One of the things that I've become accustomed to doing that I think has been really useful, it also took a little bit of work in the beginning to get comfortable doing it, is really allowing [00:01:00] myself to imagine the older version of myself. To put myself in the perspective of an older version of me that no longer has all of the resources that I have. And when I say resources, I mean my, my health, you know, my, my brain, my mind, uh, time, my ability to, to make mistakes with a lot of latitude because I have a lot of time to learn from them. There are many resources that we have just by being where we're at in this particular moment that will continue to be fleeting for the rest of our lives.

We start to hit an apex usually in our early twenties. for our fitness, our health, our ability to treat our bodies pretty much any way we want with very little consequences. After that, your health is a massive resource because, it can absolutely improve if you treat your body well, but only to a certain extent, right?

You will continue to age every single day. The same is true for your mind. And the same is certainly [00:02:00] true for your margin of error. And what I mean by that is every day that goes by every mistake that you make, you have less of an ability to learn from then use what you've learned to implement new strategies that will be effective.

And so I try to think even though it's uncomfortable, I tend to try to put myself on a regular basis in the perspective of an older version of myself. I have a friend and colleague who posited this to me years ago and it really stuck with me. It was the first time I really had thought deeply about this

and he told me that there is a 70 year old version of you inside of you now. That is screaming for you to do the right thing that's screaming for you to do the thing that you're avoiding doing right now. That's screaming for you to do the thing that you're a little bit afraid of because you might fail.

That's screaming for you to do the thing that you feel uncomfortable doing, or you [00:03:00] feel like there will be time tomorrow to do or the next day or starting on Monday. There's a 70 year old version of you that doesn't have that time anymore. That doesn't have this body anymore. That doesn't have the resources that you have anymore.

And when you can take a step back, And look at the decisions you're making right now the actions you're taking or not taking right now, the things that you're saying you want, the path that you're going down, if you could take a step back and look at yourself from your 70 year old version's perspective.

What would that be like? How would you feel knowing that you have all of these resources and all of this time right now, but you're going to have less of that every single day. For a lot of people that can be a very uncomfortable thought when we think about older versions of ourselves, often they seem so far away.

And when we think about older versions of ourselves, I think we inherently. Tend to think [00:04:00] about them having a really great life and everything they want, or we just don't really think about it at all.

And when we do, if we imagine the older versions of ourselves, they're normally living some life that we're not currently living right now for a lot of people. Oftentimes when we think about the older version of ourselves, we just, by default, assume that they have a really wonderful life.

We don't want to think too hard about it, but we just assume That things are going to be better in the future than they are right now, in whatever regard or whatever area that we might be struggling right now. We assume that we'll figure it out, that life will take care of itself. And in many aspects, that's true, especially if we're going internally and realizing that life is already pretty great.

And it always will be as long as we keep that perspective, but we tend not to think about connecting where we are right now and how we're living our day to day lives. With the older version of ourselves and map out if I continue down this path. [00:05:00] What will my life look like when I am 70, 75, 80 years old?

It's an uncomfortable thought exercise. And it's what we don't often do because of that resource of time, we feel like we have so much time that it's really not important to think about what that older version of ourselves looks like right now, that person is 10, 15, 30 years away, maybe even more than that.

We have so much time to figure it out, but if you just look at the data, if you look statistically, there are many aspects in which most people really don't figure it out. Financial is one of them. Most people end up past the age of retirement, not really set up financially to live comfortable lives, and they have to depend on amazing people in their worlds to help them financially in many aspects.

Health wise? We don't really connect what we're putting in our body right now to how it might affect us in 40 years, and we might not [00:06:00] do that tomorrow or the next day or the next day, but those 40 years are going to pass. And if we never developed a habit of treating our bodies well, each day that passes, we have less of that resource.

We have less time, and we've gone further down a path of bad habits. And so while it can be very uncomfortable. It's very important to look at yourself from the perspective of the older version of yourself from time to time, because that is going to be you, you, this body, this vessel that we call ourselves is just a culmination of all of the things that we've experienced in this world.

And many of them are of our own accord. They're of our own decisions, what we ingest, both food wise and knowledge wise, whether we adjust anything at all, the decisions that we make, the actions we take or fail to take the things that we do that are in our control, those end up controlling and influencing, I should say, our [00:07:00] outcomes, meaning the future version of ourself in a massive way.

We have this shrinking resource of time. But that older version of ourselves seems so far away right now. And unless we put the pieces together, unless we have the courage and the sense to think what I'm doing right now is just a precursor to the 70 year old version of my life experience, we can head down the wrong path in a lot of areas of our life for a very long time.

And so I think it's a very powerful question that we can get in the habit of asking ourselves. 

How would the 70 year old version of myself feel about what I'm doing right now? And doesn't have to be seven it could be 80, it could be 150 modern medical technology. Hopefully people start living longer again, whatever age it is, that's meaningful to you.

