How To Reach Your Potential By Using "Future Self" Frameworks with Steve Timoney

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 00:00

So here's the thing, a lot of people want to reach their potential, but they don't necessarily know how to actually do it. So I sat down with one of my friends, Steve Timoney, who's a performance coach, and we talked through our favorite frameworks to help people reach their potential, things that we do with our own clients and our coaching practices. And the one thing that all of these frameworks have in common is they operate off of the future self concept. We talk about how to define your ideal future self.

Who is this person? How do they differ from my current version of me? And how can I bridge that gap? We talk about mental models to focus on what matters and filter out distractions. We talk about a powerful mental model to help you align your actions with your intentions so that you can avoid doing unaligned work. We talk about how to overcome short-sightedness and short-term thinking that tends to hold people back from reaching their potential.

We talk about a really powerful strategy to use feedback loops to basically get 12 months worth of work done in only three months. And we talk about how to leverage what's called a mental advisory board to help guide you toward your ideal future. And then we kind of wrap up with some final thoughts and some other helpful resources to help you out. So hope you enjoyed this conversation where performance coach Steve Timoney and I talk about how to reach your potential using six future self frameworks. So for this,

we're kind of talking about how can you clarify and achieve your ideal future self? Like what does that look like? How do you actually bridge the gap between the person you are today and the person you want to become in the future? Right? So from your experience as a performance coach, what is your first like favorite tool or strategy you use with your clients to help them?

make progress on this path? Yeah, first of all, future stuff, I think, is super important. And I think it's the cornerstone that leads to everything else that you want to do. One of the first exercises I get my clients do, I number off them, but one of them is called the ultimate scenario. And I usually actually get them to do it before our first call, where I get them to write out what would be the ultimate dream life for them.

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whether that's in five years, 10 years or 18 months. I tend to ask them to do it with an 18 month period because I feel like it's more tangible. It's more within reach that you can actually see that because it's only what, eight quarters away, you know, when you think about like just under two years or so. So the first thing I do is really get people to connect with that future self image. And I have other techniques I use for that, but I have spoken over the last three years since running my...

performance coaching business, I've spoken probably to well over 100 people, well over 100 recorded calls. And one of the common themes that came out of these calls, 99 % of people were unclear with their own future identity. They were unclear with the path forward. And then about that path forward, people usually start to procrastinate, they get lost, they open too many projects, too many open loops. They get sucked into this sort of like opportunity

delusion and then they get frustrated, they get overwhelmed, burnout, they go looking for people like yourself and I'm made to help them out of that. So that's why I think having a strong future self is essential. That's why I get my clients to look at that first of all. And the other process that I use is very, very clear is that you select that identity and then from that identity, you would write out the standards that that person would have.

And then from those standards, you would write out the actions that you would need to do in your own life to meet those standards. And if you do that, set that new identity of the ultimate scenario, actually agree with yourself the standards that person will have, then start taking actions to become that person. Those actions will actually change your identity. And then you'll actually loop around, achieve your goals. And then you're going to ask yourself again, what's the identity for the next stage of my life? What are the next standards? What are the next actions?

And it's like a continuous loop up. So it's identity standards actions. For me, that is a tactical version of BDO have. I hear a lot of people talking about BDO have in the space and I'm like, that's cool, but how do you actually BDO have? And I think that that's where my specialty comes into it. My clients is I'm very technical. I'm very like, well, what's the, what's the baseline actual process that's actually going to get me to become my future self.

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I really liked that. well like in, in an entrepreneurship and things, we do things around like customer avatars, right? Like who is this person? What do they enjoy doing? How do they spend their time? So it's like, it's not a far leap from taking that skillset of creating customer avatars or ideal audience avatars and doing that for yourself. Like who do you ideally want to be? Create a profile of that person and then, and then say like, okay, how can I more align?

my current avatar with my ideal avatar, right? That gives us a lot of insight. related to that, there is this, one of my articles I talked about sort of like the, the true cost of things and how, you know, time is our most precious resource, right? no matter how rich or famous or important or whatever you become, you can never get more time, right? You can leverage it differently, but you can never get more.

