How much time do you spend thinking about your future? And is that time positive, are you envisioning an incredible future? Are you dreaming about your goals, or are you ruminating or catastrophizing? Either way, how much time are you spending thinking about the circumstances that you want or the circumstances you want to avoid? The truth is, whether you’re worrying or dreaming, if you’re focusing on the circumstances, on the external outcomes, you’re missing the mark. In this episode I’m going to teach you how to think about your future in a brand new way. Welcome to your feminist future self.

Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and Founder of the School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.

Hello my fine feathered friends, we have come to the end of this series on Feminist Mindset Principles. This is our last episode in this series. If you’re new to this work, you should have a solid understanding of the basic principles of thought change that we work with here. And if you’re an experienced podcast listener, so to speak, hopefully you brought your beginner’s mind to the series and understand the concepts now in a much deeper way.

Today we’re going to talk about using the concepts and tools to evolve, to become the future version of yourself and how that evolution will also create a future better version of the world. It’s important to preface this though, by saying that the future you isn’t better than the current you. She’s not more deserving of love or respect. She’s not more valuable. She’s not more worthy. And while she has solved some of the problems you have and she’s enjoyed reaching some of the goals you haven’t reached, her life isn’t a constant state of bliss.

Life is 50/50, it always involves joy, connection, love and it always involves challenges, suffering and negative emotion. It’s very important not to put future you on a pedestal because that will disconnect you from that future self and it will make it much harder to actually become that person. So that is the first and most important thing to say is that future you is not more worthy or more valuable or a better person, nor is she a Stepford wife who’s blissfully happy all the time. But she is someone who has grown and evolved in ways that matter to you.

She is someone who has accomplished something you didn’t think you could do. She is someone who has created a life she’s proud of living. And it’s so important to realize that that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything went her way or that she never dealt with anything challenging or that she got all the circumstances that she wanted even. But it means that she was able to create some outcomes and returns and circumstances that she wanted. And she was able to cope and thrive, not just survive, when things were challenging.

This is so important because so many people just live their lives on autopilot. They don’t really have a destination and if they do, it’s not an internal one. It’s focused on the external things, making a certain amount of money, living a certain way, getting married, having kids, buying a car, whatever it is. Now, as you’re going to hear in this episode, I do talk about external outcomes or markers to help anchor this concept of the future self. But those things are just the external direction signs so we know what direction we’re trying to go with our internal growth.

People who don’t know about thought work and practical philosophy, just focus on the actions to get the result. But what’s the point of that? Getting a specific outcome in your life without changing your thinking, your concept of yourself or your emotional capacity to tolerate challenge, to tolerate success and happiness. It’s fairly pointless if that’s what you’re doing and you manage to get a different outcome or circumstance without changing your self-concept and your thinking. You’re just you with the same negative thought patterns, unnecessary suffering and self-criticism in a nicer house, or with a different title.

I do see this sometimes even with thought work, people will change the thoughts they need to take different actions, to produce a certain outcome in terms of maybe believing that they can do it. They think they can’t, they change their thoughts to believe they can and then they do, do it. But they haven’t done any of the deeper kind of self-concept, new kind of future self work.

And so it ends up ringing in a little hollow because they did change their thoughts and that’s awesome, they learned how to do that. But they kind of did it in isolation without really connecting to this bigger question of, who are you trying to become as a person? A dream life or becoming your future self isn’t worthwhile because the circumstances of it will change your feelings. The point of it is to become your future self, to change the way you think and feel on purpose before you have any of the external results of that growth.

We’re taught it’s the other way around. Get the outcome, get the return, and then you’re going to feel better. Get the proposal, get the promotion, have the kid, publish the novel, whatever it is and then you’re going to feel good. But we know that’s not how it works. The outcomes are honestly in some ways, just the byproduct of the growth and evolution that you have to do in your thoughts, in your self-concept, in your emotional capacity and your emotional resilience, in your deep grounding and power in your own life.

We want to become our future selves, not because they have different things or circumstances than we do, but because they’re different people. And again, not because we’re not good enough now. Some of us, myself included, the purpose we have chosen for our lives is to grow and evolve and see what we are truly capable of as we shed layers and layers of socialization and repression of our natural power and capacity.

I’ve really come to think of this as the process of becoming my feminist future self, not because my feminism per se is changing. But because it’s my future self that more fully expresses who I am beneath the layers of social conditioning that have taught me to tamper down and shut her out and play small. And I know from my own life and from all the logic in the world that when I become more and more of that future self, when I undo more and more layers of socialization, my impact on the world around me gets bigger and bigger and I help the world get better.

I show up in my own specific sphere, yours is going to be probably different. I mean some of you might be coaches as well. But people listening to this podcast are doctors and lawyers and architects and stay at home moms and school teachers and janitors and whatever else. It’s not about you need to publish a book and have a podcast and become a coach.

But in your life, there’s something of the same phenomenon that will play out. Which is, as I strip away my social conditioning and I connect to whatever more raw source of power and motivation and joy and creativity and kind of ability to act onto and upon the world and to make change. I change the people around me and the world around me in my arena, on my path. And that same thing will happen to you whatever your path is.

