180. Unlocking Your Future Self: Communication, Happiness & Wellbeing

[00:00:00] I love the exercise of writing a letter or an email or, to your future self and then writing one back. because we know that vividness is the type of thing that really provokes emotions and emotions are the things that drive behavior. And so if we can just turn the dial up on a vivid perception of your future self, that can really help connect, you know, who you are now with who you will eventually become. 

[00:00:28] Matt Abrahams: Hi, Matt here. The New Year gives all of us an opportunity to reflect and focus on who we are, who we want to be, and our wellbeing. To help you chart your course and write your story, I'm excited to invite you to our four part mini series on communication, happiness and wellbeing sponsored by BetterHelp. Every January brings us three hundred and sixty-five blank pages waiting to be filled. This year, maybe you're ready for a plot twist. Or maybe there's a part of your story you've been wanting to revise or explore further. Think of therapy as your editorial partner. Helping you craft new chapters and create the meaningful story you deserve to live. Therapists from BetterHelp can help you write your story. I believe in you. Everyone should leverage the support of therapists and coaches. Visit BetterHelp.com/ThinkFast to get ten percent off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H E L P dot com slash ThinkFast. 

[00:01:31] One of the best ways to help ourselves in the present is to have a conversation with our future self. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I look forward to speaking with Hal Hershfield. Hal is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision making, and psychology at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. He's the author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Hal, thanks for joining me. 

[00:02:07] Hal Hershfield: Hey, thanks so much, Matt. I'm excited to chat with you.

[00:02:09] Matt Abrahams: I'm super excited as well. Should we get started? 

[00:02:11] Hal Hershfield: Let's do it. 

[00:02:12] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Your most recent work focuses on our future selves. I'd love for you to describe what you mean by future selves and how thinking about our future selves can help us in the present.

[00:02:23] Hal Hershfield: Sure, yeah, so when I say future self, I really mean any version of us that exists at some later point in time, could be tomorrow. But for the most part, we're really talking about a self that's tied to some goal later on, right? So if I want to be healthy, in five years so that I can continue to play roughly with my kids or whatever. Like that's a future self in five years, but there's multiple selves along the way. Like I have this weekend self and next month's self and so on. Your question about how that relates to wellbeing now, if we can tap into the feelings of our future selves, then we can do more that benefits them, which may make our lives easier now and later.

[00:03:04] Matt Abrahams: So it's really the next step or the next several steps and then we can think about that and make changes today that will help us in the future. 

[00:03:12] Hal Hershfield: That's exactly right. I do like to consider how the changes we make now, especially in the self control realm, they don't have to be just sacrifices now. Right? There can be benefits to doing the, you know, quote unquote, harder thing right now. It's not just that it's like all pain now and then gain later, right? I think that's a really poor framing. That's not going to get anybody to do the things that they say that they want to do. 

[00:03:37] Matt Abrahams: Right. One of the ways you frame this whole discussion is, is time travel. And I love that idea. You mentioned now one of the mistakes we make in time travel is we feel like everything now is pain for the future gain. Are there other mistakes that we make in this future forecasting time travel that you're talking about? 

[00:03:54] Hal Hershfield: One mistake is that we almost fail to even consider the future. There are many times when we may actually sort of ignore it to some degree. There are other times where we tell ourselves that we're considering it, but we don't do it on a very deep level. Procrastination is a great example of thinking about the future. But doing it at a very surface level. I tell myself, like, I will do my taxes. Next week keeps coming and I haven't yet done them and I eventually am going to have to do them. And then there's another version of this mistake where we do think about the future, but we don't consider that our future interests may change, and we overly project our present day feelings onto a future self in a way that's unfair. The analogy is like, getting a gift for a friend or partner that represents something we'd want, but not something they'd want, because we're not really thinking about them.

[00:04:45] Matt Abrahams: I procrastinate at times, many people listening are procrastinators. What's your advice on how to manage that and the other thing of not really considering the changes that happen to us in the future? 