There is this quote I found from Kevin Kelly and I'll just read it out so I butcher it. And he's, he's, he's talking about one of his other friends who's a renowned entrepreneur and writer who's in his, I think sixties. And he has arranged his life in, in, in blocks of five years. And he says five years is what he says any project worth doing will take from the moment of inception to the last good riddance, a book.

a campaign, a new job, a startup will take five years to play through. So he asks himself, how many five years do I have left? He can count them on one hand if he's lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than five big things he can do, what will they be? And I think for a lot of us, especially like when you're younger, it's really easy to think about all the endless possibilities, but it's like, okay, realistically,

Who do you want to become? What do you want to achieve? And really thinking about how long is that going to take? As you clarify who this ideal person, this ideal version of you is and what they do on a day to day basis and like what their life looks like, what they've achieved that helps you clarify that of like, okay, maybe that reasonably will take me 10 years to achieve. So that's two.

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two blocks, two five-year blocks. What do I need to be doing in those blocks? That, in my mind, helps you shorten and really just cut off a lot of potentials that wouldn't actually lead to the results you want it to lead to. So it's a real, and I mean, I'm a big Momento Mori fan, like using mortality as motivator live fully. So with exercises like that,

really help me clarify like, okay, of all the people I could become, who do I ideally want to become? How long will that reasonably take? And how can I focus myself to achieve that in a reasonable amount of time? All right. So I really liked that. okay. One of my, my favorite, exercises to clarify and begin to move towards your ideal self.

is this question of, I do a lot around values work. So a big part of my work is helping entrepreneurs, founders, creators build a life and business aligned with their values. And I typically focus on distilling it down to your core value, like a singular value that a life well lived must be aligned with. So for me, I ask a question, does this idea

opportunity or goal, get me one step closer to or further away from a life aligned with my core value. Okay. Because again, man, as entrepreneurs, you know, we both know you, you can spend all day, every day drowning in ideas and, and, and, and on a, and on a good day, opportunities, right? Like once you get to a certain point, like opportunities come inbound.

And the issue is it's really easy to pick a good opportunity at the cost of a great opportunity. Yeah. Right. Like, this was, this was good. This was some quick cash or this was like, you know, it's helped me boost a vanity metric or whatever, but does it actually get you closer to a life align with your core value? Frequently it doesn't.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 09:25

the issue a lot of entrepreneurs run into is they don't have a filter like that or a clarifying question like that of like, okay, I could do all these things and many of them are equally viable and can get decent results. But ultimately, where does this lead? Like let me extrapolate, like let me look down that road. Where does this actually moving me? Like I remember when I first, after I left my job,

I left the therapy world and decided to be an entrepreneur, coach, writer, all of the shit. I got a job offer to go back to therapy and it was for more money than I was making at my old job. for the therapy world, it was a good bit of money. And I remember thinking, this could be really good. Like, there's a lot of money, like it'd be great. But then I'm like, well, working for them would mean

working, spending 40 to 60 hours of my week working for somebody else that I'm not building my own stuff. And in an industry I don't want to go back to jumping through bureaucratic bullshit and all this other shit. Does this opportunity, despite the money, does it get me one step closer to or further away from a life aligned with my core value, which is freedom.

the freedom to control my time, the freedom to live in fucking pajamas, the freedom to live wherever I want. Like, does it get me one step closer to or further away from that? And in that moment, the answer was this would get me further away from it. So that helped me really clarify this, this, you know, decision overwhelm of like, well, which, which way should I go? Like all these options, like, no, no, no. Which get, which takes you in the fucking direction you actually want to Yeah. That's my first one.

Any thoughts on that? It's brilliant. It reminds me of an analogy from a book by a gentleman called Nick Peterson, who I've got a lot of respect for. His book's called Bumpers. And the name of the book is basically the analogy is that he is very, very focused on making sure that you have your bumpers in line and your bumpers are the things that go down the gutter of a bowling alley. So if you get up one day and you're

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 11:46

discombobulated. You're tired, something emotional bullshit's going on in your life, family issues, something outside of your work, but you can still pick up that bowling ball and just basically make it to the bowling alley and roll it down the bowling alley, even if you throw it badly, because you've got your bumpers in place, it's gonna bounce and it's gonna still hit some pins. And the problem that he talks about is lots of people don't have the...

the bumpers in place, the guardrails, so to speak. So they get up each day and then their emotional state or current economic or something's happened makes them reactive. And then they react to it. They throw a ball down the bowling alley, it hits the gutter. They don't hit any pins. They don't move their life forward. In fact, it takes them further away from where they want to go. And I think what you're talking about here is basically when you have that future identity set, going back to what I talked about, be, have, when you know what you want to be, do, have,

and you know the standards, you know the actions, you can rely on that system and those framing, framing, you know, that you talked about in Life of Freedom, I put more of mine in like a statement, like you create like a statement for who you wanna be, like I am Steven Timoney, I am a successful business owner who has created a successful business helping X amount of people, and you repeat that to yourself. When you have all those things in place, you can bowl with your eyes closed because you are going to keep hitting those pins.