So it’s not just good for us, our future self is also the future world. When we create our future selves, when we spend time envisioning them, connecting to them, figuring out how to become them or become them more. We’re also envisioning a different world, a world in which women can show up differently. |And that is a world where women change the world for the better. So how do we access and create that future self?

Here is possibly the most woo thing I’ll ever say to you, so get ready, hold on to your moonbeams. In some ways this future you already exists. And that’s not because time is an illusion, although apparently that’s true, but because your brain is already capable of at least beginning to think like that future self. You will not have all the answers. You’re not supposed to, obviously, or you’d already be that person. But you actually do already have hints of that person within you. That just makes sense because you’re not turning into a totally different person.

It’s more like you’re going to embark on a gardening process where you weed out some thoughts and fertilize others, and you landscape your mind into the beautiful place you want it to be. As we’ve been talking about throughout this Feminist Mindset Principles series, your thoughts create your feelings, your actions, and the returns, the outcomes you can create in your life. So if you want to create different outcomes you have to start thinking different thoughts.

Your future self, who has those outcomes you want. She has invested her mental and emotional energy into the thoughts that created the feelings she needed to drive the actions she wanted to take. And we can work backwards to help you figure out how to do that too. So I want you to imagine an outcome you want in your life. Maybe it’s a raise. Maybe it’s a milestone in your business. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s a friendship, it’s a creative practice. Maybe it’s a movement or body outcome, a way of parenting, a big move, a sexual fantasy, a divorce, whatever it is.

And I want you to ask yourself, how does that person feel? How does the CEO of a $1 million business feel about her business? How does a woman who has an incredible sex life feel about herself, about her partners, about her body? How does a woman who has learned Italian fluently feel about practicing the language? You can even do this with something that’s challenging right now. How does someone who’s gotten to the other side of the grief that I’m experiencing, feel about where I am right now in the process?

And then you can ask yourself, what would that person be thinking? What does a parent who stays calm when her kids are upset think about tantrums? What does a bestselling novelist think about writing and selling books? What does a marathon runner think about running? I want to share some examples from my own life, because this is a process I have used to create all of the outcomes and returns I now get to enjoy and experience, more importantly, the person that I am now that I get to enjoy and experience.

When I was first building my business, let’s just start with that first example. I had no idea what I was doing. I did not have an MBA. I had literally never taken a single economics, business or marketing class. I did take a class called law and economics in law school, but it was actually all about behavioral psychology, which turned out to be useful for coaching, but it was not really about the business world. So I had no experience. I had teachers, of course, and mentors but fundamentally every business is a little bit different and I was trying to figure this out for myself.

And I asked myself constantly, what would the CEO of a $100,000 business do? That was my goal. I was starting from zero. My first year of coaching I made $26,000. My goal was to make $100,000. And I asked myself all the time, what would the CEO of a $100,000 business do?

Any time I had a problem come up and my primitive brain usually reacted with a threat response or I was worrying or ruminating or I had to figure out what to do next or I had to make a decision and my brain told me I don’t know what to do. I asked myself, what would a $100,000 CEO do? And the wild thing is my brain often knew the answer.

When I was working on my dating mindset, my insecurity and my scarcity, my magical thinking, all the traps of romantic socialization that I talk about in my book. I would ask myself, what would a happily partnered woman looking back at this think about it? What does a happily partnered woman think about herself? What did she think about herself when she was dating? When I was doing my body image work, I would ask myself, what would the version of me that loves her body be thinking right now?

I know, this sounds simple, and of course it’s a skill just like anything else I teach in thought work. Because one of the most bizarre features of having a human brain is the ability to observe your own thinking and observe when you both know what to do and are not willing to accept that answer. So sometimes I would see clearly what the CEO of a $100,000 business would do. But then my brain would still have lots of objections about why I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t be sure. Maybe that was the wrong answer. What about this?

And all of those objections sounded like they made sense to me of course, because they were my current thoughts as the owner of a business that was making $10,000. So I believed those thoughts and they sounded right. So sometimes it was a little argument in my brain between my $10,000 and $100,000 CEO selves. And sometimes I would ask myself and I would just get no answer. My brain would just be, and what I used to like to call turtle on its back mode, where it just acted like it couldn’t possibly figure out anything and had never done that and would never be able to.

I had to really learn when I was in overwhelm and see this kind of learned helplessness thought pattern we get from social conditioning and how to get myself out of it in order to access that higher self thinking. So these are absolutely crucial skills for living the life you truly want, being able to connect to that future self vision and being able to overcome your brain’s objections. When I wrote the book, Take Back Your Brain, I really had to focus on healing the damage that society causes to our brains.

We have to heal before we can grow, not in totality, it’s not we heal to a perfect place and then we stretch for something bigger. That’s perfectionist thinking. That’s not what I mean. But obviously it’s very hard to reprogram your brain if you don’t even understand that it’s been programmed or what kind of deprogramming it might need, much less how to reprogram it. So the book really focuses on that. How have you been programmed? And what are the ways we could start to reprogram your brain?

