We all have areas that we want to work on, that we want to improve. We have areas of ourselves that we want to work on. Problems that we know about. Things we wish were different about ourselves, about our work, about our situations. In today's episode, I hope to give you confidence to take the first step towards addressing those things. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This is centrally located in that finding purpose part of that mission. Today's episode is a simple visualization exercise. It's one that you can revisit again in the future. The exercise is simple. If you haven't ever thought about your future self, then today, hopefully, if you go through this exercise with me, today will be the first time you're doing it. Now, I want you to imagine a future that you haven't necessarily imagined before. Now, here's the important part. I don't want just a single picture. I want you to imagine a future that you have in your mind. I want you to imagine all of the different kinds of interactions, the different kinds of activities that you participate in, what relationships you have. And we're going to do this imagination exercise a couple of different ways. First, I want you to interrogate this imagination. This particular picture that you've built up. I want you to start with an interrogation and you're asking yourself this question. What parts am I ignoring? What parts of my future situation have I left out of this imagination? If you can get more specific on those, you can do that. But it's just as enlightening to understand what things are we ignoring about our future. For example, you might be thinking about the future. You might be thinking about the future. You might be thinking about the future. You might ignore that you are going to age. This may change what you're capable of doing, for example, with your body. And so in this way, we are imagining a future that could never exist because we are painting a picture with much of the picture missing. So get clear on the things that you are skipping over and interrogate yourself. Why? Why did you not think about the fact that you might age? The truth is, we often extrapolate our near-term desires, our near-term goals, our near-term expectations of ourselves into long-term pictures. We extrapolate the things that we wish we could have today into some future spot where we think we will care about it. To the same degree we think we'll be fulfilled by it. To the same degree that we would be today. So start by interrogating what is missing. But not just the negative side of what is missing. It's interesting that most people will imagine a future that is partially reasonable. They expect that it could happen. But people tend not to imagine a perfect future. They tend not to imagine getting everything that they ever desired or wanted or dreamed of. And this is another interesting factor in the way we imagine our futures in general. Now, I'm not going to be the one that tells you to dream bigger. Instead, I want you to focus on why you don't. Specifically, think about what is it that you need to do to make your future better? What is it that you need to do to make your future better? What is it that you need to do to make your future better? What parts of your imagined future are tempered by reality? Specifically, think about how do you expect yourself to hold back your own future? Now, again, I'm not telling you that you need to go and change your vision of the future. Instead, I want you to become acquainted with the parts of yourself that you need to change your vision of the future. that you think are going to hold you back. If you're like most people, your imagined future contains a few key achievements, things that you have been shooting for, things that you've always expected might happen in your life, whether those are personal or professional. There's a few key things that you're shooting for and you're hoping to get. And if you're like most people, you also imagine that there are some risks to getting those things. This visualization exercise is not intended to make clear your future. Instead, it's to clarify the parts for you to think about working on in your present. That future acts as kind of a pointing guide maybe that vision does, but it's not the ultimate goal of your life. Believe it or not, it's very likely that you're going to be able to get those things. And if you're like most people, your vision of your future will change over time. And that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're indecisive. Instead, it means that you're growing. But it's important to recognize that there's this internal war in our own selves, this war between what we would like to achieve and become and what we expect from ourselves, what we think we can actually do. And so if we can be very clear, whatever that future vision is, and our gap between here and there, then we can start to clarify the parts that make us afraid. The things that we are so conscious about, the decisions that we know we need to make, but we're holding back from making. The things that we know we need to learn, but we're holding back from learning. By inspecting this vision that you have, this visualization that you have of your future, you're able to clarify the parts that make us afraid. And if you're like most people, and asking yourself, is this vision really representative of my full capacity? Is this really truly representative of everything that I want? And if not, what is it that I think is going to keep that from happening? Am I trying to be hyper-realistic? Where does the doubt live? This is instructive in a lot of ways, but it's not just about deciding, how to get better. It's not just about trying to chart a path towards your goals. It's also about becoming very aware of your own self-doubts, to become acquainted with those and to not shut them out, but instead to learn more about them, find out where they came from, to understand whether those concerns are rational and there is something we can do, or irrelevant. And in fact, we can change our vision without having to change anything about our reality. Maybe you imagine your future as a software engineer, you arriving at a particular level, a role, like a senior engineer. Now, if you ask yourself, is this in the best world, in my best case scenario, is this the role that I would choose to end up at? Maybe your answer is no. I actually want to end up at a higher level. Maybe I want to end up at a principal engineer, or maybe I actually want to get into executive level. That's really what I want to do, but I don't think I can. Well, that's what we're talking about. That feeling of, I don't think I can. Interrogate that in yourself. Ask yourself why. Maybe your answer is that you're not really comfortable in the room with, with other executives. Or maybe the answer is that you're self-conscious about your ability to speak in front of large groups of people. Or maybe you think that you are not smart enough, or some other label that you've put on this inability to reach the things that you care about reaching. Well, once you know this, you can become acquainted with it and learn about the shape of that problem in your life. Rather than kind of arbitrarily, you know, walking, your career path and looking for opportunities, you can shape your career path. You could shape it around those specific areas that you think could hold you back. Ultimately, you're probably trying to push away the thoughts of your own inadequacy, your own feelings of inadequacy. But the more you push those away, the more you assume that they will stay. This is kind of a weird paradox. You know, they are still there. You know, they are still there. You know, they are still there. You know, you're still there. You push them away so that you don't have to experience the pain of thinking about the consequences of those things being there. But if you instead were to confront those problems, to actually wrap your hands around them and understand that they're a part of you, then maybe the consequences of those problems could go away because you can address the problems themselves. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. this was a little bit of a different episode not all that drastically different we've done these kind of visualization exercises in the past but it's certainly not the daily type of episode that we would do here hopefully this was helpful and I encourage you to do these exercises on your own and whatever frequency is useful for you thank you so much for listening if you enjoyed this discussion and you'd like to become a part of the developer tea discord community head over to developertea.com slash discord to get started totally free today thanks so much and until next time enjoy your tea