Do you wonder why interviewers ask “Where do you see yourself 3-5 years from now? We dismiss it – “I don’t even know where I’m going to be in a month, what of three years! 😕” and quickly put it out of our mind. But there is a point. They want to know if you have envisioned your ‘future self’ – who is she? what will she do? what does she value? what will she not do?
You could let life and the world (family circumstances and needs, your own self-doubt, inertia, etc) determine who you’ll be in the future, or you could design the future you.
Visualizing Your Future Self
Future Self refers to who you want to be a year or five years or twenty years from now. It includes your dreams, your aspirations, your ambitions, and your goals. You can think about your current self and your future self as separate but connected people. This allows you to define the person you want to be.
Anitha is one of my coaching clients. She worked for about 10 years and led a team of technology professionals for the last three of those 10 years. She had her second child and decided she wanted to take a few years to focus on family. When she was ready to return to work, she signed up with indePenn and availed of the coaching service we offer. We talked about ‘Anitha of the past’ and the Anitha she would like to be today and in the future.
I ask all my coaching clients, “what will your ‘future self’ look like”? They are uncomfortable – “should I be aiming high? Should I be ‘realistic’ (modest) – so that I don’t look like a failure down the line? “When I asked Anitha this question, she sank deep into thought. Finally, she shook herself and said, “I would like that to be our coaching goal”.
You can design your future self and be master of your destiny.
Yes, there will be obstacles and challenges, but if you believe, “this is who I will be”, you can plan and build it!
Designing your Future Self
Let us say you have five role models – one for career, another for fitness, a third for a caring, family member, and so on. If you could integrate all of them into one person – the future you, what would they look like? That is the design.
When Anitha and I embarked on this journey of designing her future identity, she identified three women and two men as her role models along with the qualities she wants to emulate – her grandmother, the undisputed matriarch of a large clan (power); her ‘Applied Mechanics’ professor (communication, poise and humour); her friend from college who has built a career along with a family (energy, grit, endurance, investment in herself); a boss who trained her (kindness, expertise) and a mentor who has been there for her despite her long break (belief in her).
Since this is a 10-year design, we also prioritised what is important to Anitha in her future self. What she wanted to focus on immediately was to ‘invest in herself’ to ‘build expertise’, since she was returning to work after a long break.
Using Dr Benjamin Hardy’s book “Be your Future Self Now” and Anitha’s list, we created a few questions to develop a long-term vision for her life. Here are some things that we used as self-reflection questions – you could use these questions to introspect on the future you! If you are a woman planning to return to work, click below and download the template and create your own Radar Chart.
Reflecting on the Future You
We listed the list of qualities that Anitha admired in her role-models and had her rate them on each quality on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest score). Anitha then rated her current self on each of these qualities. The chart below shows the gap between her and the role-models on each quality.
As you can tell from the figure below (in her perception), the role model’s level is way higher than Anitha’s
1. Which of these habits or behaviours do you already practice? And which of these will take you a while to develop?
- Anitha felt that she had good communication skills and is a kind person – she rated herself 7 and 8 respectively on these. While I felt that she also had energy and poise, she felt that she had a long way to go to get to the level she aspired to.
- She has chosen to work on all these skills over time to build the ‘Long Term Anitha’, but in the short term, she wants to focus on building hard skills
- She felt that as she developed Expertise (now rated at 1) and built up her Determination (now rated at 3) and Endurance (now rated at 3), she would naturally develop poise (now rated at 5) and acquire personal power (now rated at 1)
2. What would your future self not do (that you do today)?
- Anitha felt that this was an easy one – she took the qualities where she rated herself low – anything that she rated at 5 or below and work them out of her personality – she would invest time in herself (develop expertise build endurance), and believe in her own potential
3. How would your life be different if you adopted these qualities or habits or behaviours? Do you like the picture of that life?
- Anitha feels that her self-esteem would improve tremendously and that she would become the role-model that others could emulate. That picture of ‘Anitha n.0’ was so attractive to her, that she had tears in her eyes as she spoke about it
4. Write up a plan for bridging the gap from who you are today to who you want to be a year, five years and ten years from now and remind yourself by reading this every day
- Anitha has one-, three-, five- and ten-year plans for transforming into the Anitha of the future (she’s an over-achiever 😊). Highlights of her plan include
- 1-year plan: Completing 2 levels of certification in Dot Net technologies and Microsoft Azure and getting back to work
- 3-5 year plan: Becoming a technology leader and speaking at technical forums and conferences.
- 10-year plan: Host the annual family get-together like her grandmother did (for over 200 people)
I am sure she’ll be on track with her milestones, and she has promised to keep me posted.
Building Your Future Self
What does it take to build your future self? – imagination? an optimistic mind? intentionality – to pursue the changes you desire? courage to stay with the program you’ve designed? – Yes, to all of these! It is primarily a mindset shift.
It takes deliberate effort to develop habits and change behaviours to grow into that person you have designed – that is, you need to intentionally become your “future self”.
What is your motivation to change? Why should you put in all this work? – to become the person you want to be!
You could use the questions in the previous section to draw a picture of your future self.
If you’re a woman on a career break who wants to get back to work, you can download the cool excel template and draw your own radar chart.
Conclusion
“The best way to predict the future is to create it” is a quote attributed to both Abraham Lincoln and Peter Drucker. You have the power to influence what happens next in your life and to shape your own destiny. Go ahead, build the new you!
Rajani Seshadri is the cofounder of indePenn, a company that brings women with college education back to work. indePenn provides learning, coaching, confidence building and upskilling guidance to its members to return to the workforce.
I also work with companies and industry bodies to frame policies and practices that retain women in the workforce, progress towards gender parity, and develop and coach women leaders.
As an executive coach, I help leaders transform their careers.
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Wow, very inspiring.
I have taken a short break from my career as a HR Manager and I have over all 14 years of experience into sales, career counseling, and the ast seven years into insurance.
My name is Ummi Kulsoom. My qualification is PGDM in HRM.
Now I want to be back to job . Since age is 55+ I am finding it a challenge though there are many companies which have ” No Age Bar”.
Can you’ll please help me out to get one decent HR job into recruitment.
I hail from Bengaluru.
I came across this platform of Indepenn.com on LinkedIn.
Thank You.
Best Regards,
Ummi Kulsoom.
HR Manager.
Ph:9513940717
Hi, I am Sumanlatha
From Bangalore i have 8 to 11yrs experience in HR recruitments field which and i have some gap for 3yrs because of kids and family reason. I need some strong support and help to get the job for WFH jobs i am looking forward now. kindly help me to find the good and confident jobs.
Looking for Remote / WFH opportunity”
Best regards’
Sumanlatha
8790249161