[00:04:55] Hal Hershfield: One of the first things to recognize I would say, is that I think it's okay to actually think of our future selves as if they're different people from who we are now. And that representation opens up the door to all sorts of possibilities. If my future self is a different person, then if I fail to do something right now that I've been saying I want to do, if I procrastinate, what I'm actually doing is pushing that pain off to a future version of myself. In my book, I talk to this guy, Tim Pickle.

[00:05:23] I call him like, Professor Procrastination. Not that he procrastinates a lot, but he's the one who studies this. And he had this great thing he said to me, which is that if I don't want to do the thing now, there's no way that future me is going to want to do it. And in some ways, you compound the pain by putting things off, because procrastination, by definition, is not doing something and recognizing that you're harming yourself by not doing it.

[00:05:45] When I put off doing my taxes, I know that I'm making life worse because it's getting harder and harder to do. And I'm making life more difficult for my future self. So it's like, if I just do the thing now and then I can save my future self some pain and I can save myself some pain right now. Obviously it's like a lot easier said than done. But I do think that part of the solutions here are the recognition that the future self is another person. And it's hopefully someone who we should care about. Would I inflict pain on a loved one? That future me is sort of like that loved one. 

[00:06:17] Matt Abrahams: I like that idea of seeing ourselves as not ourselves but somebody else. I use this technique and recommend it to people when they have to watch recordings of themselves and then give feedback. It's much easier to imagine that somebody else and what feedback would you give that person versus yourself. We would treat that person with kindness in a way that we might not ourselves. I have found in my life that procrastination actually has a built in incentive. It gives you an excuse. So when I put off preparing for a communication or a presentation I have and then it doesn't go as well as I like. Oh, the reason it didn't go well is I didn't prepare, and I, I have to get over that.

[00:06:50] Hal Hershfield: That concept of self handicapping is so interesting. Wow, I know I should be practicing, I should be doing whatever, and it's like, huh, it didn't go as well as I thought. Well, you know, I didn't give myself the best shot, so it's not on me, right? And then I can attribute whatever quote unquote failure, to the situation and not to myself and somehow that's an easier pill to swallow.

[00:07:09] Matt Abrahams: In some ways it's the type of time traveling you're talking about but in reverse. I'm saying, well only if I would have. 

[00:07:14] Hal Hershfield: Yeah. 

[00:07:15] Matt Abrahams: That's interesting.

[00:07:15] Hal Hershfield: Exactly. 

[00:07:16] Matt Abrahams: When it comes to getting in touch with our future selves, do people vary in their abilities to do this? I studied with Phil Zimbardo, who was a guest on this show, and he studied time perspective, and people are oriented differently. Some people focus more on the past, present, or future. Is it temperament, experience? How can we get better in touch with ourselves? 

[00:07:35] Hal Hershfield: In my own work, we've found that people do differ in how connected, how emotionally invested they feel in their future selves. The way I think about it is, it's sort of like any other trait that we have. Some of the input is almost innate, if you will. Some of the input, though, is our experiences. You know, who's modeling certain things for us? You know, what do we sort of absorb over time? I think those things all do help explain the varying relationships that exist with future selves. 

[00:08:03] Matt Abrahams: Are there things we can do to get better in touch? I have two teenage kids, and thinking about the future can be hard for them, and a lot of my advice is, study hard now, it will help you in the future, do this, it'll help you in the future. Are there things we can do to help ourselves and others get more in touch with that perspective? 

[00:08:21] Hal Hershfield: Let me first just put the teenager side of this aside for a second, because I feel like teenagers are a special case when it comes to thinking about the future.

[00:08:28] Matt Abrahams: Right. 

[00:08:29] Hal Hershfield: One technique that I particularly love is a conversation that you can create between your self now and your future self. So I love the exercise of writing a letter or an email or, to your future self and then writing one back. For adult learners, I often have people start by writing a letter to their past self. So I'll have them write a letter to themselves ten years ago to almost grease the wheels, because it's a weird thing to do this. And I fully recognize, you know, this is slightly uncomfortable. 