But I love, love, love teaching how to access your future self, this much more advanced next level future visioning concept. So if this podcast is resonating with you and you want to learn to do that and you’re listening on the day it releases, May 16th, you need to set an alarm to go off in 24 hours because I have the deal of the century for you. But it is only available for 72 hours. We are getting so close to the book release and I’m so excited that soon this book will be out, it’ll be in your hot little hands and I really want to celebrate the release with you.

And I really want to teach so many of you how to take the next step towards that future self. So in September, I’m going to be teaching a full one day virtual workshop with me called Your Feminist Future Self: Change Your Life, Change the World. I really want to teach you what comes after the book. It’s September 8th, but of course you’ll get the replay if you can’t attend live. And this way you’ve got the summer to read the book and get ready.

In this workshop, we’re going to focus on picking one big outcome you want for your life, and I’m going to teach you how to access your future self and the future self who has accomplished that outcome. Using these feminist thought work tools to really tap into the power you have under all those layers of social conditioning. And to really figure out who you have to become and make sure that that is the person you want to become. But we’re not just going to draw inspiration from your life.

We’re also going to envision how this change will impact people and circumstances around you. So you can connect to a motivation and a source of wisdom bigger than your conditioned brain and bigger than your personal life to carry you through to that feminist future you want for yourself and for the world. So often I see when people don’t go after big goals or they start and they fall off the wagon in addition to all the kind of self-critical limiting thinking that of course we’re going to work on. It’s also because they’re not really connecting to a bigger why.

You need that bigger why to help support you when you’re tired or the going gets tough. I have learned that firsthand again through this book process. So we’re going to really make that connection for you so that when you leave, you know who you’re trying to become, what you’re trying to create. And how it is going to not just help you grow, but actually help change the world around you.

Normally I only teach one day workshops like this inside the Feminist Self-Help Society, and even then it’s usually only for annual members who have invested almost $1,000 by that time when they are able to take it. But this workshop I really want to share with all of you who have supported the book and have supported this podcast. So this workshop is free for you when you order a copy of the Take Back Your Brain audiobook by midnight Sunday, May 19th in your time zone. And your investment for the audiobook and this whole free one day workshop is only $39.

So you’re getting a full one day workshop with me to connect you to your future self and give you a game plan for becoming that person and creating what you want to create for $39, which I have never offered anything like this before. But the normal rules don’t apply the week before your book comes out. It’s time to celebrate and just do crazy things. But listen, before you run off to sign up, you must do it through our book website. We cannot track and deliver at the workshop to people who buy the audiobook through other retailers directly.

You have to get it through our site with the audiobook retailer that we are working with. So you can do that at unfuckyourbrain.com/audiobook or you can text your email to +1347 997 1784 and the code word is audiobook. That’s +1347 997 1784, code word is audiobook, all one word or unfuckyourbrain.com/audiobook. Again, audiobook’s all one word. Let me answer a few quick questions upfront, just save us all some time.

Yes, it has to be the audiobook. If you don’t like audiobooks, but you want to come to this workshop, then just consider it a $39 workshop ticket. It is still a bargain. Yes, it has to be purchased through our site during those three days, May 17th to May 19th. Yes, I read the audiobook myself. It is one very, very long podcast but with chapters. It was actually super fun to read and get to kind of act out the whole book. I really enjoyed doing it. So I think if you like the podcast, you’re going to love listening to the book.

And I will read a hardcover and listen to an audiobook if it’s a book that I really want to integrate because I find that I pick up different things that way. Some things land more powerfully when I read them visually and then some things land more powerfully when I hear them. So if you really want this work to rewire your brain through osmosis, reading it and listening to the audiobook is a brilliant way to do that. My friend, who’s a therapist, just read the book and said that it was going to save readers, ‘a decade of therapy’. Which I can tell you right now, costs a lot more than $39.

So this is why I call it the deal of the century. Let’s recap. Purchase the audiobook through our site, unfuckyourbrain.com/audiobook or texting your email by midnight in your time zone, Sunday, May 19th. And you will get a ticket to attend this free full day workshop with me in September or you’ll get the replay. If you attend live, you get the replay. If you can’t attend live, you get the replay. All about how to create the life you want by connecting to your feminist future self and connecting that to your purpose in the world.

Let’s fucking go, you all. I cannot wait to teach this workshop and I cannot wait to see you there.

If you’re loving what you’re learning on the podcast, you have got to come check out the Feminist Self Help Society. It’s our newly revamped community and classroom where you get individual help to better apply these concepts to your life, along with a library of next level blow your mind, coaching tools and concepts that I just can’t fit in a podcast episode.

It’s also where you can hang out, get coached, and nerd out about all things thought work and feminist mindset with other podcast listeners just like you and me. It’s my favorite place on Earth and it will change your life, I guarantee it. Come join us at www.unfuckyourbrain.com/society. I can’t wait to see you there.