And that is couldn't agree with you more. It really is because we don't want to build bridges to islands. We don't want to go to. We want to build bridges to like places we want to go. We want to we want a super fast highway built to our destination. We don't want a bunch of country roads built to places that might be pretty. Might be it might be nice to hang out in, but they're not they're not the super fast highway to our to our future identity to our big bad goals. So, yeah, that would be my agreement to what you just said.

I love that analogy of the bumpers that that's solid. Yeah. What is your second tip for strategy? Well, I just talked about it there briefly. My second tip is framing. This is something that I'm actually practicing quite a lot recently in my life. I've read a couple of books around this and it's something that I've realized that I was maybe only doing first thing in the morning, you know, when my meditation journaling and reading my framing statement. And then I would go to work and then

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 14:10

I would kind of lose con, you know, connection or contact with my future self and maybe do some dumb shit, jump on things that aren't really useful for my time. So now I'm getting into this idea of having a statement process like I just mentioned and mine is I am Steven Timoney. I am a successful coach, writer and entrepreneur who successfully created an impactful business that I sold for X amount of money after helping X amount of people.

That is my statement that I repeat to myself on a daily basis. I even write it out sometimes, but it allows me to tap into this sort of energy of future self. It allows me to frame and connect because I think that oftentimes when we decide to do things, we're operating from a reactive mental sort of noise position. And you know, when you're, when you're opening up YouTube or going on a new site or scrolling through Instagram or TikTok,

It's all kind of a note. If there's a feeling up here, it's mental, it's up in the, it's a noise in the head. And we can spend days, weeks and months in that frame if we don't have a clear future self. But when you frame on a constant basis, you're almost getting in touch with, let's say God or your universe or your higher power, getting into some tactical woo woo stuff here. But you feel that vibration. You feel a higher sense of yourself, your bigger purpose, because you're,

Letting yourself be guided by something that's bigger than your current self because it's your future self. mean, we're getting into sort of David Hawkins map of consciousness here where you're trying to increase your vibration and let go and let go of God, so to speak, the flow of your work. And I find that once I have my future self set, and I find this with my clients as well, having that statement and getting into the habitual routine of framing days and reframing yourself throughout the day.

really helps you connect with your future self. So you, you feel like you're heading towards that super highway direction towards your goals and you're not off building bridges to places you don't want to go throughout your day. So that's my second technique would be to have a framing process connected to the future identity that you created. like that. It's, all about alignment. Yeah. That's a big word. Yeah. In, in psychology, we have this term called cognitive dissonance.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 16:32

And all cognitive dissonance really means is when your actions do not align with your beliefs. Integrity gap. Yeah. Yeah. And it causes a, it's unaligned, right? Cognitive dissonance causes a lot of stress and overwhelm and just existential angst because we claim that this is important over here. So this belief, this thought, this statement is important.

yet our actions don't align with it. Right. And usually when that happens, we have to change one or the other to put them in alignment. either have to change the belief or we have to change the behavior. And this is where you see a lot of people, either they change the behavior to align with the belief and that's good, or they change the belief to better align with that. And what I mean by that is something super simple, let's say smoking. Okay.

A lot of people, and again, smoking isn't healthy. Nobody's going to fucking tell you smoking is healthy. and quitting smoking is, is a complicated process, which is beyond the scope of this conversation. But one thing that you consistently hear from people is you'd be like, Hey, do you care about your health? Yes. But you continue to smoke. Yes. And you know, smoking is bad for your health. Yes. But something's going to kill me anyway.

So they have changed their belief of like, well, something, something is going to get me anyway, or, well, my aunt lived to a hundred and she smoked every day or while something else is going to get you anyway, they're changing their belief to, to align with the behavior that they refuse to, to end. Right. But other people, you can have that same conversation. They're like, Oh fuck, I, maybe I didn't realize how unhealthy it was, or I wasn't aware of the damage it was currently doing.

let me find other ways to change my behavior to better align with my belief that I prioritize my health, that I want to live longer or be able to run up and down stairs, whatever, right? That's a very basic example, right? Of you can either change a belief or the behavior, but they have to be in alignment if you don't want to feel that constant like existential angst and stress and friction around.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 18:54