[00:08:57] Matt Abrahams: Give me an example of what you might put in one of these letters. 

[00:08:59] Hal Hershfield: You could think about things like, what are some of the mistakes you've made? What are some of the things that you're proud of? That's, that's looking back, right? Moving forward, what do I want to accomplish? What are some of my goals? But not just that, what do I want my life to look like in ten years? Because there's a danger in this exercise of being too anchored on the present, which is why I think it's really important to do the letter back.

[00:09:21] Part of what's really important here is to make it concrete. What do I want that future self's life to look like? And then in the letter back, really talk about, okay, how are you spending your day, days? You know, not a general, oh, I'm happy and things are good with my family. That's just too abstract. Like what does a day in the life look like? The reason I think that's important is because we know that vividness is the type of thing that really provokes emotions and emotions are the things that drive behavior. And so if we can just turn the dial up on a vivid perception of your future self, that can really help connect, you know, who you are now with who you will eventually become.

[00:10:01] Matt Abrahams: I love this idea of communication with yourself. And I like the idea of writing to the future self and then imagine the future self writing back. And I can see how that helps separate me from my future self, but also can help me focus on what's important. 

[00:10:15] Hal Hershfield: I think you hit the nail on the head. To some extent, this boils down to a conversation of there's urgency and there's importance, you know, the dichotomy, right? It's easy to get sucked into what's urgent. I didn't get to the important things today, but there was fires that I had to put out. But then those days add up over time and then we look back and suddenly say, it's been months and I haven't done anything. 

[00:10:35] Matt Abrahams: Uh, I love that we're having a conversation about the communication we have with ourselves. I see a potential concern though. What happens if I have this vision of my future self and I don't achieve it? That to me could be disappointing and maybe make it so that I don't want to continue to have those aspirations. Have you looked at having those goals that don't come to fruition for whatever reason?

[00:10:59] Hal Hershfield: I have not examined that in like an empirical way. 

[00:11:02] Matt Abrahams: Right, right, right, right. 

[00:11:03] Hal Hershfield: Let me give you an anecdote that I think is really interesting. 

[00:11:05] Matt Abrahams: Sure. 

[00:11:06] Hal Hershfield: So, Ann Napolitano, she just wrote this book, Hello Beautiful, but I'd come in contact with her a couple years ago around one of her books called Dear Edward. She had written an op ed in the New York Times. She talked about how starting at the age of fourteen, she would write a letter to her future self in ten years. She started this tradition of every ten years she would write a letter, she would read the letter she had written and then write a new letter. And one of the interesting things that came out from this exercise is realizing just how rare it was to have things work out the way that she wanted them to.

[00:11:41] Obviously, this is just an anecdote of one, but she talked about how, when she was thirty-four, nothing about her life was the way that she wanted it to be when she was twenty-four, and yet she was so much happier. And she said, oh my god, my goals were so focused on externally. What's so nice about that example is it highlights how just because a goal doesn't work out the way you want it to work out, it doesn't mean that that's a failure necessarily, like I would almost think of that as growth. 

[00:12:12] Matt Abrahams: Yeah. 

[00:12:13] Hal Hershfield: Or an opportunity for growth. 

[00:12:14] Matt Abrahams: Part of what it does is it highlights how the, the metrics we're using for success or what we want change over time. Uh, I certainly see that in my parents as they age, what's important to them has changed dramatically. So let's tap into the other areas that you research in terms of decision making, goal setting and motivation. What are things that your research and the research in your field share with us that can help us achieve some of these things that we aspire to in our future selves? What are things we can do?

