What is future self work and why does it matter for behavior change?

Future self work is the deliberate process of identifying, building, and maintaining a specific, detailed vision of who you are becoming — what that version of you believes about herself, how she thinks, how she feels, and how she behaves on a daily basis. It is not manifesting or visualization in a spiritual sense. It is identity work, rooted in behavioral science, cognitive behavioral coaching, and neuroscience research on how the brain forms habits and drives decision-making.

Behavior change is a chain: beliefs drive thoughts, thoughts shape emotional responses, emotional responses produce behavior, and behavior determines outcomes. Most health coaching and wellness approaches work only at the behavior end of that chain. They teach habits, structure routines, and create accountability. When behavior changes without identity change, the old patterns return because the belief system driving them was never addressed. Future self work intervenes at the beginning of the chain — at the level of identity and belief — which is why it produces lasting results when surface-level approaches do not.

Neuroscience research on what is called the stranger effect shows that when people think about their current self or past self, the brain is highly active. When asked to think about their future self, brain activity in key areas drops significantly — the brain literally processes the future self as a stranger, someone unknown and unfamiliar. This is why imagining the future self feels uncomfortable, foreign, or blank for most people. It requires intentional, repeated training to build the neural pathways that make the future self feel accessible and real.

Socialization adds a specific layer of difficulty for women. Women are conditioned to base decisions on compliance, external approval, and social rules rather than internal self-knowledge. The future self who is body-neutral, self-trusting, and confident in her identity often challenges the social script women have been given. This is why the work of building a future self requires what clinicians in the non-diet and feminist health space call self-authorization — the deliberate practice of giving yourself permission to want, believe, and become what you choose, independent of external validation. Future self work is one of the foundational practices in non-diet behavioral coaching.

Transcript 

[00:00:00] Welcome to It’s Beyond the Food. I’m your host, Stephanie Dodier, non-diet nutritionist, cognitive behavior coach, and founder of the Non-Diet Coaching Certification. And today we’re going to talk about the psychology of the future self and its impact on behavior change. And I wanna be clear about something.

This is not about manifesting. This is not some woo-woo stuff. It’s not vision boarding. This is what we call identity work, and that is what is inside of the science of behavior change. And I believe that is the piece that has been missing from a lot of people’s approach to weight neutral health. And in some cases, people have walked away from the weight neutral approach to health because they claim, quote, “It didn’t work.”

And every time I am faced with one of those clients, because I get a lot of people where it’s their last recourse, there’s very little, if not any, identity work that has been done in their approach by which they’re not satisfied with. So that is what we’re going to talk about today.

Now, before I dive in, I wanna thank everyone who has sent me communication, sent me a message about our new serie of expert podcast episode called Beyond GLP-1.

[00:02:00] In one particular Facebook group that I’m part of, I had so many comment about how much people needed this. There’s only been one side covered in media through GLP-1, and it’s been, yeah, the side of diet culture. So thank you very much, and genuinely, I appreciate each one of you. And if you haven’t yet started to listen to Beyond GLP-1, you can use the link in the show note to access it.

We made it easy for you, put it all into one webpage so you can see the interview that have been published already and all the interviews coming up. So thank you.

Now I wanna come back to the psychology of the future self because I have a lot to say, and I wanna keep it short and concise for episode.

[00:03:00] Give you some context as to how I was inspired to create this episode — it actually came from the program I’ve launched in the spring called Groundwork, where I take people through the process of doing the groundwork, which is really the identity work. And it’s a mentorship program that I do with women who, in most cases, all the student I have for this round, I’ve done work on their own personal journey with food and body image.

And for multitude of reason, it hasn’t stuck. They’re still challenged, and they’re still wanting more. And the common thread is moving from intellectualization to embodiment.

[00:04:00] And inside of that program last week, I left them with one question to reflect on, which is this one. I’m gonna share it with all of you: What does your future self believes about herself?

That version of you who has, a year from now, exited, off-boarded the Groundwork, what does she believe about herself? What does she believe about her relationship to food? What does she believe about her body? That version of you from one year from now, what is her belief system?

That was an open-ended question that required them to sit and reflect and make decision about what they wanted to believe, and that’s very uncomfortable.

[00:05:00] And that was reflected in our debrief on Monday morning, which is when we have our weekly call, give them their assignment, their reflection question, and then we debrief on Monday, and it was uncomfortable. It was highly uncomfortable. Some people went through the full procrastination, avoidance. And when they digged into finding out why they were avoiding and uncomfortable is they didn’t know what to believe, or they thought that what they wanted to believe about themselves, their body, and food was too far off.

