Motivation and Our 'Future Selves'

(soda can pops) (inspiring music) Head Space Studios. Hi, welcome to Radio Head Space, and to Friday. It's Dora here. So lately, I've been wrestling with my sense of motivation. I'm finding my life has these cycles or seasons where I can be extremely motivated, and then other times I'm not. I've been exploring where my motivation even comes from at times. In the past few months, I've been training for a marathon, and I've been faced with mustering up motivation from the most uncanny places. But one place that has been helpful for me is my future self, future Dora, future marathon Dora, and you may not be running a marathon, but this is something that could be helpful for you if you've been struggling to find motivation with whatever it is you're working on or working towards, envisioning your future self and showing up right now for them. Because when we set out to make some type of change in our lives, the truth is, we won't see the results right away. When it comes to healing or growing, these things take time. I look at it like a bank account we're depositing into. Each and every day, we're making our daily deposits into that account, whether it's through our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In meditation, it's an attending to the present moment that we begin to lay the foundations for our futures. We can take care of the future by the decisions and choices we make now. But trust me, it's really easy to lose sight of that. As I write this episode, I'm in week nine of a 12-week training group preparing for the LA Marathon. The other night, after being on set for eight hours, we had a track workout and I was dreading it. I was on my feet the entire day and having to use those same feet to run numerous laps around the track did not sound enticing at all. But I had made a promise to myself that I would be fully committed to training. This was one of the moments where I was depositing into my future self. Present time Dora didn't care so much, but I know marathon Day Dora would be thanking me immensely for showing up and putting the work in. So I went to the track, and I told myself that speed didn't matter this time around. As long as I got it done, that would be enough. And I did, and I actually enjoyed myself while doing it too. I do wanna say that this futuristic thinking should be done with a sense of balance. As we all know, focusing so much on the future can make us forget about what's happening right now. So a tip that may be helpful in keeping us grounded is to begin to work backwards. For example, if you're working towards a goal, maybe you wanna run a marathon or you're wanting to learn a new language, or a...