I'm living on a lot. Right? Yeah. I really liked that. Yeah. And it's just to jump in on that. I find sometimes when I'm working with somebody and they actually clearly write out their identity or their ultimate scenario. I find clients just make massive shifts just from doing that because then they quickly realize, shit, I am smoking weed. shit. I am drinking beers at nighttime. I just wrote out an identity and that person doesn't do that.

and they fall into that second category that you discuss our people, like you show them the realization and they they're like, I, I need to make changes here because they don't actually believe in drinking every night. They don't actually believe in smoking weed. It's just the dumb shit shallow crap that they got into because of the noise of life. and yeah, it's, it's, it's amazing how simple little exercises can have such dramatic effect on, on, people. Well, and that's, that's part of why we're doing this, this piece.

today is because like a lot of the so in general, a lot of the things that we claim to want, we can't actually articulate like, I want to be a better version of myself. Cool. What the fuck do you mean by that? Who is because otherwise you're not even shooting. You're not even aiming at a moving target. You're aiming at a moving target in the fucking dark. Like you don't even know what you're aiming at. Right. How can you ever hope to achieve a goal you can't articulate? Right. And that's really what we're talking about today is like, who the fuck is this person?

What do they do that you currently aren't doing and how do you bridge that gap? Right? There's no secrets. There's no rock and rocket science. It's just clarifying shit because like so with value shit all the time I work with entrepreneurs and like, I know what my values are and I know that I want to build a values aligned life for business. Cool. What are your values? They're like, like I'll ask like, what do you give a shit about fundamentally? What does a life aligned?

with that those values look like. And they're like, I thought I knew, but I cannot get, I, I apparently fucking don't. Cool. Welcome to step one. Yeah. Right. Realize you don't know what the fuck you're aiming at. And that's, that's a huge part because once you get that clarity, man, and once you can like take shit out of your brain and put it in front of you. So now you can inspect it. You can interrogate it like fuck. I claim that these, these things are important to me, but then it's like, okay,

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 21:18

What does your day look like? Do any of the actions of your day like, I really want to be a writer. Cool. How much of your day are you spending writing? none. There's your fucking problem. Just this week, I decided to listen to an old Earl Nightingale book.

can't remember the exact title, but it's called The Secret of Success or something along those lines. I'll get the right title, it's Aaron Nightingale's three hour long audio book. And so funny, right at the back end of the book, one of the last chapters, he talks about writing out your life as if it was a vacation. If your life was a vacation, rather than like, you know, your reality, just write, where would you live? What would you do each day? How would you spend your life? How do you show up on a vacation? What do you do?

And I loved it so much. went and up my journal and I just wrote a page of if I was on vacation, I'd be, you know, walking through forests. I'd be reading more books. I'd be having, you know, long pauses at a coffee shop drinking espressos. And it's amazing how much of that stuff I can actually go and do today. I can actually go and do a lot of that stuff today. And a lot of my day already is filled with those kind of things. And it's just it's a beautiful reframing of what is it? What? As you said, what the fuck is it? Do you want to do?

And if you struggle with that because you're trying to chase some sort of like weird societal goal or your friends telling you that you should be this, your family's telling you should be that with your business or you shouldn't leave your job because running being entrepreneurs too unsuccessful or too risky, sorry. What is it that if you're on vacation for the rest of your life, what would you spend your fucking time with? And I know I would spend my time helping people because I get a lot of joy out of that. I, you know, it might not be in the same way that I'm doing it right now.

but it would definitely be something that I'd have to have some type of thing in my life where I connect with people, help other people, uh, and discussing commute and communicate with other people. So that to me is, is a fantastical exercise of anybody listening to this or watching this is like, well, how do you do that? Well, if you're on vacation for the rest of your life, what the fuck would you do with that life? That's a great idea. I love that. Um, my second one is kind of related to my first one of like, you know,

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 23:39

does this get me one step closer to a further away from a life line with my core value? This one is think of something that's currently stressing you out or you know, you're, you've got anxiety or about, or you're just, you're, you kind of feel like you're in a fork in the road. You don't know which decision to make. I ask, will this matter in a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade? Because

99 % of shit that you're stressing about today just won't fucking matter tomorrow, right? Like all the little decisions or all the little, you know, anxieties or whatever. Most of those won't make it past that first filter of all this won't matter tomorrow. If it won't matter tomorrow, it doesn't matter today, right? Some things might still matter a week from now. Okay. But still, if they don't matter a week from now and you won't even remember them, they're not

worth worrying about or, really focusing your attention on today, the very, very few things that will matter in like a decade, those are the few things that are worth not stressing about necessarily, but you focusing your time, energy and attention on dealing with. Yeah. Because those are the few things that are going to matter. Right? Cause again, man, like on a day to day basis,

We're constantly bombarded with like choices or anxieties and stress and like all this other shit. But tomorrow we don't even remember 90 % of the shit that was like making a sweat that day. But the few things that actually pass through all of those filters to the decade mark, that is what is typically worth you spending your finite resources, time, energy and attention on dealing with. So that's a hugely clarifying exercise for me.

