Every year, I give myself a dream day.
It’s a grid way to start your next year. If the weather is bad, I might stay in bed all day, with my journal and some good music playing. If it’s a nice day, I might go for a long, solo walk to think and dream.
Where I live – on the Kent coast, facing France – there are footpaths that have been used since before the Roman emperor Julius Caesar landed on the beach here with his troops. There is a Roman fort and amphitheatre near my home, and castles built by Henry VIII. I often walk across a former World War I airfield, or along a bay littered with the bones of wrecked ships at low tide.
So it’s a good place to time-travel.
Because that’s what I do, in my future dreaming. I start by thinking about what I love, what lights me up, who and what excites and energises me. I also think about the activities that tend to make time disappear altogether, because I’m in flow, indistractible and aware of little else.
Once I feel connected with the people, places and activities I most enjoy, I step gently into the future. No specific time or date. I just let the days, weeks, months, years unfold until I’m living my best life.
If I’m in bed, I lie down with my eyes closed and float out of my body until I’m high above the world and utterly weightless, then glide forward in time. If I’m walking, I’ll just imagine that each step is a week, a month, a year until it feels like I’ve arrived at the right point in the future.
In this future life, I have everything I need.
Time. Space. Talent. Skills. Luck. Support. Health. Wealth. Any barriers in my way have dissolved, and everything has worked out perfectly. And on my dream day, I get to look around this glittering future and see what I’ve built.
I take a walk around my future home, looking at the decor and furnishings, the books on the shelves, the art on the walls, the clothes hanging in the wardrobe and any other details I’m curious about.
I look at my workspace, and the body of work I’ve created. I see what I eat, how I stay fit and well. Who I’m hanging out with: my friends, my team, my tribe. What a typical working day looks like. And what I do for fun.
Sometimes I’ll meet my future self.
(Though in truth, she never looks much like me.) Sometimes she has advice, or a message. Sometimes she just grabs me by the hand and somehow imparts memories of great holidays, exciting trips, fun days with friends, major life events.
The experience is different every time. Sometimes it’s fuzzy on detail, sometimes it’s hyper-specific. But there are always common themes. Writing is always a part of it, for me.
My home is warm, comfortable but also uncluttered. It’s rarely in a city, these days. Year after year, it gets smaller too as I yearn more for simplicity, space and time than for more stuff.
Even though I am older, I am always fitter, healthier than I am now. And although I have plenty of time alone, I’m also surrounded by love and laughter, with creative and interesting friends.
When I’ve seen enough, I leave my ideal future.
I travel back towards the present, to a time about five years from now.
I’m already well on my way to the future I imagined, so I look at the changes I’ve made to my work, my home, my community, my health, my life. The skills and knowledge I’ve gained, the new habits and routines I’ve created, the work I’ve made. And the changes yet to come.
Once that is clear, I come even closer to the present, a year from my dream day. I’m progressing towards becoming the person I saw five years into the future, and I can see the changes I’ve made, over the year, to get there.
Then I return to the here and now.
This is where the journal comes in. I write down all the action steps, the systems, routines and habits I need to establish in order to make what I saw a reality over the next year. I write milestones I want to pass in the next 12 months, and list small, do-able actions for the next month and season.
Then I’ll consider what was going on, deep in my future dreaming. What does it tell me about my present life? What am I most longing for? And how can I get some of that into my life right now?
Usually there are elements that are accessible: dinners with friends, a beach holiday, long walks in the woods, going to more art and book events are all things that came out of my last dream day, for instance. And it all goes into planning your next year.
I also consider who I need to become, to bring that future closer. Do I need new skills or knowledge? Habits or routines? What do I need to do more of? And less?
I’m drawing a map, from the present to the future I imagined.
By the end of it, I usually have more clarity about the direction I want to go in, the tiny course corrections I want to make. I’m also much more connected emotionally to the outcome.
Year after year in January, I made grand lists of goals, most of them things I felt I should want or fixing what I felt was wrong with me. And if I’m honest, I rarely did much about them.
They were too big, too vague, too abstract. I wanted to earn £100k, then £250k. I wanted to get fitter, write a new book. But as none of this was about my day-today behaviour, I never got there.
So I left it, thinking I’d start next week, next month, later. And eventually I’d stop thinking about my list of lofty ambitions at all, because no one loves feeling like a failure.
This is the trouble with goals.
They’re all about the end result, not the process or journey. If we focus only on goals, we start to believe that we can only be happy/confident/successful once we’ve lost weight/signed a record deal/run a marathon/earned a six-figure income/finished the book/won the big award.
Then we perhaps allow a brief moment of celebration and satisfaction before setting new, even bigger goals. And the striving starts all over again.
We’re often chasing external measures of success that don’t even fit the life we want to live, the work we want to make: they just look good on social media, they sound impressive, or they’re about the expectations of others (our families, our friends, our culture).
Future dreaming helps you plan your next year.
What you see tends to come from the heart, not the head. It gives you clarity on the lifestyle you want. The people you long to connect with. And the work you really want to make.
The time-travel also tells you what you really want, here and now. Those stop-offs at the five-year mark then at a year from today help you see the small actions you can take now, to get you there.
It then becomes more about process. You plan your year around repeating habits, routines and systems. It’s about enjoying the journey, as well as focussing on the destination.
So if your goal is to write a book, don’t just focus on finishing it, on getting an agent, or a publishing contract. Focus on small, regular wins such as writing, every day or week. Make it fun. Make it sustainable. Make it part of who you are, rather than a goal to be attained.
Not writing a new book, year after year, felt like a colossal failure to me. But not writing for a day or two? That’s not such a big deal. And it’s easily remedied if I just go to my desk and begin again.
Exercise is my kryptonite.
I avoid it if I can, even though every year I made vague resolutions like “get fit” or “move more”. On a busy day, it was always the first thing I’d abandon.
Yet I now do a set of stretches every morning, as automatically as I brush my teeth. I keep count of my steps, and so walk far more. I also have far more friends who enjoy going for walks – and it’s become how we socialise, instead of going to the pub.
I do Pilates regularly, I lift weights three times a week and I have small daily workouts that fit easily into my routines.
All of this came from dreaming up the future I wanted, then creating new, regular habits to get me there. I doubt I’ll ever be as fit and strong as the Future Self I see on my dream day. But I’m still a a lot healthier than I was five years ago, with a lot more energy.
To map out your next year, follow a four-step process
I tend to do it in April, when the new finical year begins, the nights get suddenly lighter as we move to British Summertime, and spring is in the air. It feels like a better time for new habits and routines than the dreary, dark days of January.
Each part of this planning process is important, and helps you get where you want to be with more ease and grace. More fun.
- Review the past year, and see what can be learned from it.
- Assess the present, and think about tiny changes you might make to improve all areas of your life, just a little.
- Indulge in some future dreaming
- Put systems, habits and routines in place to get you where you want to be.
You can make up your own questions. Or I walk you through this entire process in Your Next Year, a 44-page workbook that comes in the form of a printable PDF you can use, year after year. You can buy that here, for £14.99.
So what will you do in your next year? Which new habits will move you closer to the life you want, and the work you’d love to make?
What do you think?