Guide to Future Self Journaling

Future Self Journaling is a mechanism of self therapy, or holistic therapy, which utilizes daily writing. Daily writing is required to keep a promise to yourself as a component of ego work. The Future Self Journal template I use is created and freely distributed by Dr. Nicole LePera. If you are new to future self journaling, Welcome! I hope this information is useful to you. Perhaps the journaling prompts here find their way into the toolbox of those of you who may need it.

I will start with the prompts. If you are interested in my personal experience with Future Self Journaling, how it has helped me, my story begins below the prompts. I am glad you are here!

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Once a behavior or habit is identified that you would like to change or develop, use some of the following prompts for your daily writing, keeping your future self in mind.

1. Restate the affirmation or directive to work on the selected behavior.
2. How did you actively practice the new behavior today?
3. Today I focused on shifting my behavior from […] to […]
4. I am grateful for…
5. How will my future self benefit from the actions I took today?
6. How do I feel about becoming my better self?
7. What choices did I make today to advance the goals of my future self?
8. What will my future self be doing as their better self three, five, twelve years from now?
9. What routines have you provided today to assist the goals of your future self?
10. As you have witnessed your behavior and thoughts, any clarity or insights?
11. List your behavioral and thought successes for the day.
12. Describe a specific situation that is less challenging because of the changes you have made.

As a reminder, the point is to write daily. The future self journal does not need to be overly wordy or a huge time sink to be effective, thank goodness! Being grateful for the gifts brought by today is a core facet of future self journaling. Use positive visualization to answer questions about your future self.

Would you like a refresher on the basics of future self journaling? You can learn more from Dr. Nicole herself at

https://theholisticpsychologist.com/future-self-journaling/

My personal experience with future self journaling has been positive. I began this journey last year, with some breaks in journaling, logging and blogging about my experience. I have made progress in the following areas:

• Witnessing situations where I felt overly emotional, working through my thought process and reasons to react, and making a different choice.
• Challenging my assumptions. Not only internally, but seeing a situation, choosing to handle it differently and see if it turned out as negative as I assumed. Most times, it doesn’t. My beat-an-issue-to-death method of problem solving does not benefit me and is something my future self does far less often.
• Keeping smaller promises to myself. Such as eating more servings of fruit and veggies, and starting the day eating them. Stretching *every* day.
• Reaching out to someone every day. Checking in on people I care about, not letting days pass where I forget to do the quick things to show someone is on my mind.
• Letting things go. Think about the needs of myself and the other person, act timely yet pithily and then walk away from the situation. This can be mentally taxing for me as I obsess as a matter of habit. I have had decent success with the visually “file the issue away into trash file” method of mentally resolving an issue.
• Healthier habits. Drinking more water, walking more.
• Taking control of what I can in my environment. Facebook has been gone for years. I don’t visit twitter very often. I curate my personal Instagram page with a heavy hand and as a result I have a feed full of flowers, recipes and smiling people. Negative people? No thanks, keep it moving. I don’t even like horror movie and crime television commercials. Do I really need to see a man creeping up on a screaming woman with a knife in his hand, then bloody clothing displayed on a screen? In a commercial for a show I would never ever watch? I really don’t.
• Tidier. I loath dusting but I dust daily. My fan blades and window blinds are cleaner than they have ever been. I journal about cleaning because I feel one’s environment can sometimes be a reflection of how we see ourselves.
• Smiling and waving at people more. I strongly believe that this period of isolation has really hurt some souls walking among us, barely hanging on. And you don’t know who needs that positive acknowledgment. So I deploy friendliness wildly and indiscriminately. These positive expressions also counter my chronic resting bitch face. It helps me as much as anyone!

Future Self Journaling is not a replacement for therapy and medication for everyone. It is one of many tools. Please check in with a medical professional regarding your mental and physical health needs.

Whatever mechanism of help you choose, I wish you a productive walk along that path! Please feel free to share this post, or any of my content, should you think it may be helpful to someone else. Thank you so much for reading.

C.Elisabeth