I love that. That's great because you'll find that with the 10 year one, just listening to you talk about it, I'm like, well, I know the health, that matters. automatically my health, my mindset, how I regulate my emotions, that will matter because how I regulate my emotions today is gonna have a knock on effect next week, a month or in 10 years time. And I don't wanna be in my 50s in 10 years. Yes, I'm old.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 25:55

I'd be looking back and be like, wow, I spent too much time in my 40s worrying about dumb shit. I want to focus on the right things. So when you do that 10 year one, I automatically know my health and probably my mental, emotional mindset. That is stuff that I want to make sure that I'm putting myself in the right direction. One of the reasons why I don't really drink anymore. It's one of the reasons why I go to the gym and lift weights because I'm already thinking about longevity. But you're right. Everything else, pretty much everything else in my business.

You know, I'm one phone call away from a cashflow issue in a business not being an issue anymore because someone would be like, hey, I love your stuff. Let's get a package going. Do you I mean? your mindset of what actually is a problem changes day to day to day day to day. So to really fixate on it too much and to worry about the small shit, it...

really is it's a massive trap for a lot of people. think short-termism is a term you could call for is this idea that everything in the short term has a lot bigger focus. I mean, we get into the 24 hour news cycle, obviously we're having a horrible news cycle currently because of everything that's going on in world plus the American election, the end of this year just makes everything just such a deluge of bullshit. And that short-termism, I mean,

TikTok reels, everything else. think the attention span's gone from 12 seconds to 10 or eight seconds. I don't know how true that is, but apparently that's something that's happening. So all that short-termism just makes us then focus even more, more, more, more, more on the dumb shit that doesn't matter. And there was a book I recently read. think it's called, actually I think it's called Future Self. I think it's just called Future Self and it's got a chart in it where it says,

Only 13 % of people, they did a survey, I don't know the exact numbers, but out of the survey, only 13 % of people who were surveyed think about their life longer than one year ahead. Like they think a year and more. And I think another maybe five or 6%, something they got thought up to a year, but the majority of people, like 60 % plus of people, don't think past six months, with a lot of people stuck.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 28:06

Like we're talking 50 % of people stuck within a month or down to a week. That's all they think about. So when you think about future identity and you think about what you said, the five minutes, five years, five months, five years, or I don't know the exact parameter that you broke it down into. But when you think about that, most people are stuck in the first parameters. Most people are just stuck in this ball of anxiety, building bridges to places they don't want to go, focusing on the wrong stuff.

What you said there is just so valuable to a lot of people because if we can jump out to 10 years and be like, well, what will really matter in 10 years? Okay. I'm to put my health and my mindset first each day because that's what actually matters. Those are the big rocks that and like the, the converse is also true in that. Let's just, let's just do the health example because that's the most common for most people.

Yeah. Let's say I'm trying to improve my health. I'm however you define, improve your health, right? We can get into operational definitions another time, but you're trying to get healthier today. It might not matter if you skip a workout today. It might not matter if you fuck off on, you know, and start to eat junk, right? Junk, you know, is going to like cause inflammation and cause a bunch of other issues, right? Today. It probably doesn't matter, right? Cause a day off is fine. A cheat day is fine. Yeah. But

If you extrapolate that out of like, okay, well, if this becomes the norm and every day, I skip a workout every day, I fuck off and eat shit in a decade. That's going to compound, right? It's like brushing your teeth, not brushing your teeth today. Doesn't matter. Continue to not brush your teeth for decades. That fucking matters. Yeah. It's also, it's also learning to see like how do small things compound over time. So yes, on the one hand, something that seems big today,

typically won't be big in the future, but sometimes things that seem small today will become big in the future. So that's all this whole exercise is about is like looking at your future self and how your decisions today are affecting that person down the line. You're, you're, you're becoming a fire preventer, not a firefighter. Yeah. Because I think the, I think firefighters max out at about a hundred something grand a year, depending on where you are in North America or Europe, maybe a little higher if you're a captain or whatever, but

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 30:25

The guys that go into nuclear power plants and prevent shit going wrong. We're talking, you know, half a million a year, million dollars. mean, there's guys getting flown around the world for half an hour's worth getting paid $50,000 an hour to press a button in a nuclear power plant to be like, this is what was wrong. You know, so there are different scales, but to break it down, fire preventers get paid more money than firefighters because they have a bigger scope and a better idea of what's going on. They can see what's coming down the pipeline.