[00:12:43] Hal Hershfield: A lot of times when we have these sort of goal setting exercises, there's a tension between me now and me later. The person who has to do the hard work is me now. And the person who benefits is me later. One solution then is to try to figure out any way we can to make the sacrifice of me now feel easier. Anything I can do to make the pill easier to swallow right now. I'm not going to go on a thirty minute run. I'm going to go on a five minute walk and see if I can turn that into another five minutes. There's a, you know, this great movie, The Holdovers, and there's a line in it where they're talking about writing a book, and this woman says to the guy, it's not that hard, you just have to write one word and then another word, and then just keep going.

[00:13:24] But I think it's important to recognize that exercises that we can put into place that do make the sacrifice easier will be beneficial to us. I also love, Katy Milkman has a great work on temptation bundling. Can I pair the sort of painful thing with the pleasurable thing? Uh, you know, there's, there's newer work by my colleague at UCLA, Allie Lieberman on what's called tangential immersion. The idea there is you have to be specific about the match between the painful thing and the pleasurable thing. So, you know, she uses the example of brushing her teeth. You're supposed to do it for two minutes. If I pair my brushing my teeth with, like, a really engaging movie, I'm gonna stop brushing my teeth.

[00:14:02] If I pair it with something that's not that engaging, that's also not gonna work. And so it's like trying to find the right level of engagement for the task. Another one that I really like is trying to think about commitment devices that I can put into practice. One of the things about commitment devices, and what they are, is they're putting guardrails on your future behavior so you don't screw something up. So I'm working on this exact problem now with one of my PhD students, Megan Weber. One of the techniques we're using right now is to remind people that the obstacles they face in the past will be the same as the obstacles they'll face in the future. So we'll ask people, think about the things that made it difficult for you to study or to finish your presentation or whatever before. Check off the list. Now, which of these things do you think will be present in the future? And I think people have this aha moment where they say, oh, yeah, right, right. 

[00:14:54] Matt Abrahams: It's gonna be the same. 

[00:14:55] Hal Hershfield: The future isn't somehow going to be a magic time, you know? And then from there, they're more likely to want to adopt commitment devices.

[00:15:02] Matt Abrahams: So a lot of this is framing for me when I, I take the task of grading. Uh, grading can be challenging.

[00:15:08] Hal Hershfield: Yeah. 

[00:15:09] Matt Abrahams: And I make public commitments. I'll tell my family in thirty minutes I will complete this much. And if I don't, you know, keep me focused. So these devices help. 

[00:15:15] Hal Hershfield: What's the consequence if you don't do it then?

[00:15:17] Matt Abrahams: I typically pair a positive consequence. So when Katy was on the show, I talked about how I love peanut M&M's and the only time I eat my M&M's is after I finish a certain amount of grading. So I have a positive consequence. Sometimes it's a negative consequence if there's something I want to watch on TV, I don't do it until I finish. Do you have a particular consequence that works for you?

[00:15:36] Hal Hershfield: You know, I recently had to give a talk and I had to send in my talk title and I had just kept delaying on it because I was, it was part of the reason I was procrastinating is the negative feelings of like, I wasn't sure I knew what I wanted to talk about. And I wrote to the guy who had been asking me for it, and I said by Sunday night I'll get this to you, and if I don't, like, I'll be embarrassed that I've written to you and told you I would do this, and I still couldn't do it. 

[00:15:55] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. I have found that that works in the coaching that I do of others, and then the parenting I do, encouraging others to make that public commitment.

[00:16:02] Hal Hershfield: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

[00:16:04] Matt Abrahams: This has been an awesome conversation. We end every one of these episodes with the same two questions. And I come up with one unique for you. Are you willing to answer those questions? 

[00:16:13] Hal Hershfield: Let's do it. 

[00:16:14] Matt Abrahams: So I noticed like me, you wear a biometric ring and I'm fascinated by this as somebody who talks about our future self and our goals. What do you do in terms of knowing yourself today to help better in the future? I'm curious. It seems interesting to me that you do that. 

