Hi, and welcome to the excellent rider podcast. I'm Mélanie, I'm a certified life coach and I specialize in helping people like you get things done, find ease and motivation again and get unstuck when it feels like you've lost your mojo. I remember that when I was an employee in a big corporation, I always wanted a mentor.

I wanted someone to show me the ropes and to teach me about office politics. I wanted somebody to have me in mind and influence others so that I would get good opportunities in my career. I wanted someone to help me out with difficult stuff. I wanted somebody who would help me up-level my thinking.

Basically, I wanted a sort of mix between Dumbledore and Beyoncé. So needless to say, I never had a mentor that did all of that in my career. I've had a few people call themselves my mentor and have a few very interesting conversation with, but I didn't have anybody who really gave me any piece of advice that I really remember or any help that I very much noticed.

Maybe I'm just being ungrateful and maybe my memory is selective, but I really don't remember that the mentors I had at work were decisive or very influencial in what I was doing. And then again, maybe I was expecting for too much. But now that I am working on my own and that I have my own company, I have discovered the best mentor that I could possibly dream of.

So this woman has a lot of experience in precisely the type of business that I'm trying to build, which is amazing. She knows me really, really well, which is a plus. She's always available to me, which is fantastic. And she's extremely invested in my success. Her name is Mélanie and she's my future self.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I hear you saying, oh, come on. That's such crap, Mélanie. That's not a real mentor. Okay. But just bear with me, just bear with me a second. I'm going to show you how you can use your future self as mentor and how this is the absolute best mentor that you'll ever have. And you're in for a treat.

So to benefit the most from this episode, I recommend that you listen with a pen and paper, and that you're ready to pause the episode as you answer the questions I will be asking you. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to write down what are the few issues that you would love to have help about with right now?

So the two or three things that you're struggling with right now that you would really appreciate discussing with somebody who is very experienced and who could help you be... Like, act as a sounding board, or also give you, you know, "wisdom from the trenches", et cetera. So write those down. Once you're done writing those two or three issues that you'd like help with, I want you to fast forward five years of something like this.

And I want you to imagine that the thing you're trying to build right now, the project that you're trying to lead to completion, the result that you're trying to achieve, you've had it for a little while now. So for example, if you're trying to build a company, you've had a successful company with systems well in place for a couple of years. If you're trying to lose some weight, I want you to imagine that you've been at your target weight for a couple of years.

If you're trying to meet someone and find a romantic partner, I want you to imagine that you've been in that relationship for a couple of years and it feels, secure and safe and you know each other very well. So whatever project it is that you're trying to achieve, I want you to imagine it's been there.

It's been in place. If you're trying to get a new promotion network, you've been in the new position for a little while. If you're trying to find the job of your dream and you have no idea what that is, a job that taps into your potential, I want you to imagine that you have found what it is and you've had that amazing job for a couple of years, et cetera, et cetera.

Once this is clear for you. So you don't need to know exactly what it is, but I just want you to put yourself in that mental space. You're going to imagine a normal day in the life of future self of that time. I want you to imagine the day with whatever information you have about it. So some of you, you will know very clearly.

For example, if you're trying to lose the weight, you know exactly what weight the future you has. If you're trying to launch your company, you may not know all the details, but you have an idea of how you would like your company to be when you've been successful for a couple of years. , If you are aiming for a partner, you don't have all the details of what the partner looks like , or the kind of things that you do with them, but you have an idea of what it's like to be with them.

So I want you to imagine everything that you do know about the result that you have created or about the success that you have reached. And I want you to describe what it's like. So maybe you know what kind of surroundings you're in. Maybe you know what kind of clothes you wear. Maybe you know what kind of activities you have. Maybe you know what kind of people you engage with. Or maybe you know that you are not engaging with a lot of people because this is your preference.

Maybe you know what kind of things are you excited about during the day.. So try to describe as much as possible what a typical day would look like. And start from, you know, getting up, having breakfast, getting ready, going to work, interacting with colleagues or clients , or other people or other experts, or.. Try to give as much life as possible and describe everything that you know about it.

Don't just do it in two minutes. Spend like 10, 15 minutes on this and flesh it out as much as. And then once you've done that, I want you to imagine that the Future you is going to still live in the normal world. We know that they are going to have bad days.

They're are going to have days where nothing works according to plan. They're going to have bad hair days when they wake up on the wrong side of the bed. They're going to be in a bad mood. . So all of these things are going to happen. We know that because they are still human and they still live in this normal world.

So I want you to imagine what do they do on those bad days? How do they tackle the challenge? How do they tackle the difficulties? What do they tell themselves in order to keep on creating the success that they have been creating on the good days? How do they create that on a difficult day?

And for this part of the exercise, I want you to make sure that you don't drift off into Lala land and imagine that your future self is this Zen-like perfect being who is always calm and always composed. Because that doesn't happen in real life. If you are somebody who freaks out every time there is something unexpected happening today, you are going to be somebody who freaks out five years from now.

It's just that probably five years from now, you're going to be very, very good at calming yourself very quickly and getting yourself back to a more productive mood. So I want you to describe exactly what are you doing five years from now, as much as you can imagine. So some things are going to be very clear for you again, and some things are going to be much more mysterious, but you describe whatever you have an idea about.