They're operating from a funnel rather than dealing with a volcano. And being proactive versus reactive. Yeah. 100%. Cool. What is your third tip for today? Well, my third tip for being aligned with your future self and becoming future self is feedback loops. I'm a big journaler. I also try to work in 90 day sprints. I also do a monthly review. So I believe that every year of your life should feel like four years because I think every 90 days there is enough

time within a 90 day period to get the same amount of work done than you used to in a year. And I just think that everybody should be working in 90 day sprints. It doesn't mean you sprint every 90 days. Obviously, we're not talking about driving ourselves into the ground here, but every 90 days you can be achieving something within a season, four seasons of the world. Maybe take the summer season off a little bit, but there's four seasons, not in the world, four seasons in a year. You can adjust these things, but.

The idea is to have feedback loops, a weekly journal system, a monthly review, and a quarterly breakdown where you're yourself goals and you're reviewing like you would do, or some people would do on a New Year's Eve, but you're doing it at the end of each quarter. I've got one coming up at the end of June here, because this is the end of Q2 going into Q3. So I will be doing a review, I'll be setting myself a new set of goals for Q3 over the summer. And I think that is one of the most important processes of

keeping yourself aligned is to set goals, review those goals and see if you're actually moving towards them and you haven't forgotten about them, put them in a shelf somewhere and then build bridges away off somewhere else. And then you're like, shit, I wanted to do A, B and C, but I'm over here doing X, Y and Z. No wonder I'm pissed off and not making any progress. So that would be my third element is to make sure that you have self-regulating or even with a coach, whatever works for you, but at least have some type of feedback loops on a week and a month.

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and on a quarterly basis.

I also like the idea of like the constraints, right? Of like, I'm going to like, this is my focus for this quarter. Yeah. Right. This is my identity for the quarter. Yeah. This is my identity. This is my goal. This is, and so if it's a 90 day sort of in your words of sprint, cool. How do you break that down so that at the 30 day mark, you should hypothetically be a third of the way there. Right. It makes loftier goals much more manageable.

Right. And it also focuses your attention of like, this is what the fuck I'm doing in this season. Like all these other ideas or all these other opportunities, I can, you know, pencil those in for a later season. This season, this is what I'm doing. Right. I really liked that idea. my third one, is what I call a mental advisory board and a mental advisory board is basically you pick three to five people.

who you would go to for advice. And these people can be real, they can be fictional, they can be living, they can be dead, right? If you want fucking Dumbledore on your mental advisory board, cool. Okay, or Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda, doesn't fucking matter. It does matter who it is. But make one of these people your ideal future self. Okay? So for example, I'm in the process of writing a book slash book proposal and shit.

So let's say I'm struggling with either imposter. Let's just, I don't struggle with imposter. And let's just say I struggle with imposter syndrome. I'm like, who would read this book? I I'm not smart enough to, to, to write this. Right. I could say, well, let's just say I put Ryan holiday on my mental advisory board or Jocko willing on my mental advisory board and be like, okay, what would Jocko say right now? Maybe Jocko would be like, you're afraid of writing this good. That means you fucking should.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 34:50

Right. It means this is worth writing. Otherwise you would have no emotional attachment to how this is going to go. Right. or maybe I'm, I'm stuck on a specific part of, of the book. I'd be like, Hey, Ryan, and he, don't have to actually know these people, right? It's just, it's in your fucking head. I'd be like, Hey, Ryan, what advice do you have right now? When I'm, I'm stuck on this book, I don't know what to do next. Well, I'm familiar enough with his work to know. He might say, find a good story that illustrates the point you're trying to make.