It was too pretentious. It was too strong. Someone else came back and said it was like a blank state. Like, I never asked myself these type of question before, so when I put that question on top of a page in my journal, the page was blank. Like, I didn’t know what to write, what to answer.

[00:06:00] And instead what I did is I started googling. I started listening to podcast episode from you about beliefs and body image and what are the beliefs that we can have, and then I started to transmute that into the belief that I wanted for myself because I couldn’t find them on my own. And another person said that it felt too foreign, right? They were completely separated from that version of them.

And these are all, these three patterns that I outlined for you, are very common.

[00:07:00] And it got me thinking about, um, particularly in the context of GLP-1 and also a conference that I attended on Friday. Like, I was reflecting on the last five or six years of our industry, right? Call it the anti-diet, the weight neutral approach to health, and why we are not seeing the same popularity of our message.

And I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in Reddit thread, right? And subthread of Reddit, and there’s a whole section of Reddit that’s dedicated to intuitive eating and GLP-1. I highly recommend that you go browse around that and see.

[00:08:00] Because of the anonymity of Reddit, you get really powerful insight from people, and there’s a lot of people that feel that intuitive eating, body image work, weight inclusive approach has failed them. Like, the process has failed them. And when I start reading, it’s clearly, in my opinion, my professional opinion, because the work stayed too surface level.

It stayed at the behavior level. And for whatever reason, either they did it on their own, or the person they worked with did not take them there, did not ask the uncomfortable question I asked my student last week, it stayed at the surface level. And at some point the behavior came back. The old behavior came back, the old struggle came back because the identity work wasn’t done.

[00:09:00] And that’s what I wanted to cover today, is that I call it the future self work. In order for us to really get grounded into what we need to think, feel, the behavior we wanna have, and bring that work back in our day-to-day life and really lean on that future version of ourselves to make decision in the day-to-day.

So let’s name it future self-work, and the one thing I want you to understand is future self-work and identity work are the one and the same. They’re not separate. Identity work is that ongoing mental, emotional, social process of investigating and then building and maintaining our sense of self, or commonly known as our self-image, what we believe about who we are.

[00:10:00] Identity work is at the core of behavior change because belief system drive our thinking pattern on the daily, and these pattern then shape our emotional response. And our emotional response is what drives our behavior, and the sum of our behavior is the reality, the outcome, the result that we experience in our life.

So it’s a chain of element connected together. So if you’re trying to change, for an example, your relationship to food or your body image or any health behavior, and you’re only working at the behavior level, you’re working at the end of the chain process, and the beginning, the “identity” keeps pulling you back.

[00:11:00] So when we think in term of future self, we wanna think about two phases. The first phase of doing future self-work is what we call the discovery or the unintentional thinking. You don’t start by focusing on who you wanna become. You start by asking, “Why am I where I am right now?”

So when I work with someone on body image, for an example, my first question isn’t, “What do you want to do? Who do you wanna be?” It’s, “Why are you currently thinking the way you think about your body? How do you feel about your body right now? What kind of behavior, self-care, eating behavior do you currently experience in your life? And what reality, how would you describe it, are you experiencing with your body?”

[00:12:00] That’s what we call the unintentional model, the thoughts, the feeling, the behavior, the operating system — what’s on autopilot that produce the reality you are experiencing right now, the one that you wanna change? This is where we start because we can’t build towards a future self if we don’t understand our current self and what’s running at the present moment.

Phase two is looking at that future self, I call it construction. Once the model, the current model is very clear to us, here is what we believe, and here’s what we think on the daily, we feel, we behave, we can begin to think about what do we want.

[00:13:00] So if we think in term of body image, most of the time women will tell me, “I want to be confident.” Which is great, but that’s a feeling, right? That is a feeling. Confidence is an emotion. That’s a feeling. That’s not the reality of your future self.

Now, we have to bring that at the very detailed version of your future life, and we need to ping that across various domain in your life. So for an example, that future version of yourself who feels confident in her body, how does she dress? How does she show up in a relationship? How does she show up at work? What does she currently says yes to and no to? How does she move her body? How does she move in the world? What does she think? What does she speak about? What does she care about?

[00:14:00] We need to get very specific to craft a vision of that future version of yourself in your reality, in the life that you live. Now, with that in mind, we kind of know the behavior that we wanna have. We know how we wanna feel. Now, what does that future version of yourself thinks in order to feel confident and do all these things so she can live this reality in her life? What does she believe? What does she believe about who she is? What does she believe about her body? What does she believe about food in relationship to her body?

