William Collins

From 2017-2019, I found myself going through a series of negative experiences that completely stripped my life of anything associated with my identity.  Almost every area of my life had been wiped clean, including what I thought was my strongest personal virtue, my faith.

I decided to treat the situation as if I were starting over again fresh. There was little from my past that was worth hanging onto because I felt that I had flunked all of life’s tests and at age 63, my future looked very bleak indeed.

I thought to myself, “ What if you gave yourself 25 years to transform your life?”

That means that it would take me to age 88 when I would be done, but then I thought:

What if you could have a single focus for those next 25 years?

Rather than put together a long list of things I was going to accomplish by “doing“ something, I decided to focus instead on “being” something.

What I hit upon was the biggest reason why I think my life blew up and that was because I wasn’t telling myself who I really wanted to become.

What I realized my later was that I had been going through a major identity crisis that that what I was doing was challenging myself to create clarity around who I was becoming….my own Future Me.

With this one revelation, I decided that every day for the next 25 years, I would write down something that I thought would help me define who I was. But where could I start?

The only thing I could think of that made any sense was to go back to a book that I had read many times in my past called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I remembered that he was able to make it out of the concentration camps in Germany during WWII by learning how to reframe his future.

After rereading that book, I decided that this was going to be my pathway forward and that I would find a way do live out of my Authentic Identity which I believed could be found between the things that stimulated me and how I would responded.

If I could find a way to then inject an idea or concept that could help me affirm my Authentic Identity, then I reasoned that over time I could become the person that I believe that I was created to be.

After more than 7 years of trying thousands of tiny experiments, I woke up one day and realized to my amazing that my entire life had shifted and that I had become the person that I knew in me, but could never get out into the real world.

So with that experience behind me, I started to reach out to friends and people that I would met and began to apply this new mental model to others. To my surprise, it worked. But the really good news? It didn’t take a major life challenge or 7 years to make work. In fact, to make it work in anyone’s life, all you need is a simple framework and someone who could model how this worked so that you could experience that same results.

This is how I created the Future Me Now.