Cause that's how he writes a lot of his books. I'd be like, cool. Thanks. I now know what I need to do to move past this point. I've been stuck at. Right. But then I might also be like, you know, I don't really feel like writing today or I I'm going to fuck off and do this other ship. I'd be like, Hey future Corey, what advice do you have? And he would be like, look motherfucker, this book, is it going to write itself? No, your future self is David Goggins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And he would be like, look, I have written five or six books in the 10 years between you and me. You know how the fuck I did that? This is what I did. Love it. Do this or shut the fuck up and don't claim you want to write a fucking book. And I'll be like, thanks. I am super blunt to myself, right? I'm blunt to everybody, but I'm extra blunt to myself. So, but, that's it. Like that, that works. Cause it'd be like, fuck. It's so easy for me to become short sighted or myopic in my own shit today.

and not think about how does that affect the future, like future me that I'm trying to become. That motherfucker would be like, look, I succeed in a 10 year time span. I succeeded and wrote five books or however many because of shit I did 10 years ago, which is where you are right the fuck now. Here's what I did. Here's what you need to fucking do. And that is just like, cool. Because most of the time we know what we need to do, but

And all of us were great at giving advice, but we're terrible at taking our own advice. The function of a mental advisory board is basically for you to trick yourself into getting out of your own way. Cause it's like, it's not me saying this. It's Jocko. It's Ryan Holiday. It's future successful, like super successful. And it just, you're taking your own advice in a way that doesn't feel like you're taking your own advice. That's why it's super powerful. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Cause the part of my,

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 37:12

quarterly planning, I actually have something called backward planning, which I frame it in having a coffee with a very successful future version of myself at a very posh cafe somewhere in Vancouver, where I live overlooking the fantastic English Bay, or they're looking up at the North Shore Mountains and we're on a terrace somewhere or a balcony in one of the really super expensive hotels that are in Vancouver or high level of restaurants that are atop of buildings. There's a lot of them.

It's a beautiful, expensive city. But I'm there with super successful version of Steve and I'm asking them, what does it feel like to get this done? What were the barriers? And I actually put myself in having that conversation with the slick, smooth, professional version of myself. And on a weekly basis, I think we've discussed this before, maybe at different conversations or different times, but.

Actually a question that you give me and it's going to be, I'm going to double question here. There's something you give me and I asked myself this after I asked myself this question. What is my biggest struggle? And then if I was advising a friend, how would that, how would I advise that? And then I asked myself, if I was to die tomorrow, would I be happy if I showed up with that struggle over the last seven days? That's a question I stole from you. By the way, so those, those sets of three questions are the first three questions I asked myself on a Sunday morning about

about my business or about my life. And it's that, you know, it's not quite the panel, you know, the Napoleon Hill talks about that, having that panel of a boardroom, which I think it's a great idea, something I'm probably going to think about more off more for myself after having this conversation. But writing out your struggle and then asking if you had a friend who was struggling with this, what advice would you give them? It's that stoic sort of like giving yourself perspective, it's setting yourself aside.

and giving yourself that advice and it does feel slightly different because you stop talking in the eye when you're journaling and you start talking in, well, you could do this, you could do that, you could do that. And it's a really, that's actually a really great way to journal as well is to remove eye and always talk to yourself in the third person in my opinion, because then it doesn't feel like you're beating yourself down with the, should have done this, I should have done that. You're actually being a bit more objective. But anyway, yeah.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 39:27

I punched my table there. But what you said there about the board, getting feedback from Jaco or Ryan Hall, I think that's brilliant because we often need to remove ourselves from that negative signal or that voice in our head that is the naysayer, the peanut gallery, because usually that voice, that radio station is usually the loudest. It's usually the one when you turn on your radio in the morning, it's usually the one that starts first because you haven't actually

got the frequency right and your body hasn't woken up, the reptilian brain is awake because the reptilian brain is awake because it's looking for danger when you're still asleep. So the reason why we, I don't know if this is scientifically backed, you're the guy with a PhD, but I have this theory that the reason why we can think negatively first thing in the morning is because our reptilian brain is the one that's awake first. It's the one that's, because it's the one that's alert. It's waiting for someone to sneak into a cave and get us while we're sleeping. It takes us that.

20 minutes in the morning to connect to that bigger, better brand to wake up our mind. I don't know whether there's any scientific fact behind that. That's just my own opinion. But I'm going off in a different direction there. But yeah, I totally agree with that advisory board. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, I'm not a neuro guy, so there may not be. I'm a big fan of useful over factual. So as long as something is useful and it is maladaptive.