[00:15:00] What does she believe and what does she think about on a day-to-day? That’s the future self. And it has to be, I like to say, black and white, meaning it has to be concretely written on a piece of paper. The future version of myself believes she has these beliefs, she has these thought pattern, she feels confident, she feels sure, she feels comfortable, and she has all these behavior. So she’s living the reality of a confident life. It has to be written somewhere.

This is not something we think about once and then kind of forget and put on the shelf. So for me, black and white paper, really important.

[00:16:00] I’m gonna give you an example of this to make it really concrete for you. Today is 2026, right? May the 12th, 2026. And the version of myself today is the future self of my 2016 self. I’m gonna repeat that again. The version of me in 2016 — who I am today, the person who’s speaking to you on the podcast — is the future version of myself from 2016. How did I get there?

How did I get to be the version of me today who believes her body is a tool to experience life, who believes that her body is this place of wisdom that she respects, that she cares for, that she feels confident, that she takes time to dress and care for it?

[00:17:00] How did I come to believe this versus the 2016 version of me? That’s when the future self-work came in. I started by first investigating what I was thinking about myself and my body in 2016. I gotta tell you, it was far from what I believe today. And I remember vividly sitting outside on my balcony, having my journal.

So I always recommend for people to have a thought work journal, like a future self workbook, where you can write all these things. And writing down in that journal, the reality check of what I was thinking, feeling, and doing in relationship to my body and who, what I wanted to be in 2016.

[00:18:00] And it was a big gap. One of the starting point was believing — I wanted to believe that my capacity to be confident, my ability to show up on social media, because that was a big resistance point for me as a person in a larger body to show up on social media.

As I was writing this podcast episode, I remember vividly in those couple years, 2016 and ’17, making sure that my camera in my office, my video camera, was not picking up anything below my neck. Because I was deadly afraid of people finding out that I did not exist in a thin body, and here I was talking about health, talking about transformation, and existing in a larger body. And for me, that was a real threat to my survival.

[00:19:00] So I had to first — the first layer of belief in 2016 — was believing that it was possible for other people, not even me, just other women, to exist on the internet and to successfully lead a business, confidently show up on camera, that it was even just possible. That was my first layer of belief.

We call that thought laddering, right? That’s where I was in 2016. When you think about today, where I show up, I can show up in a bathing suit and get a photo shoot in a bathing suit, and put photos of me everywhere on the internet in a bathing suit.

[00:20:00] 2026, that’s far off from 10 years ago. But I was aiming for that in 2016. Took about three to four years to get to that space, 2020 probably, where I got to that place. But it got me to look at where I was, what I believe, and then I build up my belief to get to a place where I am today in 2026. That’s future self-work.

So I build up my belief, and almost every day I would rewrite my intentional belief that I wanted to believe over, and over, and over. I did that for probably two to three years, constantly training my brain to see how and what I wanted to believe. Something that I actively practice. That’s what we call intentional thinking.

[00:21:00] Because the human brain is not wired to be comfortable in future self-thinking. There’s actually a number of studies that have been done about what they call The Stranger Effect, and I’m gonna link in the show note to studies that I’m referring to.

One is called The Stranger Effect, where neuroscientists looked at the brain when the brain was thinking about thoughts about their current self and their past self, and the brain was lit up. And when the brain, when the subject was asked to think about their future self, the various area of the brain that were showing activity significantly reduce.

[00:22:00] Because the brain is not — there’s no neural pathway in a brain to think about the future self unless you intentionally train your brain to think about your future self in a way that feel safe to you. And then the extension of that in behavioral science is that when you do think about your future self, it influence your day-to-day decision.

That’s how you form the reality. When I started the podcast, I said, “This is not woo-woo. This is not manifesting, sitting at a top of a green luscious mountain. It’s actually hard science.” Because when we train our brain to think about our future self, about who we wanna become, how we wanna feel, what kind of behavior we wanna have in the future, what reality we want to experience, it helps us impact the day-to-day small decision that we’re making in order to line up our current little decision we’re making day to day towards who you wanna become.

[00:23:00] When we are not focused on the future self, because human brain being human brain, we’re gonna keep thinking about who we are, and we’re gonna measure up our day-to-day small decision only to who we are today. And we will keep creating the same reality because we keep taking the same decision. When we are focused on the future self and who we wanna become, there’s more opportunity for us to line up our current decision in our day-to-day life with who we wanna become.

