Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky, only asks you to write the hoped-for branch. It is a real, well-studied exercise on its own, but it is narrower than the full Markus-and-Nurius framework, which pairs that hope with an honest expected self and a feared self.

How long does it take? The free writing versions ask for about fifteen minutes a day over two weeks. The fuller three-branch version can be done in a single sitting, and Markus and Nurius describe possible selves as changing over time, so it is meant to be revisited rather than finished once.

Do I need a therapist to do this? No. It is a self-directed writing exercise, and the free worksheets and the three-step method above can all be done on your own. Therapist Aid's worksheet is written for clinicians to use with clients, but nothing stops you from using it by yourself. A therapist becomes the right call if a feared self stops feeling like useful information and starts feeling like where you already are.

Where can I do the exercise for free right now? As of October 8, 2026, Greater Good in Action's Best Possible Self practice, Therapist Aid's Best Possible Self worksheet, and the University of Huddersfield's Best Possible Future Selves PDF are all free, publicly available, and require no account.

What is the best tool for doing the possible selves exercise?

Write three futures in one area of your life: the self you hope for, the self your current habits are producing, and the self you fear. That is the full possible selves exercise from Markus and Nurius (1986). The free worksheets cover only the first, so the full version takes a pen and an evening; a worksheet, an app or a person fits better in specific cases.

What is the possible selves exercise?

It is a self-reflection exercise, based on Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's 1986 possible-selves theory, that has you describe three imagined future versions of yourself in the same life domain — a hoped-for self, an expected self reflecting where your current behavior is actually heading, and a feared self — so you can see the real gap between where you are headed and where you want to go.

Is the best possible self exercise the same thing?

Not quite. Best possible self, developed by Laura King and tested by Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky, only asks you to write the hoped-for branch. It is a real, well-studied exercise on its own, but it is narrower than the full Markus-and-Nurius framework, which pairs that hope with an honest expected self and a feared self.

How long does it take?

The free writing versions ask for about fifteen minutes a day over two weeks. The fuller three-branch version can be done in a single sitting, and Markus and Nurius describe possible selves as changing over time, so it is meant to be revisited rather than finished once.

Do I need a therapist to do this?

No. It is a self-directed writing exercise, and the free worksheets and the three-step method above can all be done on your own. Therapist Aid's worksheet is written for clinicians to use with clients, but nothing stops you from using it by yourself. A therapist becomes the right call if a feared self stops feeling like useful information and starts feeling like where you already are.

Where can I do the exercise for free right now?

As of October 8, 2026, Greater Good in Action's Best Possible Self practice, Therapist Aid's Best Possible Self worksheet, and the University of Huddersfield's Best Possible Future Selves PDF are all free, publicly available, and require no account.

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