It largely doesn't unless you're like trying to sell some bullshit to people like snake oil. As long as it's a useful belief, it doesn't really matter if it is factually accurate, right? Like a useful belief is that porcupines can throw their spots. They can't, but if you believe they do, it keeps you from getting hurt by them because you stay the fuck away from right. So maybe the rotunda, like, I don't know if it's a useful fucking mental model for you. Fucking cool. Like I'm not a neuro guy. I'm not a cognitive scientist. Like I'm just a regular psychologist. So like,

Maybe, right? as long as it's useful, I will say that to that point, our, our, our brains, are wired to find problems because anticipating problems so that we can fight them or avoid them is adaptive. has helped us survive. But another thing that humans supposedly are reasonably unique in is their ability to see into the future, to anticipate future things. So it's like, look,

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 41:53

How do you leverage that? Like how do you leverage that to look beyond your current problems, which is your natural wiring, to also look at the future and what you need to be doing to achieve that ideal future in whatever capacity you define it, right? One of my original mentors and now friend, Dr. Keelan Hinton, he's another psychologist, he would always say, he's like, life is about perspective. And for me, it's like, anytime you start to struggle,

you have likely lost perspective. it, struggling again, however the fuck you want to define struggle, you've lost perspective. So finding strategies like the ones we talked about today or, or others you find in the world, finding strategies, those bumpers, finding strategies to help you regain perspective, to clarify what matters, to identify what you need to be doing. All of that is about regaining the perspective you need.

to succeed, right? So hopefully today, you know, gave, gave you some new ways of thinking as far as succeeding in achieving your ideal future self, clarifying who the fuck that even is. kind of wrapping up, is there anything you want to share for people to check out first and where can they find the rest of you and your work? Well, I'm on Twitter under Steve Timoney at

S-T-E-V-E-T-I-M-O-N-E-Y, we'll put that below here. That's where I hang out most of my days. I'm also on LinkedIn. Elon, Daddy Elon has not been kind to a lot of us creators on Twitter, on X, sorry. Dumb name, by the way. That's okay, I'm starting to get used to it. But I'm starting to be a little more active on LinkedIn, which is my full name, Steven Timoney, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-T-I-M-O-N-E-Y, and also that is the same name as my YouTube channel.

as well where I'm starting to get back onto that because obviously with the downfall, I'm not gonna call it the downfall of X because there's plenty of people still succeeding, but with the way that X has been, it's not my favorite platform anymore. So I'm spreading myself across that. I also have an email list, steventimoney.com. You can go onto the website on my web, but you can join my email list from my website, steventimoney.com.

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 44:12

Currently the link in there will send you something free when you sign up like a little guide on saving time and reclaiming hours and getting clear in your future self as well. So lots of stuff there. So that's where I would be. If you're looking to check out, get some stuff, go to my YouTube channel, look at the last couple of videos that I've posted because they're gonna be a lot more in line with what I'm talking about now, because I've got YouTube videos going back to 2016. Things have changed a lot. But on Twitter and LinkedIn on the feed every day, that's where I'm sharing ideas.

And I do talk a lot about future self. I would even describe myself as a future self coach. So I'm very, very, very locked in on that future identity, those higher standards and improving your actions to become the person you want to be. Awesome. Awesome. Um, I mean, we've been friends for a minute. I fuck. I love what you do. I love your content. I love how you think. So yeah, definitely. Um, everybody go check out your stuff. Um,

For me, you can find me at corey Wilkes side.com corey society everywhere. Um, and again, we'll, we'll link it below, it's C O R E Y W I L K S P S Y D. My doctorate is a side D a doctor of clinical psychology. Um, it's the same as a PhD is just, it's just a different degree. Um, still a doctorate. Um, my news in my newsletter, I explore the psychology of success, like how to succeed in life and business. How do you build a values aligned life and business?

How do you define success? What holds us back from success and how do we actually develop strategies to overcome those and succeed on our terms? That's a lot of what my work revolves around. So you can just go to corebookside.com, hit me up on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, subscribe to my newsletter and I will also send you like a master class in the psychology of success over a couple of days so that way you can get like the best foundational.

skills and insights to help you succeed on your terms. So that's my thing. Any parting words for today?

Corey Wilks, Psy.D. (: 46:17

For me, think if you're struggling right now, if you're as an entrepreneur and you've lost that perspective, I think the number one thing you can do is sit down and just write out your vacation. If life was great, how did my future self show up each day?

I will say momentum. Mori, you're going to fucking die one day. What's the, what's the point of wasting your, your, your, your, your one fucking chance, like figure out what you actually want to achieve, figure out what is holding you back from it and figure out what the fuck you need to do to overcome that to succeed, to achieve that life you want. Cause otherwise what's the fucking point? What are we doing here? Yeah, dude, this was awesome. I'm definitely down to do it again in the future. I'm curious what

you, the viewer slash listener, think about this, please let us know in the comments below and hit us up anytime. All right. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with me and Steve. Like I said, check out all of his links below. Until next time. Take it easy.