What choices do we need to make in the future in order to become that version of ourselves? I’ll link to that study as well in the show notes.

[00:24:00] Now, in the beginning of the podcast, I was talking about my student experience of resistance, of avoidance, of high level of discomfort, of this blank state in their brain of not knowing what they wanted to believe about themselves and their body and their relationship to food, and that’s very common, and it’s most particularly prevalent in people socialized as women because women are socialized to respect rules, to comply to standard that are put in front of them.

One of my student really described it well: to base my decision of my life based on what people could potentially think of me in the future, because we are trained to kind of level off our self-worth based on what other people think of us.

[00:25:00] So when we are brought into this world of, “I wanna change my current reality. I need to think, feel, and do differently,” it takes a lot of effort, a lot of emotional energy for us to authorize ourselves to bypass our social conditioning in order for us to ask ourself, “What is it that I want?” Not what other people want me to do, what other people want me to act in their life.

What is it that I want? What is it that I want to believe about myself? And in some women when they do this work and they get past what I call self-authorization, it’s like, “Oh, really, Stephanie? Can I really believe that about myself? I feel a little bit of cockiness and righteousness. I don’t think that’s okay for me to believe that I’m a great person,” because it’s so foreign.

[00:26:00] It’s so foreign for us who spent decades thinking, “I’m not good enough because of my body, because of how I look,” to all of a sudden go to the other side and think, “No, I’m awesome. I’m great. I’m confident.” That’s a huge stretch, and that’s where various technique of titration, habituation, and thought laddering comes in for us to help us believe.

That was the example I was giving you about it’s possible for fat women to be successful online — the example I was giving you earlier. We need to titrate that thought to get there. But it comes from that layer of socialization that we need to unlearn.

[00:27:00] And this is why what I call the surface level coaching tool, the coaching process, are not efficient when it comes to challenging behavior that are rooted in socialized learning and core belief. We need to go and do the work at that level, and that’s work, honestly, that takes time.

We’re not going to change our self-belief in six weeks. This is months and years of work. That’s why for me it’s a combination of both education, right? Educating my client to understand the concept of future self, to understand thoughts, feeling, action, and result in your life.

[00:28:00] Educating them to understand the various frameworks so that they can continue self-coaching as they continue to increase their belief in moving towards their future self for years to come. And then they can take these framework, these knowledge, and apply it to other area of your life. Think about yourself, body image, food, but then your business, your relationship, perhaps other enterprise you’re gonna be part of. You’re using the same framework in different aspect of your life.

[00:30:00] So I wanna give you a tool or a question to use for you to really start to get familiar with that future self psychology and apply it in your day-to-day life. So here’s a question I want you to use ongoing. As you’re making a decision in your day-to-day life, and you’ve created that future self model based on your particular goal you wanna work on, ask yourself the question: What would my future self who has achieved the goal…

So think about in term of body image. What would my future self who is at peace with her body think about this moment right now? What would my future self who is at peace with her body do right now in this situation?

[00:31:00] Now, here’s the kicker. When you’ve asked those two questions — what would you think, what would you do — then you need to take micro action as if you were your future self. Now, that’s where the discomfort comes in. Not only they needed to imagine their future self, but they needed to put it on paper, and then the next step is actually to start taking action.

So here’s an example of that in term of body image. When we think about our future self, we say, “My future self dress comfortably,” perhaps even exploring her style, right? So when you make decision about buying clothes today, how can you buy clothes that makes you feel comfortable?

[00:32:00] Perhaps it’s the first layer is buying new clothes, right? Because there’s so many women who refuse to buy clothes because they have to buy larger sizes. They have to donate the old clothes that they have, and they see that as financial labor. So how can we make a decision in the moment of purchasing these clothes today to buy comfortable clothes and perhaps even stylish clothes in the style that you want to be seen into the world?

Micro decision in the moment now to build up — in the future having a closet only of clothes that fits your body, that feel all comfortable, and that are representing of the style you enjoy showing up in the world. But it start with the micro decision today, and for you to make that micro decision that align with the future self, that’s the future self-work.

[00:33:00] So this is the work of the future self. And that’s exactly what we do in Groundwork, and that’s why Groundwork is 12 months — it’s where we actually build that future version of ourself, that map, that vision, and then we do the work of making micro decision on the day-to-day with me as your support.

And the non-diet coaching certification is where you’ve done that work already for yourself. You’re familiar with it, and then we learn to coach and train other people using that model to achieve their goal.

So that was the psychology of future self-work and how it’s embedded in behavioral changes. I hope this helped you, my sister, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.