So for example, I can imagine for myself that five years from now, when there is a situation in which I have no money on my bank account, for example, instead of completely freaking out and being very worried and very stressed about what's going to happen, probably I will have so much experience of situations changing at the last minute and me being very resourceful with creating money that I will keep relatively calm.

So I will still have a little a pinch in my stomach and I will pay attention to the thing. But what I will do is that I will double down on doing the kind of activities that create money for myself.

If we imagine somebody who is in a relationship, maybe they have days where they have a little argument with their partner. And maybe today, when they have an argument with their partner or in the past, when they've had arguments with their partner, it became this huge thing and they were sulking and they were unable to express their feelings and what they wanted, et cetera.

So maybe five years from now what they're going to be able to do, maybe they're going to start by having the argument and sulking for 10 minutes and then they're going to compose themselves. And go and talk to their partner and figuring it out. And they're going to be ready to admit that they are wrong maybe, so that they can reconnect with their partner.

And from the reconnected state, they're going to be able to iron out whatever the difficulty was in the relationship, et cetera, et cetera.

So just try to describe what you know. Some of the things you know exactly. Some of the things you don't know exactly. Do your best. And then you've done all this in writing. So I want you to go back and to read what you have written and to identify what are the main feelings that you can guess your future self is feeling, both on the good days and on the bad days.

And to do that, you can imagine that you're watching the movie of what you have just described. And you're going to imagine what does the actor or the actress feel as they are playing the role that you have just described. So for example, somebody who will have described that they have a lot of interaction with colleagues and they're part of a team and they do something together.

Probably the feeling that they are feeling is connected. They are feeling connected to the other people around them. And they're probably feeling connected to themselves. Or somebody who is talking about how interesting it is to investigate the different aspects of the project they're working on.

Probably they're feeling very curious and maybe they're feeling passionate. So you try to identify what are the feelings, the main feelings that your future self is feeling. Try to come up with a list of maybe seven or eight feelings at least, that your future self is feeling on a regular basis.

And some of the feelings are the feelings from the good days, and some of the feelings from the bad days. And the feelings from the bad days, it can be for example, that they are determined to get back on track or that they are patient with whatever is happening. Or they are still connected.

They stay connected even when it's a bad day. Once you have listed, what kind of feelings your future self is feeling, you're going to try to identify, what do they tell themselves that create the feeling? So what is it that your future self knows for a fact, or really believes or takes for granted that makes them able to feel this way in the situation of a good and normal day or in the situation of a bad day.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples again. So for example, if your future self feels connected, maybe they believe "I belong". "I'm part of a team". "This is where my place is". "I can always rely on myself" or "I can always rely on my team". So they believe things like this, which make them feel connected and secure and trusting perhaps.

If they are feeling curious, maybe they're thinking "this is so interesting". "I really wonder if we could do it in a different way". "Let's figure out if we could find a different way to market this product" or whatever it is that your future self is working with.

So these are the typical thoughts that would create curiosity. So try to figure out what your future self knows or takes for granted that would create this feeling. And you can imagine if it's difficult for you to do that, you can imagine a situation in the past where you have felt that kind of feeling, and you can ask yourself, what did I know, or what did I tell myself that made me feel that way in that situation?

And you can use this as a base to figure out what are the thoughts that your future self is thinking. You can make a list of these thoughts. So you're going to have a handful of thoughts, maybe 7, 10 or 15 thoughts that your future self really believes.

And what you're going to do now is you're going to go back to the list of issues that you wrote. And you're going to imagine the person who believes those thoughts that you just identified, how would they tackle the two or three issues that you have listed? And that's the way you can get wisdom from your future self. If you really follow this exercise.

And if you really do it, as I have described and take your time to really flesh out and really understand what does your future self think and feel and how do they behave on a day to day basis, you're going to be able to put yourself in their shoes and answer to the questions you have on your current issues from their shoes.

And that wisdom is so powerful because it's exactly adapted to you. It's exactly adapted to your values, to what you like to do, don't like to do. What you want for yourself. And it's actually advice from the future. And it opens up a part of you that you might not yet have identified exists, which is quite amazing.

And then there's another amazing thing that happens is that, at some point you actually become that future you. At some point you actually meet the partner. At some point, you actually lose the weight. At some point, you actually launch the company which is successful and you realize that you have actually become the future self of your past self.

And so when it's time for you to create the next future self, you create them with the full confidence that at some point you are actually going to embody that person and become that person. And that's an amazing, amazing, amazing feeling. So have a lot of fun talking to your future self. As a little bonus, what you can do is you can also ask any questions to your future self. So you can ask them anything that you want to know and step into their shoes again, and listen to their answer.

And be inspired by their answer. If you found this episode helpful and you want to help the podcast, well, the best way is to share it with other people. So you can do that by leaving a review on one of the podcast platforms, or you can tip a friend about it by sending, for example, the link to the podcast episode from my website. Thanks a lot for listening today.

And remember that even when you can't get yourself to do what you want, even when you're stuck in negative emotions or unpleasant thought loops. And even when you don't believe it, especially when you don't believe it, you're not broken. You're not flawed. You're not even jinxed. You're just learning how to be an excellent rider. There are no bad horses, only untrained riders.