Connecting with our Future Selves with Hal Hershfield

The Evolving Leader

Have you ever wanted to travel through time and see what your life will be like in the future? While we want the best possible future for ourselves, we often fail to make decisions that would make that a reality. So why are so many of us so disconnected from our future selves?

This week on The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to psychologist Professor Hal Hershfield. Hal is Professor of Marketing, Behavioural Decision Making, and Psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and is committed to the work of helping people make better long-term decisions. In his 2023 book ‘Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today’ Hal explains that in our minds, our future selves often look like strangers. Many of us view the future as incredibly distant, making us more likely to opt for immediate gratification that disregards the health and wellbeing of ourselves in the years to come. He says that people who are able to connect with their future selves, however, are better able to balance living for today and planning for tomorrow.

This is a fascinating listen.
Referenced during this episode:
Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. Check-in (00:04:20)

3. You write that our future self is a stranger to us and that has implications on our decision making, our wellbeing and our quality of life. Can you unpack that for us? (00:04:55)

4. Can you unpack the idea of being a stranger to your future self? (00:06:51)

5. You ask ‘are we the same over time?’ and you point an interesting way of answering that question by identifying when those closest to us might say that they no longer recognise us and that’s connected to some evolution of our moral traits. (00:09:57)

6. What’s going on in people’s minds when they’re looking at behaviours that undermine their future self? (00:13:34)

7. The language that people use about themselves is interesting. You talk about when people use first person descriptions of themselves and when it shifts into third person. (00:16:33)

8. This notion that our future self is unknowable to us, how do we change that relationship? (00:18:55)

9. In having this dialogue, you have also learnt what doesn’t work to make this conversation really productive. What are some of the things that you’ve seen there? (00:23:39)

10. How much does making our future selves more familiar to us depend on making our present selves more familiar to us? (00:27:09)

11. We’re talking about how to envision a picture of our future self so that we can change the relationship from the complete stranger and refer to commitment devices that help us. (00:31:06)

12. Shifting to the implications on the economy and society. (00:42:12)

13. Listeners who are parents might be thinking ‘how can I help my children use this future self thinking to not become beaten down by the uncertainty of AI etc’. What advice would you give to parents? (00:45:09)

14. What’s one piece of practical homework that you can leave our listeners with to go and put into practice straight away? (00:48:23)