Stop Waiting to Be Them: How to Start Living Like Your Future Self Today

I always lived in that future dream. But that needed to stop because I realized that as long as I resent the person I am now, who is creating the life I'm living right now, or who has created the life I'm living right now, I needed to understand that I will never get to that desired dream. I will never get to that level financially, emotionally, if I'm not able to tune into that right now, into how it would make me feel if I already had that right now. This is the Leap Live and Laminate Podcast. Hi, I'm your host, Esther Godor. Twelve years ago, I took a big leap. I left my corporate job, I moved into a new company, country, and started a business from scratch in my fifth language. Today I run a boutique launch and systems agency helping ambitious entrepreneurs build smart and scalable digital businesses on Kajabi without having to do everything by themselves. This is your go to place with honest stories, actionable strategies and real talk around building a business and life you love. Your best life and success story are still ahead. Let's write them together. The other day I recorded an episode where I talked about how each time I want to make a decision or I have to make a decision, I check in with my future self for the person I'm becoming, the person I want to be, and check what they would be doing in this situation in this case, and how this attitude, how this approach actually have replaced any and all New Year's resolution over the past, let's say, three, four years in my life, but definitely the, the last two years. And there are a few things I would like to add to this topic because you, you might have, you might have been trying this approach for the last week. I, I published that episode a week ago. But if you haven't, if you haven't watched or listened to that episode, then before you listen to today's one, this one, please definitely go back and listen or watch that one first because that's where I explain the foundations. That's where I, I lay out the groundwork on this, how this whole approach work and why it has proven to be way more substantial and way more sustainable for me when it comes to changing habits. Or, yeah, coming up with a, with a New Year's resol and how it gradually helped me elevate who I am and the way I live my life, the way I run my business, the way I find my clients and the way I work with my clients, even the way I behave with my friends and family and with myself. Okay. In my life. So it Basically impacted everything positively. And I wanted to add a few thoughts so hence this episode today. And what I want to talk to you about is that when we follow this approach, when we occasionally or very frequently, to me it's a couple times a day when we so frequently talk to our future self, what we definitely want to avoid is constantly comparing us to that situation our future self wants to be in and take it as a shit, I'm not there yet. Shit, I haven't done what I promised myself two days ago, I'm never gonna get there. Maybe this is not even my future self. Maybe this is not even in the cards for me. So basically what I want to bring your attention to is that your future self want or wouldn't exist or wouldn't ever come to life without the person you are today. And therefore, whenever I talk to my future self, as crazy as it might be that I talk to my future self or I act as if I was that person already, I give myself grace. Because I also know how freaking difficult it is sometimes to keep up with everything that I promise myself. And I want to just enjoy the path getting there. I used to be in a place in my mind where I was constantly hating the life I was in. And I always lived in that, in that future dream. But that needed to stop because I realized that as long as I resent the person I am now, who is creating the life I'm living right now, or who has created the life I'm living right now, because everything we do affects the way we are able to live our lives. Of course, there are tons of external circumstances as well that shape everything in our lives. But today I'm talking about our role in really shaping who we are and what life we are living. And. And basically I needed to understand that I will never get to that desired dream state or place. I will never get to that level financially, I will never get to that level emotionally, if I'm not able to tune into that right now, into how it would make me feel if I already had that right now. To give you, to give you an example, if I'm not able to feel great and amazing at the home I'm living in right now, whenever I get to the home, to the dream home that I will be living in one day, I might not be happy even there, but as soon as I'm able to start truly enjoying the home I'm living in right now, I'm opening myself up to up leveling to that new home and will be able to enjoy it to the fullest as well. And this applies to everything. Um, I used to think I would be. I will be successful in my business when I. When I lose weight, or I will be successful in my business when I will be able to afford having my hair done. And it's. It works the other way around. Yeah. As long as you are able to tune into that successful self of yours. That successful self. When they are asked, are you going to take care of your body today? They're gonna do that. But if you are waiting for someone else to take care of your body so you become that toned person, the day might never come. I hope I'm making sense here. I know I'm rambling, but I'm trying to bring up examples from my