[00:16:31] Hal Hershfield: I think it's exactly what you said. I love the way that you can actually get a full picture of your data right now. And the reason I love that is because part of the value of tracking your behavior is that you see how the different points in time connect to each other. I ate late last night, like, it's not just impacting me last night, it's impacting me over time. Look, this is an area outside of the ring. It's an area where I'm trying to improve. You know, so I'm trying to do this at home. We have two little kids and it's like, let's do a check in. How are things going? What could I be doing differently? I need to, I haven't done it yet. I need to do that professionally too.

[00:17:05] Matt Abrahams: Right, right. 

[00:17:06] Hal Hershfield: Something I would love to do. 

[00:17:07] Matt Abrahams: I appreciate your candor there. I am somebody who is a big fan of reflection. And in order to reflect, you need data. And things like biometric rings and other things give data that can then help you inform the decisions you make. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:17:22] Hal Hershfield: So Wendy De La Rosa, she's a professor at Wharton. She has become, I think, one of the go to experts in figuring out how to communicate information to get people to change their decisions for the better. Specifically, people who are on the lower income end of the spectrum. There's millions of people who don't apply for government benefits who are eligible for them. And you start wondering, why don't they apply? Um, or when do they drop off the application process? And she realized that the way that benefit applications ask people to report their income is often not congruent with the way that people earn income.

[00:18:00] So they say, how much money do you make per year? Well, many people are hourly employees. And if you get that question and you're worried that if I don't answer it right, I'll get kicked out. What you do is you drop off. So she started saying, okay, how do you make your money? Is it hourly? Are you salaried? Now let me ask the question. And I think what's so nice about this from a communication standpoint is that she is doing the perspective taking of how would someone understand this information? How would it be received by them? Let me ask a question in a way that matches that. And then what you're finding is that people are more likely to go through the application. Which to me is just a great example of the big picture of communication. 

[00:18:37] Matt Abrahams: She's actually a GSB alum. Let me ask my final question. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:18:45] Hal Hershfield: Perspective taking, clarity, and simplicity. 

[00:18:50] Matt Abrahams: We just talked about perspective taking, very clear. Talk to me about simplicity. I think it's so easy to make ideas overly complex from a good intention perspective, right? We think, oh, my audience needs all the information out there. That's how they'll make the best decision. That's how they'll fully get the big picture. And the irony is that in doing so, we may lose a lot more folks than we would if we were to just keep things succinct.

[00:19:16] When I was in grad school, one of the older grad students was a guy named Danny Oppenheimer. Danny is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon. And he had done this great work on this really sort of ironic finding that more complicated language actually makes you sound less intelligent. But people, especially undergrads, think that if I make something sound lofty and big and use multi syllabic words, I'm gonna impress my audience, and the irony is that the exact opposite happens. And I think it's so true with any form of communication. By the way, I, you know, I do a lot of work with financial advisors, and I find that they want to try to give all the information possible to their clients, and that just ends up turning the clients off, right? So it's trying to keep it simple. 

[00:20:02] Hal Hershfield: Yeah. The, the notion of just focusing on the bottom line. And when we had Dan Pink on as a guest, he said, just talk like a human. You know, you don't need to impress, you don't need to use big words, just talk like a human. 

[00:20:13] Matt Abrahams: Hal, you've done a great job of talking like a human, keeping things simple and clear. I really appreciate having you on. The idea of having conversations with our future selves to better our current selves is one that I personally am going to reflect on and work on. And I encourage everybody listening. Thank you for your time. 

[00:20:31] Hal Hershfield: Thanks, Matt.

[00:20:35] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our Think Fast, Talk Smart, Communication, Happiness, and Wellbeing miniseries episodes. To continue to learn more about this important topic, please tune in to our other three episodes in this series. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, Aech Ashe, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company and our sponsor, BetterHelp. 

[00:21:02] We recorded this episode at the Spotify Studios in Los Angeles, and we are grateful for the help of Haley Muse and Travis Morningstar. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, AMAs, ask Matt anything, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.