It's important to get in the habit of doing that. Maybe not every day, but often enough that you stop down and you ask yourself, would that version of [00:08:00] me feel good about what I'm doing right now? What about where I'm at right now about the things that I'm not doing right now or am doing right now? You don't have to do this in every aspect of your life, but I think in the key ones, it's a very important question to ask The things that by default will affect you for the rest of your life, like what you put in your body, for example, I think it's really powerful to stop down maybe once a week and ask yourself, would the 70 year old version of me approve of how I treated my body this week? Of how I've set them up. For later in life, what I ate, did I drink too much, whatever it is, how I treated my body this week, Knowing in the modern era that we have so much information on how to live a healthy lifestyle, on what to eat, on how to move, even if you're not doing crazy vigorous exercise, just not being totally sedentary and keeping your body moving.

We [00:09:00] have so much information and so much of an ability to treat ourselves well with that older version of you. How would they feel about how you treated your body this week? You don't have to do it every single day, but can you imagine having to actually vocally answer that question? You imagine that 70 year old version of you like Ebenezer Scrooge style comes walking through the door.

How would he feel about this week and how you've treated your body? That's an incredibly powerful question. And there are many aspects of this. I think that health and fitness is kind of just the easiest one because it's the easiest to sort of see and feel and it's relevant for everyone.

I have something that's very important to me when I get older and that is that my words are still found valuable. I think that this is something that we all want, but maybe we don't articulate very well. I think a lot of us can relate to having maybe people in our world that [00:10:00] we don't really listen to them nearly as much when they get older, we tend to think that they're losing their edge a little bit, maybe mentally a little bit, or maybe they just spent a lifetime doing things or not doing things that brought them to a point where we don't really value what they say.

We don't really look up to them with a ton of respect in a lot of different ways. And I don't ever want that to be me. One of my goals in my life experience is to ensure that for as long as I live and breathe, the words that I say have value to other people. And I ask myself about that older version of myself often enough in terms of what I'm reading, what I'm consuming.

Am I sitting there doom scrolling on my phone and just ingesting a whole bunch of nonsense information that's not going to be worth a dang in 20 years or am I taking the limited time that I have on this earth and [00:11:00] learning and growing and raising my level of intellect? So that for as long as I live, I can have value that I can give to others, whether that's just articulating something or a thought or giving them a useful tool that can help them in their lives.

Like I have to continue to learn those things and I have to continue to apply them and I have to continue to embed them. So that for as long as I live, I'll always have those. That's very important to me. So when I ask those questions of myself on a weekly basis, it reminds me all of the times that I don't really feel like picking up a book or the times that I don't really feel like doing much of anything except just sort of laying scrolling through a whole bunch of stuff , on Facebook, it reminds me that there's purpose in what I'm doing.

that for as long as I live, I want to be able to provide value to other people. And that helps drive me forward. And I asked myself, would the 70 [00:12:00] year old version of you appreciate The way that you've treated your mind this week, the content that you've consumed this week. I do this with many other things in my life.

I've talked about my Spanish journey on this show quite a bit. I just made a massive commitment to my learning and coaching there with the 70 year old version of you feel good about your commitment to becoming bilingual this week. Did you slack off? Did you hit no on your notifications when it was time to practice?

Like every day, like I tend to do sometimes, how would they feel about your performance this week? It's a really, really, really useful tool. And I think one of the reasons that it can be so uncomfortable for people. It really even triggering is because we don't want to think about that far off future. We don't want to live with the reality that where we're going is just a culmination of the things that we're doing to get to wherever that is, the decisions that we're making.

Of course, life has some variables that we can't [00:13:00] control, but we are heavily influential on our own outcomes. And we don't want to think about what that future looks like. Because we might not be totally fulfilled with the decisions that we're making right now. And it feels like we have a lot of time to change that.

It feels like we have a lot of time to start over. It feels like we have a lot of Mondays where we can start then, but every day we have one less. And that's why I think it can be really powerful to try and put yourself in the mindset of that older version of you and just have a conversation with them.

Listen to them. Would they be satisfied? Would they be fulfilled? Would they be happy? Would they be joyous about the decisions that you're making? This carries over obviously in every aspect of life, your relationships, if one less day with the people that you love every day. Your relationships with your spouse or your partner or your children, all the things that we always feel we have so many resources around time [00:14:00] being one of them Would our older version of ourselves be happy about the way that we're engaging with those part of our lives?

I think that if you get in the habit of Asking yourself that in the areas that you might be uncomfortable asking yourself that right now you might reveal Um A whole lot of gaps between where you are and where you want to be. But what I hope it does for you is really raise that level of awareness that spurs action.

Massive action is a product of massive awareness. That is all it is. It is burning your hand on a hot stove. You burn your hand on a hot stove because you become incredibly aware of the pain that you're experiencing and you take massive action to get out of it. Massive action is the product of massive awareness, and when we avoid awareness around what the future looks like or is going to look like if we continue down this path, we don't inspire massive action.

So at least what this tool will do is help raise your [00:15:00] level of awareness and hopefully spur a higher level of action. Try this in your life, drop a comment. I would love to know what the answers to some of these questions are, how you're feeling about these exercise, how it challenged you. 

I truly appreciate you watching another episode and I look forward to talking soon.