You are a Caretaker for Future You

Yesterday I posed a question. What if you were confronted by a future version of yourself? Let’s say Future You of 20 years from now showed up. Would he or she be stopping by to say thanks —or to accuse you of neglect or worse??

The research is fairly substantial that people who are well-connected to their future selves or better able to self regulate in the present than those who are less well-connected. But we can all gain a stronger connection to the future versions of ourselves.

Maybe it’s not obvious how to do that when we look into the distant future. But it becomes more and more apparent as we move that date closer to the present.

For example, anyone who has ever faced a deadline knows that anxiety, stress, and adrenaline all rise as that deadline approaches. The reason for the anxiety is not the deadline itself. It’s the anticipation of repercussions that might happen to Future You. And so, the adrenaline that drives that last minute push to hit send, comes from that temporal connection. We all have some connection to that future version of ourselves. If we had none, we would likely be far less conscientious about lots of things. After all, who in the world likes flossing their teeth??

So it’s clear that connecting to Future You can change choices you make in the present. For example, imagine you are working on losing weight and getting fit. Think of?a moment in which you are faced with a choice of whether to eat something that is not on your current eating plan – a rich piece of beautiful, dark chocolate cake. Pause for a second and picture yourself tomorrow. You are standing on the scale in the morning and looking down at the numbers. See your own feet in your mind standing with the scale’s digital LED between your toes.?

Now imagine the number. What number should be there, according to the plan? And what number might be there if you go off the eating plan? Focus on that higher number. How do you feel looking down, past your bare feet, to a higher number yesterday? How do you feel about you?— the you who chose to eat that piece of cake last night?

Projecting into that different version of yourself, Tomorrow You, what would you say to yourself as you ponder eating that piece of cake? I suspect Tomorrow You would have something to say.?Something like, what were you thinking back then yesterday??

Now, back in the present moment of choice, do you still want to eat that chocolate cake?

This phenomenon of the temporal identities exists in organizations two. I have a few clients that are leaders in organizations that recently went through some kind of a transition. For them and their teams, there is a kind of before and after.

Before times are often characterized, as “when all the mistakes were made”. But as time goes on those get viewed less charitably. It’s not hard to understand why. From the outside, maybe we assume that there were poor results because of bad luck, poor conditions, rabid competitors or something else.

But, as we get imbued into the culture of an organization and understand its inner workings, it becomes easier to detect the difference between decisions that were simply mistakes, and those that were either egregious or neglectful. For example, technical debt that lingers over a long-term is a function of the latter, not the former.?

A number of years ago I was hired as head of revenue in a technology company. Everybody on the team had been there for many years. And the two founders were both still leading as CEO and CTO. They hired me to create a massive expansion and take the company from being a small regional player to being a continent-wide leader. I was excited about the opportunity because I love tackling challenges and causing breakthroughs. And this was going to require both.

But, as I learned more about both the company and the marketplace, it became painfully apparent that the technology we were selling, was far inferior to that of most of our competitors. Our competitors were cloud-based. We host a server room. Our competitors were built on flexible digital programming, languages. We were built on UNIX.

Those decisions made everything harder for everyone. Great sales people can sell inferior products. But they do so within a moral dilemma. And having a product that was so inflexible made everything subsequent to the sale harder. Our integrations took longer and were more complicated. Our customer service reps had to be 10 times more technically savvy and astute than normal. And, we lost deals because we simply couldn’t do what some of our prospects were asking. And they were asking because most state of the art technology would have been able to fulfill those requests.

Depsite the fact that the team I built succeeded in exploding revenue and growth, I resented the decisions the leaders had made.

They had coasted for two decades, continuing to sell an outdated product while ancutely aware of the progress taking place around them. Despite having the wherewithal to invest in updating the product, and becoming genuinely competitive, they chose instead to hoard cash.

The irony is that it was their lack of connection to their own future selves that had them make such short term decisions. The reason they had hired me was to build the balance sheet for an ultimate sale. And they did sell shortly after I left. But, they got less than half of what they could have gotten.

Had they updated the product even five or eight years earlier it would have been flexible enough for regular upgrades and additional features. That would have positioned it to be highly competitive, with even the best of our market opponents. And that would’ve enabled my team to grow the company even beyond what we accomplished, likely, expanding into Europe.

There’s no telling how much more would have been possible and what that might have meant in the ultimate sale. Their neglect of their Future Selves —the selves that would be selling in 10 years—was costly to themselves.

As leaders, we bring the same vulnerabilities to work as we have in our personal lives.

Future you provides a standard against which to true yourself. That effect may be to give you strength, or saddle you with shame. You can choose. But if you foster a sense of connection, responsibility and ownership of Future You and Future Us, you will have an extra tool.?

We think of that tool as willpower or discipline. But willpower and discipline carry a connotation of force and resistance. When our conscientiousness is born of a feeling of duty and compassion for ourselves in the future, it doesn’t feel like force. It feels like caretaking. ?

Building the muscle to make decisions that are based on high confidence of a future outcome is a skill. Beyond Better Executive Coaching helps you and your team develop that skill. Schedule a call to learn more.