own life. And another way of looking at this is I might never get to that future state if I'm not able to be that person right now. Because we need to understand that that future self will never exist without the person we are right now. The person we are right now is responsible for shaping, building, and creating that future self we. We are becoming. And I might get the question mostly from my. My mom, like, why this obsession with the future self? Why can't you be just happy where you are? She would. She would even ask me, why couldn't you just stay happy with where you were? At 25, you had your own apartment, you had your dream job, you had amazing friends, family, you had everything. But somehow I felt like, this is not everything. Maybe it looks like everything to someone else, an external observer, but to me, it felt like, oh, my God, there is so much more. For example, in terms of my career, I felt like, oh, it looks like I have it all. I have an amazing job. I work with truly incredible individuals. Fantastic humans surrounded me back then. But working in corporate, I felt I was a tiny little piece in a huge machine. And back then, what made me change was that I felt, wow, I think I can do so much more. I can make such a bigger impact with something that's truly my own and where I don't depend on others. It somehow ties into this saying that if you don't get to work on your own dreams, you will become someone who works on other people's dreams. And this is how I felt back then. So that's why I needed to step out of that situation and needed to shape something new. And, yeah, I acknowledge that during, I think, a whole decade, I constantly lived in a state where I wasn't able to be truly happy about what I had. And it kept me Stuck. And the moment I realized that there are so many amazing things in my life, current life, or even when I thought about what I want to build or create or have in 2026, my first thought was, oh my God, I have everything. I don't need anything else. But to get to this state, I needed to go through times when I wasn't looking at things like that. I was always just like, as soon as we get out of this place, maybe house we were living in, I will be happy. Yeah. But we did get out and I still wasn't happy because I needed to find my happiness in the moment. And to give you a few examples on how I find my future self in my current moment, there are so many things that your future self will do that you can actually do today. One of them for me is, for example, having my house cleaned. You can't only have a house cleaner if you have a million dollar house. If you have a three bedroom apartment which we now have, you can equally as well get a cleaning person and help you. And if you are in my membership or you have worked with me previously, you know, we, we do a calculation on how much you earn on an hourly basis. And as at the moment where your hourly earning is higher than what the cleaning person would earn at your house, you shouldn't even do an hour of cleaning. Yeah. So let's say if you earn $20 an hour, $30 an hour, $300 an hour, $1,000 an hour. But a cleaning person who will come to Your house earns $15 an hour, $10 an hour if you do the cleaning yourself. Let's say you make 200 an hour if you do the cleaning yourself. It's as if you paid someone 200 an hour if you earn $50 an hour. If you're doing the cleaning during three hours, it's as if you spent $150 on cleaning your house. So this is the money you are throwing out of the window if you are cleaning your house yourself. So I don't clean my house for example, and that's what my future self would do. Or to give you an even more fun example, is that we are looking at beautiful houses that we want to have. One day with Javi and two years ago that seemed like a very far fetched dream. We were not really close to it. Now we are much, much. It's becoming way more tangible. And back then I was struggling big time on how I can put myself in my future self's position on a dream home. And that's when the idea came up that I don't even know how it didn't come up before, but before I was just dwelling in this endless cycle of oh, I'm never going to be able to live in the home that I deserve or I desire. So then the idea came that we should do house sitting. And that was when I first presented this idea to Javi. You know, he's Spanish and sometimes Spanish people, I don't know, as if they lived in, if they got stuck in the 80s, I don't know. When I first explained him the idea, he was like, why would someone let us into their home? Why would we even want to go to other people's places? But then when I was able to identify some truly amazing freaking amazing homes very close to our dream home and show him that what if we took care of a cat and in this million dollar house at the location that we were always dreaming of going to. And that year we couldn't really afford big travels. So we started to apply to house sitting gigs. And we have been doing it ever since. We traveled to our very first set was Palma de Mallorca. Since then we were able to spend two, two whole months in London. So twice in the summer and in London when you, when you go there, you would get, I don't know, like £400 a night would cost you a single room. And at this place we are, we are able to stay a whole month at the. An amazing, a huge, amazing house with a beautiful garden. Take care of the most amazing doggy ever. So this year we, we have repeated London is not really my dream place to go to, but it is for Javi and this family that we are taking care of the, the doggie of. They are, they are simply amazing. So it was a, it was a dream. To repeat. We also did sits in Lisbon repeatedly in Algarve, which southern part of Portugal with it Barcelona last Christmas like Christmas before and this most recent Christmas within Marbella. And like what we do with these sits is. It was funny with the, with the latest Marbella situation. They wanted to meet us in September when they advertised the set. So we went down to meet in person and I told Javi, you know what, this is not the exact place where I want to have my home, but I want to have it in a very similar place like two hours from here. So what if when we go to this place for the sit interview, when we look around the house, we do the house tour as if we were the buyers of the house. So basically we just went in and they, they were fantastic. They showed us around. They, they introduced the pets, their daughter, and the whole house and the garden and, and the whole time I had in my mind, okay, we are the buyers and we are deciding whether we want to live in this house. So it's this kind of silly ideas that, that can get me fully connected to my future self and to me. The fact that Javi, who is like, you know, the finance guy, the person in our family who is always with two feet on the ground and I'm like in the clouds and I'm flying above and he's the, you know, the sane one, the controlled one out of the two of us. The fact that even he buys into this and he even he loves these ideas and today he understands. And Sam, show me and tell me that this is the way to go. And these little tweaks, which sometimes are not so little because, because these house sits, for example, allow us to double or triple our. The number of trips we do a year. I don't know how we, we could have afforded like, like seven, eight trips to abroad last year, which we did. Like we, we went to Austria, we went to Hungary, we went to Lisbon. So it, it, it's truly mind blowing how we can do that while we are saving for the house, the dream house that we, we will be living in. And I try to apply this, this approach on everything I mentioned to you. How I choose my clients and how I wasn't so great with that last, last year once, and how I ended up with a, with a great lesson with one of my clients. And since then I'm really tuned into, okay, would my future self work with this client? And even if I feel like no, but the money would be so great, I'm not letting me fool myself anymore. Yeah, it's not worth it. I am on the path of becoming that future self while I'm truly enjoying myself. And I think this is the key, not telling yourself off. Like, shit. My future self would have gone to the gym five times this week and I've only been twice. Like, wow. My previous self didn't go once for five full years. And this week I was there twice. I'm taking care of my body. I'm proud of all the dietary changes I have made in the past year. I'm proud of being able to enjoy a day in my bikini on the beach, which I didn't want to even think of in the five years prior to that. So what I want to say here is give yourself grace. Your future self would Never loop down at who you are right now, because you are forming a crucial part of building, creating that person and become that person today. Try to think of the things in your life that you can already have today. And they might be like, like silly little things. Like the other day, actually a few weeks ago, I was thinking, oh, once we have the, once we have the amazing house, I would always have everything organized in my kitchen. And then I realized, couldn't I have everything fully organized in my kitchen right now? So it just took to buy some racks for the spices and some storage boxes or whatever you call them for all the dry food we have like the buckwheat, the rice, the quinoa, the couscous, the sesame seeds, then the black sesame seeds, then the chia, the flaxseed, the creatine, or creatine, how do you say it even in English? The collagen, the seeds we are eating, they were all in different bags first. And I started to collect jars and now I finally bought beautiful different size boxes for them or jars for them. And we have it all organized and labeled. I'm just so freaking happy about it. I even feel better about creating my breakfast or doing the cooking. You know, I'm the cook for, for a week and then Javi does it for a week. This is a heritage or heritage. This is a habit we created during COVID when during 90 days, only one person could leave their house in Spain. So only one of us went shopping and did it for a whole week and then the other person went shopping and did it for a whole week. And that's when we realized how relaxing it is shopping by yourself and not doing it together. And we kept it ever since. And the person who is doing the shopping for the week is responsible for the cooking for that whole week and the other person is responsible for, for cleaning up. And that's such an amazing habit that we have kept ever since. So yeah, this is just a little side note because I love it so much. I. I rave about it all the time. So I hope these, these little thoughts and ideas will be able to, to bring you closer to that future self of yours. And yeah, share your ideas below. Give me any examples you have, you have come up with, any ideas you have come up with. I would love to be hearing about them and I would love for you to have a year where you forget about New Year's resolutions and instead you truly connect to your future self and start enjoying the journey for real. Thank you so much and see you next time.